Mourning And Militancy Pdf
Milan Skidmore
When I celebrated my fiftieth birthday a few days later, I felt young in my body and deeply happy, with a lover who had my full attention. I was settled in mind, and sure that the next decades would be very like the life I was then leading. Less than a month later, I was out for my regular seventeen-mile bicycle ride when a branch caught in my front spokes. The bicycle stopped dead. In an instant, I was thrown off; my chin hit the pavement; my neck snapped back, fracturing my fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae; the broken bone scraped my spinal cord. A rapid-response helicopter from Hartford Hospital landed in the graveyard on the other side of the country road from where I had fallen, and I began the rest of my life.
If these are the effects of grief, why do I ward off forgetting? Even as the unconscious process of detachment Freud theorized is at work within me, I remain committed to incorporation. I want to remember my brother in his youthful strength and the vividly embodied pleasures that I shared with Janet when my life felt shot through with joy.
The militant organizing and direct actions of ACT UP were driven by the fury of the many who had lost friends and lovers. They knew they were abandoned by a government that refused to recognize AIDS as the epidemic it so clearly was, while church and state together encouraged active hostility toward homosexuality. Crimp argues that militants could sustain their activism only by being open to the feelings of grief, abandonment, fear, and rage that are part of the processual work of mourning. Otherwise depression would strand them, exhausted, on the sofa, watching TV.
To some working in the field of disability studies or active in the movement, public discussions of grief and pain are unwise. After I presented my work at a conference, one of the participants responded by raising the very real political dangers of associating grief with disability. What you are saying will be held against us. Okay, yes, your dilemma is real, but once we start talking about ourselves as grieving, pity will be the response. Even exploring physical pain makes us vulnerable to the idea that the first thing we want is a cure. In a world in which bodyminds are so relentlessly sorted by those powerful negative prefixes, pity is the nearly universal response to disability.
The radical claim of militancy and mourning is that you are not required to set aside the messy, dark, grieving, perverse, incapacitated, angry, or shameful parts of yourself to be admitted to the public world. Even if universal design should magically appear everywhere and signal a sea change in public understanding of what it means to be disabled, that fact would not touch the neurological pain lighting up my body, or my balky bowels that move only when highly disciplined with laxatives and enemas, or counteract the loss of endless bodily pleasures. Not even that truly radical transformation would assuage my grief for the bodymind I was, thinking about my cadence as I crested that hill. Remember how that felt.
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As people have mobilized in response to the September 11 attacks, I have found myself uncharacteristically dissatisfied by analysis of foreign policy and by teach-ins that consist of supplying information. They're absolutely crucial, and I applaud all of those who have coordinated their energies in this way. But I also want to see, as AIDS activist and theorist Douglas Crimp has argued, mourning and militancy brought together. Crimp has suggested that activism ignores mourning at its own peril, that it cannot simply displace mourning with militancy or fail to address the ways that anger is also motivated by loss.
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Iranian Shi'i believers claim that capturing sorrow and lamentation in their fullest sense falls beyond language and reason. They constantly refer to their inability to articulate in order to explain martyrdom and highlight a form of unsaid that explains all that appears impalpable for them. I undertake a journey among Iranian Shi'i youth to trace the unarticulated and the sense of wonder generated via religious experiences. By way of an ethnography of Muharram lamentation ceremonies, this article highlights how the unarticulated and the unsaid are socially and politically used in service of Shi'i militancy. I explore those uncharted terrains in the darkness of the Lacanian Real and in terms of how the Real is authenticated in order to address how realities are crafted and religious subjectivities are enacted in the realm of militancy.
