death work.

the space between fugitivity and a grave.

the comorbidity of love and survival.

the homogeneity of dead weight and care.

the sacrifice of your flesh for the empty promise of freedom.

By: Hunter Shackelford

Death Work is the labor of ending the imminent, prescribed, and ubiquitous violence of antiblackness that ultimately infects and sacrifices your own flesh, your own wellness, and your own freedom in the undoing of the very terror you're fighting to escape.

Death Work is being hungry for air when you’ve made the ocean your home; it’s escaping suffocation to deeply inhale carbon monoxide; it’s lifting as you climb, just to be pulled down by who you’ve helped; it’s running in circles on plantations because there was never an exit; it’s making sandcastles on the shore and turning your back on the ocean.

Death Work is the comorbidity of love and survival, the space between fugitivity and a grave, the negative integers between manumission and the perfection of slavery*, the collapsed bridge between possibility and a familiar death, the war between solidarity and maintaining the illusion of power, the homogeneity of dead weight and care, the sacrifice of your flesh for the empty promise of freedom.

‘Death Work’ has colloquially been used by non-Black folks who work with end-of-life services, remembrance, life-to-death transitions, hospice care, and burial ceremonies. Mostly used by white funerary workers, its context is completely removed from the implications of the climate of antiblackness or social death*. Antiblackness is a metaphysical affliction that ravages the world in every aspect. Death Work, in my framework, is not exclusively the intervention around morality and end of life, or the need to embrace death as a natural component of our lived experiences. Death Work, in my dying eyes, is a defining of the care and commitment to wanting to end the parasitic nature of antiblackness killing the world/ my people/ myself and the sacrifice of yourself to do it. Death Work is trying to hold water in your hands too tightly, and too loosely. We want to save Black people, but to do so, it might be the end of everything we want to protect, including ourselves.

I originally moved towards the idea of ‘death work’ as a language to describe the never-ending gnawing feeling in your gut of trying to compromise and struggle with other Black people who are committed to killing and siphoning from more marginalized Black people around gender, sexuality, and marginality within white supremacist patriarchy. Gender violence and oppression within the Black community are difficult to redress without being militant in how there must be an intentional commitment to divest from antiblack gender.

“When we attempt to save those who will never see us deserving of the life that sustains them, we must recognize that we’ve committed ourselves to an eternal and repetitive morbidity. You’ll always die trying to save a nigga whose identity requires your death, whose flesh is only sustained by the price of your flesh, whose pleasure seeks your blood as sacrifice, and whose gut only growls for your endless labor.” This is always death work.

This eternal and repetitive morbidity is the care we give where it’s not reciprocal, where it’s eaten us alive, where the power dynamics are vastly and dangerously imbalanced, where love cannot exist. This is death work. This is what it means to want to get free, to escape, to be fugitive, and to save Black people whose indoctrination overtakes their decolonization. Black death-eaters are everywhere. And to be vigilant, we must name what is killing us, who is killing us, and how to protect ourselves from commitments we make to those who don’t have any to us. We must name how our flesh is not for the taking because everyone we struggling with ain’t principled, ain’t deserving of our flesh, ain’t giving us a freedom to die for.