Sarah Jaffe: “The sense of anger amongst some men is masking a form of grief”

“There’s this sense that capitalism is supposed to be able to fix everything for us, but it actually can’t do shit,” author Sarah Jaffe tells me as she reflects on our current system and it’s relationship with grief, in the midst of Covid, murderous police violence, genocide and climate catastrophe. “All it can do is maybe point our attention in a different direction, but actually capitalism is perfectly happy to keep profiting off people dying.”

In her latest book, From The Ashes: Grief and Revolution, Sarah writes about the fact of grief as a rupture; a cataclysmic event that can untether us from the past, sending a permanently altered version of us tumbling into an uncertain future. She draws on interviews with activists and organisers who’ve made space for revolution amidst their pain, from relatives of Black people murdered by racist police, to those resisting the genocide in Gaza. Interwoven with these are Sarah’s profound writings on her own experience of being completely “undone” by grief after the death of her father, who, having fully internalised the traditional masculine notion of being a provider, immersed himself ever deeper into work at his bike shop in South Carolina after losing his own parents, without ever talking about how he felt.

Huck: What’s your earliest memory of your dad?

Sarah: I have these memories of him reading to me, which is obviously something that really shaped who I turned out to be. My parents were obsessed with having a genius baby. They had gone to something called the ‘Better Baby Institute’, which is hilarious. They were these upwardly mobile, second generation kids of immigrants who really wanted to be middle class in a way that had all the trappings of middle-classness, and having a kid who was really smart was an important part of that. So they taught me to read really young, by reading to me a lot. I, of course, loved the attention of being read to. And according to my mother and father, I’d yell, “daddy! You missed a line!” because I’d have the books memorised. They’d always tell me I’d say, “read it again, daddy!”

Huck: My dad is a first generation immigrant, and his vision of upward mobility was having children who were really, really smart, too. I think that speaks to the precarious nature of being an immigrant, or the child of an immigrant, even. That fear of falling backwards. Especially with our heritages, and our histories, our inherited traumas.

Sarah: Yeah. The relationship of both holding onto that, and also wanting to let it go at some point, which I always found really interesting with my dad. He played golf at the Jewish country club, which was founded because the white people wouldn’t let us in. By the time I was born, that was illegal, you couldn’t keep people out because they were Jews. But my dad was really insistent about going to this one, rather than move to the formerly, but still, racist one. Not to say the Jewish one wasn’t racist in its own way, because it was the Jewish one. It wasn’t the Jewish and Black one. And then I think about him voting for Trump, eventually. It’s about assimilation. My dad very much believed in pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. So on the one hand being Jewish was really important to him, but on the other hand, any implication that it had prevented him from achieving anything would make him really angry. It’s this dance between embracing and denying the trauma of our history, and its practical, material effects.

Huck: How did you navigate the fact that your dad’s politics were in direct conflict with your own?

Sarah: Some of my earliest memories of politics in the world were the Berlin Wall falling, and the end of the Soviet Union. I was like eleven. When I would ask my dad about what was going on in various places, he would be honest with me. I remember asking him about Cambodia during the Vietnam war and the Khmer Rouge, and him explaining it was this genocidal regime we supported because they weren’t communist. He thought that was fine, I will note. He did not think that was the most horrific thing ever. Although I do think he never voted for Nixon. I think the first election he voted Republican was after that. He told me the truth about everything. There was never this whitewashed image of America. I would be horrified by this, by learning about what my country actually does in the world. Like, holy shit! I figured out we were the bad guys, and I just went and read books, and I talked to people, and that led me to the left. That, and punk rock. And also my family’s downward economic mobility. My dad owned restaurants. He was your classic Jewish small business owner. His parents owned a Jewish deli. My dad went from seven restaurants, down to two, down to a load of debt and being very underwater on the house. I went from private school to public school between the fourth and fifth grade, which was sad for me because I left all my friends behind. I don’t think I was aware of the class ladder then, but as I got older I was aware of the things we no longer had.

Huck: So your family lived out the reality of capitalism, in a way?

Sarah: Yeah. And this was twenty years before the collapse of 2008, the global recession. We happened to experience a precipitous drop when the rest of the country was doing fairly well. This was the Clinton years, which were supposedly boom years. My father took it very, very personally. And that’s the awful side of having internalised all the myths about the bootstraps, right? When you fail, you blame yourself. And I watched him punish himself for that, for the rest of his life.

Huck: Do you think he grieved the loss of those businesses?

Sarah: I think I didn’t notice it at the time. But I was very aware later, when his parents died, of him going into this very deep depression. I was in my twenties when that happened. He lost them within a couple of months of each other. When he lost the businesses I was sixteen, and really pissed off that we’d moved across the country. I was really mad at my parents and didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about their feelings. When his parents died, at first, he carried on like everything was fine. They lived in Florida and my parents were in South Carolina at the time. He had to go to Florida to take care of their things. He did everything very quickly and didn’t really talk about it. He came back with some of their stuff. There was no funeral. And he just went back to work. Shortly after that, I came back from Colorado for the summer and showed up to work at the bike shop we ended up with when we moved to South Carolina, while I figured out my next steps.

That summer turned into three years. My dad was like, ‘you can’t leave.’ He’d just sit in the back room of the shop at his desk and put his head in his hands. He’d ignore the phone when it rang. I started doing the day-to-day running of the business with our shop manager Fred and our mechanic, Armando. It was a year on from his parents passing, and he’d pushed himself to go back to normal, and then you reach a point where you can’t do that anymore. I write about this in relation to my own grief: how I tried to be good at grieving and get over it faster, and that just doesn’t work. You’ll hit a wall. He hit a wall, and was unable to keep going in the way he’d been going. He never took days off, even when he was in total breakdown mode. He felt he had to be there. I think that was his old grief, of losing the business and this idea of failure, combined with losing his parents. And also his complete inability to talk about his feelings. It’s the ‘perfect storm’ of masculinity when you think about it, right?

