Parade of Champions: The failure of black queer grief

"Between grief and nothing, I will take grief."

—William Faulkner, The Wild Palms (1939)

My mother died on August 18th, 2011. She had lived with pancreatic cancer for fourteen years and in some ways, I had been facing her death all that time. In the end, this made little difference to the devastating pain of losing her. My mother died as she lived, with inordinate reserves of grace and resilience, and as I held her hand and watched her take her last breath, my only comfort was in knowing that she had made her peace with dying.

There has been nothing peaceful about my grief. It has destroyed who I knew myself to be, and stolen away much that had surrounded me. Grief has meant sadness yes, but also fear and anxiety and rage. It has meant teeth grinding and panic attacks and insomnia. It has meant depression and isolation and confusion. It has cleaved my life in two, and now there is only before and after.

This is where I find myself now, with her love, and all that grief has given me, making sense of the after.

In Mitchell's Death (1977), performance artist Linda Montano mourns the violent death of her ex-husband by recounting the tragic story on screen, her voice droning and her face covered with acupuncture needles. In January 2012, five months after my mother's death, I watched this 22-minute video at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles and it provoked an intense grief reaction that was both overwhelming and validating. In Montano's chanting monologue, I recognized the numbing rhythm of grief and, in her pierced face, I recognized the ongoing need for invented healing rituals. Although painful to watch, I found the work to be deeply moving.

In the preface to her recent book, Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (2013), Jennifer Doyle singles out Mitchell's Death to illustrate the type of work with which she is engaged, "work that feels emotionally sincere or real and that produces a dense field of affect around it." For Doyle, the artists that interest her "turn to emotion, feelings, and affect as a means not of narcissistic escape but of social engagement," and with Parade of Champions, I count myself among their ranks.

Parade of Champions is a three-channel video installation based on interviews I conducted with three black queer people about their grief experiences, following the recent deaths of their mothers. In conceptualizing the form of this work, I was seeking to create an immersive environment, both literally and figuratively, in which I would ask the viewer to sit in the gallery and serve as witness to black queer grief. The installation is thus composed of three large images projected perpendicularly and in close proximity to each other, accompanied by an audio documentary soundtrack transmitted into the gallery space.

The digital video images consist of still video portraits of Chy Ryan Spain, Jelani Ade Douglas, and Simone Dalton; they are seated in their homes, almost filling the frame and appearing slightly larger than life-size. The participants sit calmly and unspeaking, and looking directly into the camera. Over the ambient sound of the gallery, the soundtrack plays in surround sound, their three voices operating as a single, nonlinear narrative. Throughout the 24 minutes of the audio documentary, the participants talk openly and honestly, sharing with the viewer the experience of their mothers' deaths, their grief reactions, the insights they have gained, and the ways in which blackness and queerness have shaped their grief and mourning.

Death and mourning remain taboo subjects for discussion in our culture, and in turning to black queer grief as a subject, I was seeking to better understand my own grief experience. For 14 years, I anticipated grieving my mother's eventual death from pancreatic cancer. During that time, I understood grief to be primarily sadness and a sense of missing the person who has died. My actual experience of grieving her has been far more tortuous and I was confounded by...