< grief is a grandmother whose burning hands enshrine light > by Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson

A passport photo portrait of Lateisha's mother — Lateisha’s mother, Maxine Joy Lovelace at 19 years old in 1979

Lateisha Davine Lovelace-Hanson is one of artists in residence in the Apocalypse Reading Room over the summer. On Wednesday 18 August, Lateisha leads a workshop for Artsadmin Youth and on Thursday 19 August, join us for an intimate live event in our cafe with Lateisha and Apocalypse Reading Room curator Ama Josephine Budge in conversation.
The artists in residence are doing blogs and Instagram takeovers, and this is a blog from Lateisha.

What is it?

love
water
memories
sadnesses
openings, and opened and open
&
grief

These words have met me repeatedly over the past week as I now step into a new age, 32 if you are curious. Lots of returning to new and old and lost and foraged ways of being…

I don’t know how to start this blog, other than to say
Thank You, for being here with me….
For arriving, here. Reading, this

I don’t know how to start this blog, other than to share
feels, thoughts, memories

I don’t know how to start this blog, other than create
A holding ~

Grief has been showing itself in my life in so many ways. Ways I once had no name for, no place to put it, no knowledge of its depths and oceanic pull. All currents, waves and unmet shorelines
When rising to the surface, was too far away
So many tears uncried, so many hugs ungiven, so many deaths unrited

I think you can understand?

Maybe

Grief has taken years from me, i have echoes and shapes but i genuinely don’t remember
I think we live in a f*cked up world tbh
A world that has expected, demanded and constructed us to ‘be okay’ with the literal Apocalypse
The end of this world

You know, I actually want it to end…

Like, for real. I desire the ending of this world.
I desire the collapse of this empire, this unremembering, this forgetting
I want us to hold hands
I want us to dance, to mourn, to welcome ourselves into Futuresss
I want us to know it. Deeply and Desirably.
I want us to never be relegated to the realms of speculative fiction, the mad house, the radical, the marginalised
The other
I want us to hold hands
And call ourselves into completeness, wholeness and beauty
I want us to undo the undoing, and look unquickly into each others black, brown, grey, blue, amber eyes
And feel
Holy
Like baby suggs in Beloved*, all heart and prayer and knowing ~

I want us to hold hands and feel the beating heart of Earth travelling through our bodies and know this fire as our own

Is this too much to ask?
The end of this world?

Cos, it’s already happened… it’s been happening
It’s happening 100 times over, again and again and again

It happened the moment our mothers were hunted, killed, unwritten and written out
Thrown into disembodied water
Sacrificed to fire
It happened when their wombs were no longer their own, their knowledge of these Celtic lands was too much, Too Much Knowing
too much truth
too much power
And then it began
This thing that roots me here, keeps me sane and connected
And then it began
the moment our mothers were hunted, killed, unwritten and written out
Thrown into shackle iron
Sacrificed to seas
It happened when their wombs were no longer their own, their knowledge of these African lands was too much, Too Much Knowing
too much truth
too much power
And then it began
This thing that roots me here, keeps me sane and connected
And then it began
the moment our mothers were hunted, killed, unwritten and written out
Thrown into sickness
Sacrificed to rubber
It happened when their wombs were no longer their own, their knowledge of these Antillean lands
was too much, Too Much Knowing
too much truth
too much power
And then it began
This thing that roots me here, keeps me sane and connected
And then it began
the moment our mothers were hunted, killed, unwritten and written out
Thrown into dampness
Sacrificed to sweat
It happened when their wombs were no longer their own, their knowledge of these Asian lands was too much, Too Much Knowing
too much truth
too much power
And then it began
And then it began
And then it began

Is this too much? Too much knowing?

There is a feeling-voice creeping up on me, telling me ‘i don’t know enough’, that ‘i must not name, speak to or write these things down’
I want to soothe this feeling-voice, give it softness and full breath. I want to cradle this feeling-voice as it wells, weeps and wants to run away ~

Grief
Ancestral grief
Never goes away, because it can’t
It wants to live, it wants to move the mountains across my chest and tear open my heart to a new today
It wants me to know its names, and bathe it in rose petals and bay leaves ~
It wants me to sing it lullabies and gift her a kiss on her sunkissed forehead as she rests, rests, rests for all eternity
She wants me to go back in time
pick up my 3 year old mother, cuddle her close into my cocoa buttered arms, squeeze her tight and tell her she doesn’t have to struggle with water anymore ~
Grief wants me to tell my mother to not fear her, to know freedom is a coming, to know that she will be held and loved and hugged and protected
And it will be okay
Grief wants me to write her back into us
to write her into our past and know how many lives taken deserve a soft burial, a gentle rite, a golden epitaph
She wants me to speak into the echoes, the whispers and the complete full sentenced silences
She wants me to break us out of prisons, return us to the laughing hills and gathered gullies of siblings, cousins and the unpassing
She wants me to never lose her again, because Grief wants it all
us all
To dance, be fed, be fucked, believe that we are not dead
No, no we are not the undead, the necromancer, the n-gger
Fi wi
The Black
The Night Sky
The Returned Ocean
The welcome and the welcoming
Us All
Fi wi
She wants us