When the Law Does Not Secure Justice or Peace: Requiem as Aesthetic Response

This essay assesses the possibilities for poetic-liturgical compositions, such as requiems, to promote Christian public engagement when legal frameworks are perceived to be inadequate for securing justice. This essay addresses the perception that legal statutes and procedures failed to honor the personhood of two particular African American males and discusses how aesthetic responses have been used to counter the devaluing of their lives. One such response, Marilyn Nelson’s poem Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem, questions the law’s failure to protect an eighteenth-century enslaved man. Another requiem memorializes Michael Brown after the teen’s killing by a police officer in 2014. This essay discusses these particular aesthetic responses and then evaluates the possibilities for the requiem as a Christian practice of civic engagement by appropriating Charles Mathewes’s articulation of hopeful citizenship. In cases when the law is perceived to be complicit in devaluing African American personhood, liturgy can be a meaningful Christian response.