Rebellious Mourning by Cindy Milstein

Author:Cindy Milstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2017-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

TO MOURN AND STRIKE

PROLOGUE AND INTERVIEWS BY JEFF CLARK

In French, faire grève means “to strike.” It’s first seen with that meaning in an 1805 police report, and is linked to Place de la Grève in Paris, where unemployed people seeking work would gather. The grève in Place de la Grève refers to gravier (gravel in English), which in turn probably refers to the Latin gravare (to be burdened).

Our own word grief is etymologically linked to gravare; when we mourn, our hearts are burdened. And amazingly, our term grievance, in French, is “grief.”

Faire grève (to go on strike) and to grieve (mourn) are thus ultimately etymologically connected. But that doesn’t mean that people didn’t make the link when the syntagm faire grève appeared. One could imagine a person at the time saying (as a play on words) that people seeking jobs on Place de la Grève were burdened (gréver) by the misery of unemployment.

The public artists in the pages that follow have made of grieving a grievance—a visual strike—proving it’s possible to transmute some of the weight of mourning those murdered by the state into an act that is simultaneously memorial and protest.

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