A few years ago, I visited The Black Archives in east Amsterdam. Among the collections were declassified FBI documents, 25-cent Black Panther periodicals, and ink-stained flyers for a debate between Marcus Garvey and Otto Huiswoud. While wading through documents, books, and artwork in English and Dutch, I came across a tall semi-transparent screen surrounded by a wooden frame. In bold letters it could barely contain it asked: "What would you have done had race not compelled you to fight?"

For me, the question was one that prompted deep reflection, as well as deep grief. The Archive was asking me how I would have lived had I not been shaped from birth by the very systems of exploitation and violence that had brought me to the Archive, and my career, in the first place. But why would an archive, dedicated to engaging the past through preserving its record, ask me to reflect on a past that never happened? That particular question, and that particular grief, has shaped my research and my understanding of this colloquy.

I research practices of self-mourning. Self-mourning is exactly what it sounds like—mourning the self. Previously, the term described individuals anticipating their own death or reflecting on their mortality. But I have expanded the term to include intangible losses of self, such as losses of futurity, potential, and self-determination. In other words, rather than grieving the fact that one must die, self-mourning can mean grieving how one must live. And, to return to the Black Archive’s question, to grieve not only who we are, but who we could have been and should have been.

My work revolves around African and Black diasporic literature, where self-mourning is gendered, layered, and generational. The questions of “who might we have been,” “what should we have done,” and “what would this place look like if,” haunt these literatures across time.

From a utilitarian standpoint, dwelling in the non-real, dwelling in regret, and dwelling in grief don’t add anything to the world. We are meant to think only of what is tangible, concrete, and applicable. But not everything we have lost is tangible.

Intellectuals in the time of crisis need not reinvent the wheel; the time of crisis has always found the intellectual, the artist, and the craftsperson at work. We live through the way that we think and the way we feel. The job of the intellectual is to expand our thoughts and emotions as to expand our engagement with life itself.

My work as an intellectual is to expand our understanding of and practice of mourning. My job is to give people permission to sit with deeply perpetual grief. How do we allow ourselves to work with grief, instead of through it? How do we accept grief instead of treating it like a problem to be solved or a disease to be cured? I regard self-mourning as a practice with generative potential, as it mobilizes the imagination toward realities we haven’t seen yet but that we must aspire toward. The practice of imagining myself outside of race is not only a practice of remembering that race is in and of itself a construction I did not have to experience, but also a practice of thinking through the distance between my reality and the one I should have experienced. My determination to create a more just world is not only for the people coming after me, but for the version of myself that I can’t yet inhibit. How can I traverse that distance? One of the bridges between who we are and who we want to be is grief.

In times of crisis, we fight and we grieve for what we have lost, for what we deserve, and for what we can only imagine.