Grief and mourning in the midst of a genocide

Today in Parliament, Abigail spoke about grief in the context of an ongoing genocide - whose lives are grievable and ungrievable, and who has the right to determine such a thing?

Contributing to debate on a Coalition motion deliberately seeking to be divisive, Abigail said:

The Greens oppose this motion. I quote:

So, one way of posing the question of who "we" are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable. We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others—even if it means taking those latter lives.

These are the searing words of Judith Butler about the ways that war is mediated, sanitised and rendered palatable. Consent is manufactured for the ruthless extermination of those wretched populations of the earth by rendering their lives as non-lives, and so their loss is no loss at all. It is under these conditions that a genocide may occur. We are now in the second year of that genocide. It is one of the greatest crimes we have witnessed in a generation, and through our association we have been complicit in it.

Necropolitics seeks to shape the ways in which we can grieve by determining who is grievable because open grieving is bound up with outrage, and outrage in the face of injustice or unbearable loss has enormous political potential. It is for this reason that the regimes of power seek to regulate and explicitly censor our expressions of grief. We saw this surrounding 7 October this year. Politicians and the media told a community that their grief was inappropriate and unwelcome, and the New South Wales police sought to prevent its public expression. The motion brought to the House today exemplifies that permission structure under which this genocidal assault is being waged. It erases the grief and suffering of those in our community who have lost friends and loved ones every single day for more than a year.

Why is it that they are incapable of mourning the dead without diminishing the deaths of others? When one vigil on 7 October mourned all victims and included prayers from three religions, and one vigil only referred to one group of victims, why was the former called divisive? To make it abundantly clear, The Greens mourn the loss of Israeli civilians on 7 October and acknowledge 7 October as a day of mourning for Israelis and many Jewish people. I reaffirm the beyond-urgent need for an immediate, permanent and unconditional ceasefire in Gaza, and now in Lebanon, and for a hostage deal.

A just and lasting peace goes beyond just a ceasefire and requires an end to the long-term occupation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid regime. I reaffirm our party's commitment to peace and nonviolence through language, intention and action. I refuse to be drawn into this sick exercise of weighing one group's grief off against another's. It is inhumane and repellent. Every day brings fresh horrors to our community. Pushing that terrible and unimaginable grief away will only do us harm. We need to pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living, and that is exactly what we intend to do.

Read the full debate in Hansard here.

16 October 2024

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Grief and mourning in the midst of a genocide

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