In 2007 and 2008, artist and writer Camille J. Gage and poet Juliet Patterson (no relation) held a series of workshops in Minneapolis, the Whiter and less integrated of the Twin Cities. In their workshops, which were part of their project The Presence of Loss, Gage and Patterson asked participants to sit and think and write and talk about what had they lost, what their communities had lost, what they felt they were losing. Later, Gage and 40 volunteers embroidered the words people had offered in white thread on sheer white fabric, to create and to elicit material recognition of what might be categorized as emotional or psychological emptiness.
What those community members named most often — lost most clearly — was a sense of connection. The emptiness addressed most frequently was the absence of a fundamental declension, a grammar of belonging. What was missing was the genitive “of” — of relationship, of place, of continuity.
As he was vanishing, George Floyd announced a primal belonging.
George Floyd called out for his mother before he died. She was already dead.
The circumstances and facts of George Floyd’s life and death reflect a loss both individual and collective, communal.
The of, in regard to George Floyd, is multiple.
George Floyd was honored in three funerals. His family chose to have his life and death marked by ceremonies in Minneapolis, in Atlanta, and in Houston.
Proclamations of sympathy and solidarity were posted around the world.
Pop-up shrines appeared and were seen on social media by millions.
Protests proceeded and continue to proceed as expressions of outrage and anger and energized resistance to the persistence and the acceptance of violence against Black bodies, against Blackness.
Each has a context. Each is a response to and from a community.
All these responses, like the reading of a list of names, belong to the contemporary language of public grief. They are recognizable and they are necessary, and they are often understood as stages in a process of coming to terms with loss. They can be healing. They tend to be seen as temporary. Still, the language of public grief is an old one.
Often, for instance, it involves flowers, cut flowers — symbols of the ephemeral.
Many flowers have indeed been brought to this site. Yet the George Floyd memorial along Chicago Avenue is not about the temporary. It is about a longer vision of belonging.