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The writer and social-justice facilitator adrienne maree brown thinks we can use organizing like time travel — as a way to transport ourselves into a more communal and sustainable future. Even when responding to the moment, her projects look forward: In 2019, motivated by the exhaustion many felt after Trump’s election, she released Pleasure Activism, an anthology of love letters from organizers about the meaning they find in their work. Last year, when fraught discussions of “cancel culture” permeated right- and left-wing circles alike, brown wrote We Will Not Cancel Us, a short book advocating for healthy and empathetic conflict. Now, as COVID-19 continues to put Black communities into unprecedented physical, emotional, and economic peril, brown releases her first long-form work of published fiction: Grievers, a novella about Black death during a pandemic.

She started writing the book in 2012. “I did not expect or predict this pandemic, but it was definitely interesting to compare my guesses of what a pandemic would look like in Grievers to what happened during COVID,” brown says. “In the book, for example, I said the CDC would not be on the ground, but they’d be making the calls. That was true to form. Capitalism is usually pretty predictable.”

Grievers follows Dune, a teenage girl living in Detroit, as she mourns the death of her mother due to H-8, a terrifying virus claiming the lives of Black folks all around the city. As she watches countless loved ones fall prey to the virus, Dune realizes that H-8 is forcing Black folks to sit in their grief, sending previously healthy people into deep comas of mourning from which they never wake — a symptom that will either prove fatal or necessary to their survival.

Brown’s writing artfully burrows into our darkest societal anxieties — the fear, the exhaustion, the death, the grief — and finds the light stubbornly gleaming underneath the surface. “Dune realized … that even if she didn’t really have an idea of why she would continue living, she didn’t want to die,” brown writes. “She particularly didn’t want to die from H-8.” The premise of Grievers is a crucial one: that perhaps in our mourning, we do not just grieve the dead — we also grieve the realities of our own lives, which, in spite of everything, we still desperately want to live.

After many years spent in Detroit, brown now lives in Durham, North Carolina. Vulture spoke with her about writing intimate, textured depictions of Black grief, the power of speculative fiction, and how to write about death without succumbing to despair.

‍—Mary Retta

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