A few days ago, in our first Soulwork Reading Salon, we gathered in the wake of Christina Sharpe. We called names. We learned how to sit with the ache of what lingers.

Sharpe taught us that to live in the wake is to live with what refuses to stay buried. It’s about noticing how the departed still shape the air around us in language, in memory, and in the ways we love one another despite and because of all that’s been taken.

But grief doesn’t end with attention. It asks for movement. So this week, we follow the current from Sharpe’s weather to Saidiya Hartman’s water. From the aftermath to the origin story. From attending the wake to tracing the wound.

i.

Sharpe teaches us to notice the wake. Hartman teaches us to walk through it.

In Losing Your Mother, Hartman travels to Ghana searching for the ghost of a mother she’s never met. A mother that is a stand-in for kin, homeland, and coherence. What she finds instead is the truth that there is no return. That loss is a feeling powerful enough to be the architecture of our world.

She writes, “To lose your mother is to be orphaned by history itself.”

If ‘mother’ in Hartman is part metaphor, what does she stand for for you — home, loss, history, something else?

Hartman’s return is not triumphant. It’s uncomfortable, disorienting, and deeply honest. Hartman’s journey across the Atlantic disrupts every fantasy of homecoming. The people she meets are not her people. The land is not home. She finds no healing, no easy reconciliation. The Middle Passage does not offer closure — only continuity.

Still, she returns. And that return itself becomes the lesson.

To return, knowing there’s nothing waiting for you, is an act of faith. To stand in the place of loss and name it truthfully is what Sharpe might call wake work — a refusal to let history fade into abstraction.

For those of us doing this work in smaller, quieter ways — returning to our journals, to our grandmothers’ kitchens, to the selves we abandoned for safety — the lesson holds. We are all trying to find our way back to something we can’t fully touch anymore.

But that’s the point. To live as a descendant of the enslaved is to always live in-between — tethered1 to a history that never fully belonged to us, and yet one that shapes everything about how we move.

In the same way Sharpe turns weather into method, Hartman turns geography into text. Her travel becomes study. Her searching becomes theory. Her grief becomes praxis.

And this is Soulwork: to take the wound and make it instructive. To let our searching become a method of staying alive.

ii.

In In the Wake, we learned to attend and to witness.
In Losing Your Mother, we learn to study and to search for what resists being found.

Hartman’s method is archival but also fugitive. She knows the archive can lie. That it often records the captor’s voice more faithfully than the captive’s. So she listens in the silences. She imagines. She speculates. She writes what might have been because silence itself is not neutral.

That’s what makes her work so radical: she refuses to let history dictate who counts as knowable.

And in that refusal, I see the same labor my grandmother practiced at her dresser altar — a kind of household archiving. A study of the departed. She may not have called it theory, but that’s what it was. Every folded obituary, every photo tucked behind the frame, is a syllabus of the gone.

This is where Sharpe and Hartman meet: in the insistence that grief is knowledge. That mourning, properly tended, is a form of study.

What the water remembers is everything that refused to stay drowned. Every body that crossed. Every name that vanished. Every dream that still insists on surfacing.

Love y’all. Mean it. If you love me back, buy me a book!
-B

If you want to sit with this in practice, I’ve created an extended journaling ritual in the paid layer—what I’m calling The Crossroads.

Next Reads

If you missed the original essay which is acting as our syllabus this month, follow the link below:

• https://thesoulworknewsletter.substack.com/publish/post/176085970?back=%2Fpublish%2Fposts%2Fscheduled