Grief as Refusal: the work came from somewhere

We opened the reasoning the way I often want Saltwater Reasonings to open: with a text that does not behave like an "icebreaker", but like a threshold. I read James Baldwin aloud, holding on to his insistence that after departure, what remains is invisible: memory, loss, love; "invisible chains" that hold the world together. Zaira met Baldwin with Junie Désil, a Haitian Canadian poet, offering a stanza that felt like a second door into the same room: strange inheritance, salt sea, racing rivers, umbilical centuries old, bones abridging oceans, triangulated passages.

In that exchange, something shifted. We were not discussing grief as a theme. We were staging it as method: a way of arriving, a way of listening, a way of naming what is carried but not fully "known". What we carry is not only personal loss. It is collective trauma sedimented in water, language and the body.

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I first encountered Zaira's work through my colleague Deborah Mc Fee. Her chapter In Search for Repair: Reflections on Grief, the Repaired and Reparations closes an editr text Deborah and I coedited. The essay examines contemporary institutional claims for reparations against the backdrop of the pandemic's assault on Black lives and her mother's death—a woman she names as a practitioner of repair. Since reading it, I have been sitting with grief differently. Not as interruption to scholarship, but as refusal: refusal of sanitised narratives, refusal of "closure" as institutional demand, refusal of the fantasy that pain must become productive to count as real. I have been sitting with the grief I hold in the academy. But I had not yet fully unpacked grief as a site of knowing.

Inheritance as Intellectual Formation

I have been thinking for some time about how formation happens outside formal training. How political consciousness gets poured into children before they have language for it. How I absorbed my father's insistence on legacy and responsibility as a child, not fully understanding the words but taking in the weight. How out of nowhere one day he told my daughter, at a young age as well, that enslaved women were raped; that many did not want to bring children into that world. Her eye-roll was familiar to me. I knew that refusal. I had done it too.

When I asked Zaira who she was and where she was coming from, she answered as a daughter first: daughter of Velda Simone, Karin Santi, and AbdouMaliq Simone. She named her people not as background, but as living infrastructure. Her identity as daughter was intellectual and political. She was naming what I had been circling: that formation is what is poured into you before you know you are being formed.

Then she said something that cracked the question open further. Knowledge is shared in ways that are "never too late and never too early". It lands when it lands. The child returns to it as they evolve through adulthood.

This is epistemic inheritance that does not wait for formal readiness. It arrives too early, then returns later with new meaning. It is not linear. It is not neutral. It forms the researcher before the researcher knows they are being formed.

Grief as the Collapse of False Boundaries

I know what it is to be expected to perform coherence while something is breaking open inside you. To meet institutional deadlines while sitting beside loss. To write emails, teach classes, attend meetings, submit documents, all while grief presses against the edges of every sentence. The academy does not pause for your personal reckoning. It asks you to compartmentalise, to keep the work moving, to wait for a "more appropriate time" that never arrives.

Zaira described pressing "submit" on a dossier while sitting beside her mother in hospice, then interviewing for jobs days later. Professional life does not wait. What moved me was her refusal to accept that boundary. She named it as fragile and false. When winter break came, she stepped away from the obligations that required her to perform coherence. What she did instead was dream. She journalled. She attended therapy. She listened for messages. She described the attentiveness to the dead that sits inside Islamic ritual: instructions, debts, unfinished matters, obligations as someone transitions.

Here, grief was not emotion. It was practice. It had protocols. It demanded interpretation. It asked for responsibility.

This clarified my own framing. In the face of academic deadlines, she set aside the revise-and-resubmit. That was not negligence. It was refusal of the institution's timeline as the primary measure of what mattered. She turned towards a different labour: writing her mother, expanding a eulogy, returning daily to the same document as an act of tending. Grief demanded its own timeline.

Repair after wholeness fails

I have been teaching theories of Black repair, policy formulations and decolonial visions of collective healing. I teach them seriously because they matter. But I also teach them while carrying losses that have not resolved. I have grieved over and over again the story I had about what being part of the academy would be like. That dream has died many deaths as I work in and through the realities of the academy. And somewhere in that gap between what I am meant to convey and what I actually hold, I have felt a quiet fraudulence.

When Zaira named that she was stuck on a passage—"there is no wholeness"—I felt my chest tighten with recognition. She could not embody wholeness while teaching theories of repair. Her grief exposed what many of us recognise but rarely state plainly: repair discourse can become aspirational in ways that erase the severance that loss produces. Some deaths are premature and incomplete. No manifesto can make them whole.

What her grief did was give her permission to recalibrate the questions. Instead of leading with prescriptions, she began asking students: what constitutes wholeness in your life? What makes you feel whole? In a post-pandemic generation shaped by displacement, bereavement became the beginning and the conclusion of classroom dialogue. She called the Caribbean a "grieving geography", drawing from decolonial, Indigenous, and feminist geographical work.

That phrase rooted instantly. I have been circling this in my own teaching: practice without grief becomes administrative. We can teach policy, frameworks, intervention models, but if we never start with the losses that organise Caribbean life, displacement, rupture, land theft, sexual violence, migration, abandonment, environmental vulnerability, then we are teaching technique detached from reality. In our contexts, grief is the context.

Fieldwork, Archives, and the Permission to be Affected

I have struggled with the cleanness expected in research. The demand for distance. The fantasy that objectivity is an ethical posture rather than a disciplinary performance. Many social sciences, carries what a colleague once called "physics envy": the desire for methods that keep the researcher untouched, uninvolved, safely on the outside.

But I am involved. When research feels too heavy for linear language, I paint. I paint as epistemic practice. Painting is one way I refuse the narrowing of knowledge into what is legible to institutional audit. It is one way I hold grief without turning it into performance. I have often wondered if this counts. If the intimacy between my life and the material is methodological failure.

