An unknown virus spreads through the Black communities of Detroit – and only the Black communities – manifesting as Syndrome H-8, a disease characterized by stillness and bodily resignation rather than any violence or pain. Hospitals and morgues fill with victims, and residents of the already struggling city look on at the crumbling community with an overwhelming sense of helplessness. As the political and social infrastructure fails to adequately respond to the crisis, one young woman draws on the history of her family’s activism and her own inner strength to work through the devastation to forge a positive community response.
There are two potential misconceptions about this story to get out of the way at the start: 1) It is neither inspired by, nor about, SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID-19 pandemic; 2) It does not involve some conspiracy of biowarfare against African Americans. It’s not about attack or about facing an unexpected outbreak of emergency or vulnerability. As the title reveals, it’s an allegory of grief. And as one character muses, “Of course Black people are dying of grief.” It’s just another day in Detroit, another day in the United States of America. How has this not happened sooner?
Grievers opens with its protagonist, a young woman named Dune, dragging her mother Kama’s body into the yard to burn on a pyre. An influential community organizer, Kama was Patient Zero for H-8, a woman who fought each day of her life for justice and advocacy, a woman who – one day – simply stopped, mid-sentence, mid-motion. Unresponsive and uncommunicative, Kama’s body slowly deteriorated. Without money or insurance to continue hospitalization or hospice care, Dune watched over her mother at home, hoping for a change, for an improvement. But all life in her mother ground to a halt, leaving Dune alone to care for her paternal grandmother while trying to discern where feelings stand with her girlfriend and her other connections to the world crumbing outside.
Using a model of the city in the basement built by her deceased father, Dune begins to map out occurrences of H-8 and to record notes of the history unfolding before her. In the meantime she begins looking more toward the activism championed by her parents and grandmother and how she can embrace organization to get through the present challenges, and through the stages of her grief. Through this, brown explores epidemiology through a fascinating lens that merges the medical and the psychological, the biological with the sociological.
Along these lines, Grievers is the debut novel in the Black Dawn publication line from AK Press, a series that “honors anarchist traditions and follows the great Octavia E. Butler’s legacy, [that] seeks to explore themes that do not reinforce dependency on oppressive forces (the state, police, capitalism, elected officials) and… generally express[es] the values of antiracism, feminism, anticolonialism, and anticapitalism.” A total of four novels have followed in this line, including a sequel to Grievers titled Maroons, where brown further explores themes of justice-oriented sociopolitical organization in the wake of the H-8 epidemic and continued experiences of Black trauma and grief.
The final stage of grief is generally identified as a combination of acceptance and hope. Notably it is not elimination of grief or the utter defeat of trials and tribulations. brown very effectively illustrates this aspect in her novel, and how it relates to the Black experience – not in the sense of accepting injustice, but in accepting how situations beyond individual control have changed a person, and what opportunities those situations now provide in sustaining life and investing in the work needed to improve and build better as an organized community where more power can be held.
Though filled with melancholy and exhaustion, Grievers is filled with a regard of simple beauty and hope. Partially through the resilience in the character of Dune and her commitment to being an honest witness of events, it also comes from the stark, but delicate prose by brown, lines that match Dune’s actions, filled with powerful emotion and overriding love.
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