Embodied Grief: On the body, my mother, and the kin we carry

Grief is embodied. Often, but not always, it elicits a visceral reaction; one freezes, face crumples. The feeling is oppressive; the wind pulls at us sharply – joy and laughter feel like a betrayal; we are imbued with a deeply blasphemous sensation. Modification of one’s life feels obligatory – how do we participate in the world when grief occurs? How do we sustain relationships with kin that pass? Where can we find refuge?

My mother has dealt with bipolar and depression thus, I have borne witness to her oscillation between extremes: from her not being able to walk (having to carry her to the bathroom, to hospital) or talk (she stares at me blankly; where is she? What do we do without words? She watches me sob as we look at one another; her face does not move), to her drawing on our walls in lipstick, lighting my clothes on fire, screaming at me that I have stolen from her followed by apologising profusely for not caring for me. I am aware that this may not be a conventional source of grief, and yet it stirs me in the same way. My mother is infinitely intelligent, a beautiful writer, innately extroverted, curious, and kind. She has however, broken my heart many times – and I, hers. But the question remains: how do I reckon with the grief that resides so tangibly in long-distance phone calls, in texts – and even in close proximity?

At the risk of making sweeping generalisations, grief practices in many Western or Global Northern contexts frequently require us to shrink. They call for us to be subdued; to quietly feel. We must exile grief from our flesh quickly and neatly – it must be contained in a sombre facial expression, a barely detectable shake of the shoulders that does not mirror what sits inside: the upheaval that twists the organs and wrenches at the heart. Yet grief is often felt somatically: lodged in creases and folds; in the throat; the stomach.

Here, while I let these questions linger, perhaps it is pertinent to turn to another way of navigating grief, moving southwest to Brazil. Situated in the western Brazilian rainforest near the Bolivian border, the Wari’ – an Indigenous group – live in the state of Rondônia. While westerners tend to assume that with death, an individual’s most crucial qualities are contained within one’s spirit or consciousness – which resides in the otherwise empty shell of the body – personhood within the Wari’ community is often articulated in relation to one’s corporeality. For instance, people’s habits and eccentricities are explained with “his flesh is like that” (Je’ kwerekun).

Until violent governmental and Christian missionary interference in the mid-twentieth century, particularly during the 1950s-60s, the Wari’ practiced the ritual of endocannibalism: a custom that involves . The Wari’ believed that this actively mitigated prolonged sadness (tomi xaxa), returning the body to where it began. The act of ingesting the body enabled mourning kin to hold and sustain both the qualities and essence of dead kin within their own bodies. It was a profound act of intimacy, born from a desire to preserve loved ones and offer one’s own body as a bearer of this responsibility. Comparatively, burial expressed dishonour – considered cold, wet, dirty and polluting and in turn, a transgression of cultural boundaries. Thus, the act of ingesting the body is a loving promise, a final act of care. Like urns holding ashes on a mantelpiece, the bodies of the living are contained and entangled with(in) grieving kin members.

This Wari practice, while seemingly unrelated to my relationship with my mother, seems to offer me clarity: that the body cannot be reduced to a shell, but rather extends itself to store one’s deepest feelings, desires, plights. Endocannibalism recognises that the body is not a contained subject, but a feeling body, directing and organising how we move through the world. It demands that grief be enacted, digested, carried rather than abstracted or diluted. Thus, I implore: let my body, and yours, feel.

References:

Conklin, B. (1995). ‘thus are our bodies, thus was our custom’: mortuary cannibalism in an Amazonian society. American Ethnologist, 22(1), pp.75–101. doi:https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1995.22.1.02a00040.