Zaira described reading interview transcriptions in an archive at The UWI, St Augustine campus in Trinidad, in which a former indentured labourer writing endless letters back to India, never receiving replies, until the relationship transforms and she gives up. Zaira offers that she was not "looking" for grief, yet grief was present as a conceptual residue. She linked that archival passage to her own altered relationship with her mother. Not through migration, but through death. She named what many research traditions treat as error: the intimacy between the researcher's life and the material. Then she reframed it. Welcoming that connection, sitting with it, became part of the work.

Caribbean ways of knowing, Black feminist ways of knowing, keep insisting that the body is involved. The researcher is involved. The question is not whether we are affected, but how we become accountable for being affected. Zaira's reflection gave me the language I needed. Affective geographies. The unsustainable distance demanded by positivist knowledge production. The permission to be affected is a the method.

Wholeness, Opacity, and Survival inside Institutions

I have learned, repeatedly, that bringing the whole self into the institution is both necessary and dangerous. There is a kind of wholeness that becomes possible when you stop amputating parts of yourself to be tolerated. But there is also extraction. There is surveillance. There is theft. I have had to learn what to share and what to protect.

Zaira named the academy as unsafe: policed syllabi, institutional surveillance, McCarthy-like conditions. Then she offered language I want to keep close: there is power in opacity. There is power in the unseen. Grief, too, often requires opacity. It demands that some things remain unshared, unperformed, protected from extraction.

She also named intellectual theft, especially the theft of Black women's work. Her response was direct: this is where the work came from; these are the reckonings that shaped it; you can call it what you want, but it came from somewhere.

Grief is refusal. Refusal of institutional appropriation. Refusal of being made source material for someone else's legitimacy. Refusal of the idea that knowledge must be "available" to be valuable. Some things must remain withheld to remain ours.

Testimony, Community, and Memory beyond the Human

Can memory be more than individual recall? What does it means to remember collectively? How can imagination and fiction become the necessary tools for telling truths the colonial archive refuses to hold? Can memory work can be repair without requiring perpetrators to witness it? Zaira spoke to all these questions as well as her love for the act of testifying; spiritual-political testimony from the community that survived and remembers. Memory, in her framing, is provisional, fractured, inherited, never ours alone. Repair does not require the presence of perpetrators. It requires witness, attention, collective survival.

Then she extended memory beyond human consciousness. What do plantations, mills, estates, and colonial ecologies retain? What do trees planted under colonial regimes carry? How might hurricanes, coral reef erosion, environmental disturbance be understood as reckonings with plantation capitalism? She held open a methodological possibility that indigenous peoples have long known: the environment is an archive. The land and water are memory-bearing.

If grief is not only psychological but also ecological; if memory is not only in minds but also in infrastructures; then research practice must expand its listening. It must be willing to hear what speaks outside the human.

Everyday Repair and the Refusal of Elite Gatekeeping

I often tell my students that their very presence in the classroom is resistance. That the struggle is not only in manifestos or policy documents; it is in showing up, in remembering, in caring for community, in refusing disposability. I tell them this because I believe it. But I also know the academy wants to own the language of repair. It wants repair to be legible, measurable, produced by credentialed experts.

Zaira returned us to a grounded political insistence: people do not wait for justice. They do not endure abuse in stasis. In the absence, delay, or uncertainty of institutional restitution, people claim repair every day. They do not have to call it reparations. They do not need lectures on it. They already have principles, worldviews, survival strategies, and practices of care that respond to the afterlives of slavery and colonialism. Grief as refusal becomes both ethical and methodological here. It refuses elite ownership of concepts like "repair". It refuses the idea that only policy documents count as evidence. It insists that everyday survival is a site of theorising, and that community practice holds intellectual weight.

The Geographies of Grief

By the end we returned to place. I hailed Zaira "from the Republic of Brooklyn", and she accepted the playfulness while naming the violence underneath it: gentrification as settler colonialism, a neighbourhood altered beyond recognition, grief entangled with infrastructure removed.

She described grief on Kent Avenue, on the train, in the cemetery thick with incense and myrrh and Qur'anic recitation. She described dreams that carry addresses of women elders. The departed are not here, but their memory is embedded in the places they moved through.

If the Caribbean is a grieving geography, Brooklyn can be one too. The diaspora has its own saltwater logics: movement, rupture, return, altered landscapes, and memory that refuses to stay in the past tense.

What became clearer

This Reasoning brought home for me that grief is not a detour from scholarship. It is a rigorous site of inquiry, with its own practices, protocols, and demands.

Grief is … refusal of institutional timelines, refusal of false wholeness, refusal of the performance of distance, refusal of extraction.

My commitment is to teaching and research that begins with grieving geographies, because service without grief becomes shallow, and repair without mourning becomes fantasy.

In the end, what stayed with me most was a simple line we echoed together: the work came from somewhere.

Grief, too, comes from somewhere. It is place-bound. It is lineage-bound. It is community-held. And when we allow it to shape method, it becomes a way of knowing that the academy cannot easily police, measure, or steal.

Tune in to Zaira Simone’s full episode Mapping Memory & Grief – collective mourning as method on Spotify and YouTube

Baldwin, J. (1965). This morning, this evening, so soon. In Going to meet the man. Dial Press.

Désil, J. (2020). Eat salt | gaze at the ocean. Talonbooks.

Simone, Z. (2025). In search for repair: Reflections on grief, the repaired and reparations. In D. N. Mc Fee & T. A. Rogers (Eds.), Public policy making, gender, and human security in the Caribbean. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-81592-8_18