The Impossibility of Closure
“How does one mourn the interminable event? How does one memorialize chattel slavery and its afterlives which are unfolding still. How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing? How does one memorialize the everyday?”
These questions, raised by Christina Sharpe strike at the limits of conventional memory and grief. For how does one memorialise an event that never ended? How does one remember what is ongoing — not past, but persistent, inscribed in the everyday textures of Black existence?
Chattel slavery cannot be consigned to the past because its logics are constitutive of the present. Saidiya Hartman describes this as the “afterlife of slavery”: a time in which the enslaved are legally dead yet socially alive, and their descendants live within the structures of that death.
To live in the afterlife is to experience time not as linear progression but as repetition — the same wounds reopened, the same names echoing across generations. The mourning of the interminable event, then, is not the remembrance of something gone, but the recognition that we are still within it.
The afterlife of slavery is not a shadow of history but its ongoing form. The monument, the museum, the historical marker — all presuppose that what they commemorate is finished. They freeze time, offer the comfort of distance. But there can be no monument to the interminable, because the interminable does not stay still.
To mourn is to mark an ending. Traditional mourning depends on closure, yet the violence of chattel slavery resists such boundaries. As Sharpe argues, its wake endures — in the hold, the prison, the hospital, the school, the street
If the event cannot be contained in history, then mourning must take another form — one that attends to the everyday. The everyday gestures of survival, care, joy, and remembrance are themselves acts of mourning and resistance.
Cooking, storytelling, laughter, protest, naming, refusing — these become memorial practices, ways of keeping the dead present and the living human. The ongoing, ordinary labour of attending to Black life in the midst of its precarity. Mourning the interminable event is not a matter of building monuments but of making life otherwise within its ruins.