Michèle Pearson ClarkeParade of Champions (Esther’s daughter, Simone), video still, 2015.
Photo: courtesy of the artist

Black Queer Grief in Michèle Pearson Clarke’s Parade of Champions

Ricky Varghese

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Grief is necessarily an unruly thing: it knows no time that can contain it, no space into which it can be relegated or cordoned off. It betrays restraint; it belies constraint. It is neither sacred nor profane as far as experiences go. It leaves the griever in ruins, fragmented, disoriented, longing, irreducibly destitute, poorer in a sense, wanting for what was lost. How, then, might we think of grief with regard to its capacity to be represented? How can grief’s destitution, its poverty, be rendered?

What would it mean for grief to be revealed not as spectacle, but as experience? What would it mean to be recognized for one’s grief, in one’s grief, and to see oneself as possibly recognizable in the grief that one might share with another or the other?

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