I felt overwhelmed by a surge of indescribable feelings that were unknown to me. It was as if I were emptied out: I had no heartbeat, no bones in my legs, no eyes to see with. Instead, I had a knot in my throat. It was as if I had lost all my faculties to sense, think, reason, or speak. I was there to observe, participate. Anthropology as usual! I was among the black-clad Iranian volunteer militants who had gathered to mourn and commemorate the martyrdom of their holy imam. I had seen lamentation and mourning ceremonies many times, but this was my first among young Shia militia who would be deployed to Syria in few days. They gathered like most Shias to mourn the loss of their holy imams, but that night was different for all us: I felt different, and they were in pre-deployment excitement.
Something, he said. He did not say God, paradise, heavenly virgins, or that the chosen one called him. I was lost in the chaos within my head; sorrow, anguish, wailing, howling, tears, and cries all fused together in the darkness and prevailed over me.
The Iranian state has supported various resistance movements across the Middle East, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Many young volunteers have been sent to fight alongside Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hashd ul Sha'abi in Iraq, and the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. My inquiry here focuses on those young people between 18 and 30 years old in Isfahan province, where one of the most important combat training centers is located. The youth receive basic training in rifle handling and ideological orientation from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps during the summer holidays. After training hours and outside the center, these youth tend to gather in certain mosques and hey'ats, religious collectives that organize ceremonies and religious festivals.
For Iranian Shi'is, Muharram, the first month of the lunar calendar, is the occasion for their most poignant rituals and moment of religious expression. While most (Sunni) Muslims celebrate Muharram as the beginning of a New Year, Shi'i communities wear black and prepare for mourning. They grieve the death of Hussain and his companions who were martyred in the desert of Karbala, in present-day Iraq. Hussain refused to pledge allegiance to the ruling caliph, and he and his companions were surrounded by the caliph's troops, who demanded his submission. Hussain's refusal resulted in the carnage that is still commemorated today by Shi'i communities across Iran and around the world. After the Islamic Revolution, the story of Karbala became the master narrative of martyrdom, sacrifice, and oppression (Ram 1996). However, this master narrative does not only produce resistance, martyrdom, and militancy. Mary Hegland (1983) shows in her ethnography of mourning ceremonies in Iran that some mourners choose to see Hussain as an intercessor and adopt to the ruling power rather than revolting by offering blood.
This form of mourning has been inspired by and learned from Iranian Azaries of Northern West of Iran,2 who mourn Hussain's martyrdom with a legendary passion, zest, and avidity that has made them the masters of azadari. They express their passion through what seasoned lamentation singers call harvaleh (mayhem or havoc). They passionately listen to poems without holding back their tears or grief. Azaries gather around and mourn while a lamentation singer entices them, or his apprentice encourages the crowd, by crying and lamenting louder and louder. This style of azadari appeals to the younger generation, who appreciate actively participating in lamenting through their tears and bodily performance rather than remaining a passive audience. Such desire for a certain form of azadari has made lamentation singers the cornerstone of every majlis.
I emphasize that the Lacanian Real is what mourners find elusive and unarticulated in the Karbala paradigm, and that the authentication of the Real, suggested by Van de Port (2005), occurs in the moments that highlight how people appropriate the unarticulated and uncharted terrain of lamentation. However, my emphasis leads to a broadening of the Lacanian Real within the anthropology of Islam and Shi'i rituals by addressing how the Real becomes a realm that is called on, referred to, and navigated by mourners through the traditions and ways of imagining that Shi'ism offers them. Therefore, mourners enable themselves to explain notions such as sacrifice, obedience, and indulgences like finding pleasure in pain and acts of mourning, refusing to account for these in any manner other than unspoken and unarticulated. It is noteworthy that the mourners protect themselves from the terror that they encounter in the revelation of the Real. They situate the Real within a familiar, tangible, reoccurring, and authentic narrative, such as miracles and unusual coincidences, which they see as sublime and divine interventions. Following this framework, I seek an alternative anthropological approach to the intricacies embedded in the Karbala paradigm, an approach that pursues the production of a production to expose how those committed to a Shi'i doctrine of lamentation and commemoration in the Middle East craft subjectivities, even as the precarious realities of war, violence, and bloodshed inscribe pain and suffering for them.
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