Huck: What would you say you learned about masculinity from spending time with your dad?

Sarah: The masculinity he was invested in was around being smart, and being funny, and being successful. But he never really wanted a lot of things for himself. There weren't a lot of ‘boy toys’ around the house. When he bought fancy things, it was for my mother. When we started to lose money, it was his fancy car that went. He went from driving a Mercedes to a Ford Taurus. It was very much this unshowy version of masculinity, but it was still deeply invested in providing and clamming up around feelings. My longest relationship, which I write about in the book and which ended after my father died, he didn’t know what to do with my feelings or his own, frankly. I realised I’d ended up with someone who was pretty much like my father. A very practical maths and stats brain, where everything has a practical solution, and feelings were big and scary.

Huck: I can count on one hand the amount of times I saw my dad cry before his dementia diagnosis. My daughter has probably seen me cry more times already. Did you ever see your dad vulnerable in that sense?

Sarah: I don’t remember if I ever did. I do not think so. And I have this thing occasionally when I’m really sad where I actually have a hard time crying. There was one period where I went two years without properly crying, and then when it all came out of me, it really all came out of me. I couldn’t stop. I feel like if my dad had been able to do that, it would’ve been so much better than that awful image of him with his head in his hands. When I think about my dad not having a funeral for his parents, and my mom not having a funeral for him, I think my family is trying to avoid the moments where they might have to be publicly vulnerable.

Huck: When I think about what I learned from my dad about masculinity, for better and for worse, I definitely came to understand anger as being the one seemingly acceptable, almost expected feeling men could access and exhibit.

Sarah: I think in America at the moment, the sense of anger amongst some men is masking a form of grief. In the book I quote Olúfẹ́mi O.Táíwò on how our grief and our trauma doesn’t make us better, necessarily. We can learn from it, and use that to have more empathy and care for other people or we can use it to be selfish assholes who think we deserve everything, and anyone who doesn’t give us exactly what we want is a monster who is denying us something, and therefore ‘Make America Great Again’, right? I think this thing we might call toxic masculinity, and I don’t particularly like the word ‘toxic’, is circling around the fact that you can’t really have this male identity of provider anymore, unless you’re really rich. It’s really hard to be in a one-income family. Like, the ‘trad wife’ influencers are doing great, but most women don’t have the option to be a ‘trad wife’ because most men can’t afford to have a wife who stays at home. She’s got to work, because you can’t pay the mortgage if she doesn’t. Talk to the boss at the General Motors factory about why he doesn’t pay a family-sustaining wage anymore. Those things don’t exist. What does a version of masculinity that doesn’t provide look like? What are we giving people to aspire to? What are the good things that are assimilable to a masculine identity? Do they have to be different from the ones we ascribe to a feminine identity?

Huck: Is there any room for grief within capitalism?

Sarah: This is sort of the central point of the book: I think that capitalism can’t assimilate grief. Nothing that you can buy or consume will make it better, other than therapy. And even then, as some of the therapists I spoke to for the book explain, grief isn’t a therapeutic problem. It’s a community problem. What you need is to be held by your people. And these are the things that capitalism doesn’t allow. Grief time is anathema to productivity. My dad threw himself into working after his parents died, until he crashed completely. I thought I could be good at grief when my dad was dying. But grief doesn’t get resolved on the clock. I thought I could ‘get an A’ in grieving but that is so not how it works! It will kick my ass when it is going to kick my ass. Writing this book brought everything back up for me and I spent this summer feeling freshly in my grief. You no longer fit nicely into the boxes you’d fit into before you were grieving, temporally and emotionally.

And then there’s the fact that the capitalist system treats us all like interchangeable cogs in a machine, and it can’t deal with our deaths in the way that humans deal with our deaths. Workers in the book speak about seeing somebody pass out on the assembly line and the manager yanking their body out of the way to keep the line going. How horrific that is. You’re spending all of your time making your boss money and if you die, he’ll get somebody new. ‘I could have another you in a minute.’ I just quoted Beyoncé there! That’s what capitalism thinks about all of us. There’s no space for grieving, and that’s why so many of the political movements of the last several years, a lot of them have been based around grief.

Huck: My mind immediately took me to Palestine then, and the genocide unfolding there. The movement against the genocide is completely powered by grief and rage.

Sarah: It’s like I said earlier about growing up and figuring out we’re the bad guys, figuring that out with the state of Israel was a similar sort of realisation. As a Jewish person, it’s been really, really powerful to be part of and to witness Jewish groups using Jewish ritual to say, ‘no, not in our names’. And using grief rituals to do that, and even combining grief rituals, where Muslim, Jewish and Christian people are standing together and saying ‘no’ to this. That's so emotional, and it’s been really hard, because the emotional resonance has not made it stop. Despite that resonance feeling really important, I think it will not stop until it becomes too expensive for our governments and these companies to keep funding this horrific violence. That’s the awful reality of this system. It does not care how disgusted we are by this, or how much time we spend crying over these horrific videos we see daily on our cell phones, right? It doesn’t care about how sad we are. It will care if we can make the funding stop.

Answers have been edited for clarity and length.

From The Ashes: Grief and Revolution is out now.

Enjoyed this article? Follow Huck on Instagram.

Support stories like this by becoming a member of Club Huck.