Who Has the Right to Be Grieved?

Who Has the Right to Be Grieved?

8–12 minutes

Susannah Dickey on the true crime media engine, Palestine, grief and the PEN Heaney Prize.

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Susannah Dickey won the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize, awarded to a work of poetry of outstanding literary merit that engages with the impact of cultural or political events on human conditions or relationships. The PEN Heaney Prize is a partnership between English PEN, Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and the Estate of Seamus Heaney. The 2024 Prize was supported by Hawthornden Foundation and the Estate of Seamus Heaney, and was announced on 2 December 2024 at Queen’s University Belfast, in partnership with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s.

‘Who Has the Right to Be Grieved’ is an essay that expands on Susannah Dickey’s speech on accepting the Prize.

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In December 2024, I was incredibly fortunate to be awarded the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize. The prize, which recognises a collection of poetry with a focus on social engagement, was awarded to my debut collection, ISDAL, in which I attempted to satirise the typical tropes of True Crime podcasts, and ask questions about the broader implications of the True Crime media engine: what does the form ask of its listeners by rendering crimes – and, by necessary association, the victims of those crimes – as exceptional, aberrant, and fascinating? The aim of True Crime is not to engender grief among its audience, nor provide criticism of the systemic violence that leads to the death of so many of the genre’s subjects. Rather, the approach of True Crime is evidence of a dominant cultural pathology that trivialises death. And it was this that I wanted to try and understand. 

When I was writing ISDAL, a book that hugely influenced my writing and thinking was Judith Butler’s Precarious Life. Butler asks what makes a life grievable – what qualifies a human being for the respect, acknowledgement and witness implicit within our willingness to grieve them? With ISDAL, the lives at the front of my mind were those of women murdered by practitioners of systemic misogyny. Violence against women continues to proliferate, particularly in the place I call home: rates of femicide in the north of Ireland since 2017 are the third highest per capita in Europe, and the highest per capita in the UK and Ireland. 

In our current moment, though, any talk of systemic violence must include an acknowledgment of the people of Palestine and Lebanon. These are people who have also been deemed less than human, both by the Israeli state and by those governments that continue to equivocate, to cower, and to provide weapons to the Israeli army. At the time of writing my acceptance speech, the news of a ceasefire in Lebanon had just been announced; at the moment of writing this elaboration upon that speech, a ceasefire deal for Gaza has been agreed, coming into effect on Sunday 19 January. While the news of the Gaza ceasefire is welcome, just as the news of a ceasefire in Lebanon was, it is abundantly, blatantly not enough, because no ceasefire will ever be sufficient to right the wrongs perpetuated by Israel in Palestine since 1948. In fact, just hours after the ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas was announced, the Israeli military launched attacks across Gaza, adding to the Palestinian civilian death toll. If these actions tell us anything, it is that a ceasefire agreement does not, in the eyes of Israel and in the eyes of those who arm the Israeli war machine, imbue the citizens of Palestine with dignity, respect, or humanity; given which, this trajectory of dispossession can only continue.

In Precarious Life, Butler talks about the societal perception of violence perpetrated against those who have been strategically dehumanised in the service of military operations. ‘If violence is done against those who are unreal,’ Butler writes, ‘then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated.’ Over the course of the last 15 months, we have seen how the language of negation is used to deny Palestinians their reality – Palestinian children have been referred to as ‘people under 18’; Palestinian civilians have simply ‘died’, or been ‘killed’, often in an abstracted voice, with no specific reference to who, precisely, has been killing them. The goal of this language of negation is to absolve us of feeling – of feeling anything – and to discourage us from critiquing the canny self-mythologising of Britain, America and Israel, which works to make certain bodies, in this case Palestinian bodies, viable military targets.

Many of us are constituted in some way by the social susceptibility of our bodies to violence. While writing ISDAL, I wondered if women being the predominant audience for True Crime media might suggest a mass desire to escape the fact of our vulnerability – that playing the detective or voyeur for a while is a nice escape from the reality, which is that many of us have been, or will be, victims of male violence. While this desire for escape makes sense, what if there is a more meaningful way to face this frightening truth? If, by recognising the distinct but no less conspicuous vulnerabilities of those we are told are ‘other’ to us, we might foment the desire to protest the political frameworks that render so many of us undeserving of care? To grieve the ‘other’, therefore, might be a means by which we can challenge the membrane between the ‘I’ and the ‘you’, to question which lives are presented as real, and which lives are presented as unreal.

