Mapping Memory & Grief – collective mourning as method
📚 Further Reading / Resources
Bhattacharyya, G. (n.d.). We, the heartbroken. Pluto Books.
Brand, D. (2001). A map to the door of no return: Notes to belonging. Doubleday Canada.
Desil, J. (2020). Eat salt | gaze at the ocean. Talonbooks.
Gosine, A. (2016). My mother's baby. In G. Hosein & L. Outar (Eds.), Indo-Caribbean feminist thought: Theories, genealogies, enactments (pp. 49–60). Palgrave Macmillan.
Goffe, Tao. (2025). Dark Laboratory. On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis.
Mantri, R. (n.d.). Speculative grieving into the future: The importance of griefwork in breaking free of colonial and nationalist thinking [Unpublished manuscript or pre-print].
Mitchell-Eaton, E. (2019). Grief as method: Topographies of grief, care, and fieldwork from Northwest Arkansas to New York and the Marshall Islands. Gender, Place & Culture, 26(10), 1438–1458.
In this episode of Saltwater Reasonings, I am in conversation with Zaira Simone, whose work sits at the intersection of memory, grief, and care. Together we explore how memory becomes a form of resistance, and how grief, personal, ancestral, and collective, functions as a methodology for healing, justice, and communal survival.
Our reasoning attends to memory as practice, refusal, and political intimacy. We begin with a grounding invocation on mourning and ancestral presence, before moving into Zaira’s own arrivals: the memories she carries, the stories she inherited, and the moments when grief clarified and redirected her intellectual and creative path.
The conversation deepens into the tender and often difficult terrain of memory work in contexts marked by loss, violence, and silence. We reflect on how memory shows up in research, writing, and community practice; the ethics of remembering what others wish forgotten; and the ways grief makes itself known in the body and institutions. We consider how communities hold and transmit pain across generations, and how remembering can be both wound and witness.
As we expand outward, we imagine the forms of remembrance required for collective care. What does it mean to grieve together rather than alone? What must be remembered for repair? How might memory work accompany political action, spiritual restoration, or the archiving of care rather than only violence?
Themes: Caribbean memory, Ancestral memory, Grief as care, Grief as methodology, Decolonial practice
Mullings, B. (2021). Caliban, social reproduction and our future yet to come. Geoforum, 118, 150–158.
Roach, J. (1996). Cities of the dead: Circum-Atlantic performance. Columbia University Press.
Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: On blackness and being. Duke University Press.
Thomas, D. A. (2019). Political life in the wake of the plantation: Sovereignty, witnessing, repair. Duke University Press.
Figueroa, Y. C. (2015). Reparation as transformation: Radical literary (re)imaginings of futurities through decolonial love. Journal of Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 4(1), 41–58.
Gilmore, R. W. (2022). Abolition geography: Essays towards liberation. Verso.
Rodríguez Aguilera, M. Y. (2022). Grieving geographies, mourning waters: Life, death, and environmental gendered racialized struggles in Mexico. Feminist Anthropology, 3, 28 43.
Sheller, M. (2020). Island futures: Caribbean survival in the Anthropocene. Duke University Press.
