Personal, Cultural and Political Grief in The Longest Memory and The 7 Stages of Grieving Kai Henderson 12th Grade

Both D’Aguiar’s The Longest Memory and Enoch and Mailman’s The 7 Stages of Grieving explore communities defined by grief. Both texts provide a multifaceted examination of the personal, cultural and political aspects of grief and loss. The protagonist of The 7 Stages of Grieving experiences these forms of grief both firsthand and secondarily and is grieving throughout the play. Grieving for family members that have passed, family members that will pass and a lost culture and identity. The Longest Memory’s protagonist, Whitechapel, grieves for people he has lost and the life that was stolen from him. Enoch and Mailman explore grief through a personal lens, while D’Aguiar looks holistically at generational grief, the loss of culture and identity and the suffering of African American slaves as a whole.

Personal grief is explored in both texts through the loss of a loved one. Whitechapel mourns the death of his wife and son in close succession, experiencing a brutal loss and responding by straining to forget, lamenting that ‘memory hurts’ and attempting to ‘forget as hard as [he] can’. In The 7 Stages of Grieving, The Woman grieves as she attends her grandmother’s funeral and as she confides her fear of her Father dying, though...