A close friend of mine recently attended a funeral home in County Kerry, to participate in a practice in which residents of the parish, even those not closely associated with the deceased or their family, are encouraged to shake hands with the surviving loved ones, to share a moment of communion and condolence. My friend and I talked about how strange this seemed, in so many ways; having grown up in a large city in the north, it wasn’t a tradition either of us were familiar with. We talked about how querying the practice is an obvious consequence of the deliberate and incremental winnowing of public grieving, imposed by those systems and officials who shape our daily lives. Grief often demands that we step outside our typical itinerary; that we reflect upon the value of a life outside of what it can offer to industry, to production, to commerce, to economy. Grief, in many ways, functions in direct opposition to productivity, and it is therefore, in the most literal sense, not a ‘productive’ use of our time. Christina Sharpe writes about this in In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, acknowledging how, through grieving, we dislodge ourselves from the forward propulsion of the imperial present. It is exactly because of this that grief ought not to be reserved purely for those with whom we have shared moments.

I am obviously not so untethered from lived experience that I think it is possible to feel a similar intensity of loss for someone I have never met as it is for someone I love. Rather, what I mean is that grief ought not to be one fixed feeling, and that by casting the net of our grief wider – by permitting some variety in what we mean by the word – it is possible to see how grief can be a political act, a means by which we acknowledge a stranger’s humanity, their deservingness of care for the conditions of their lives, our outrage at the unbearable circumstances of their death. Because the circumstances of these deaths – Palestinian children, gunned down in the street by IDF soldiers; Palestinian families, murdered in their beds amid airstrikes – are indeed unbearable. That we, safe in our cosy privilege, can bear them is a symptom of many intersecting evils: information satiation, imperialist rhetoric, and racism. Mourning the Palestinian people, amid the pressure not to mourn them, is a resistant act. As Lisa Baraitser puts it in Enduring Time, ‘looking after the dead through the practice of grief’ can serve the larger interests of society, allowing us to ‘keep safe political ideas.’ Grieving can galvanise us, spur us on to advocate for those not afforded a voice.

In 2004, Seamus Heaney said in an interview, ‘I can’t think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is change people’s understanding of what’s going on in the world.’ It felt – and feels – wrong, in so many ways, to celebrate a poetry prize in the midst of a genocide, but it is precisely this wrongness that we need to cling to, for the moment in which we fail to feel outrage at genocide is the moment in which there will be no reason for poetry to exist, because our collective conscience will be too rotted, too unfit for purpose, to allow in the kinds of change that are necessary for our salvation as a species. Butler writes: ‘I am as much constituted by those I grieve for as by those whose deaths I disavow, whose nameless and faceless deaths form the melancholic background for my social world.’ Over the course of this 15-month assault, over 45,000 Palestinians have been murdered in the background of our social worlds, each one worthy of our grief. This ceasefire should not bring an end to our outrage, because the ceasefire does not bring with it an end to the grief – a ceasefire does not rebuild the hospitals, homes, schools, and mosques destroyed in aerial bombardments, nor does it bring back those lost, the children, friends, fathers, mothers, and siblings. It is our collective responsibility to feel grief for these losses, because it is our grief that motivates intervention into the injustices facing those still with us.

In response to receiving the PEN Heaney Prize, I’d like to thank Seamus’ family for continuing to be so brilliant, and for continuing to do so much to support Irish poetry. I’d like to thank Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann and English PEN for the work they do, including platforming writers like the brilliant Adania Shibli. I’d also like to thank the judges – Nick Laird, Paula Meehan, and Shazea Quraishi – for drawing attention to all the great books that were on the shortlist. And finally I’d like to finish by expressing my solidarity with and admiration for all those who continue to participate in acts of protest and witness. This ceasefire cannot signal the end of our efforts, or our attention. Free Palestine.

Susannah Dickey is a writer from Derry. She is the author of two novels, Tennis Lessons (2020) and Common Decency (2022). Her debut collection of poetry, ISDAL, was published in 2023. It was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and won the PEN Heaney Prize 2024.