Ep 6: Memory, Grief and the Politics of Remembering
What happens when grief becomes public? When the thing you're supposed to keep quiet gets stitched into fabric and carried into the street? In this episode, we explore grief and memory, the moments where empires have been challenged by art and craft, and the more personal, tender moments too.
Mary Burgess founded Woven Memories in Australia after her partner died fifteen years ago. She wove herself a blanket with his clothes, the jacket she wore to his funeral, and their sheets. When she finished, she thought: this is very comforting. I could do this for other people.
"I don't set out to heal the grief. But sometimes, obviously, some kind of transition happens for the person I work with. There's something about the transit in the physical work of the weaving and in the psychological state of my client."
Mary Burgess, Woven Memories
In Brooklyn, Michael Sylvan Robinson creates memorial garments with Gays Against Guns, beading the names and numbers of the murdered into pieces that refuse to let us look away. The decoration draws you in, and once you're looking closely, you find the names, the evidence of loss.
Philosopher Judith Butler asks a simple question with devastating implications: whose deaths count? To grieve publicly is to insist that a life mattered. And that insistence is political.
"Decorative for me is a queer device. I'm using color, decorative details in a maximalist way to capture attention... That's often an invitation to look more closely at the things I want you to pay attention to. Often text, like the actual number of the people who were killed in that year is a beaded text detail."
Michael Sylvan Robinson, Gays Against Guns
This is why authoritarian regimes suppress public mourning. They understand that collective grief threatens the stories empires tell about who matters. Under Stalin's Great Terror, families were forbidden to mourn publicly. The Memorial Society, founded in 1989, was dissolved by Putin's regime in 2021. The Tiananmen Mothers are placed under police surveillance before each anniversary. In Franco's Spain, authorities moved over 33,000 bodies anonymously. Scholars call this memoricide: the murder of memory.
Cloth can be hidden. Cloth can be smuggled. Cloth survives sometimes even when the person who made it dies. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo marching every Thursday for nearly 50 years with embroidered names on white headscarves. Palestinian women stitching tatreez patterns that carry village identities across generations of displacement. They all understood what Butler put into words: to mourn publicly is to insist that a life counted.
To grieve publicly is to insist that a life mattered. And that insistence is political.