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Murmurations: There Will Be Living, After All
Why you can trust usDec 19, 2023 
Illustration by Michael Luong
A note from adrienne maree brown: Malkia Devich Cyril is the founder of the Center for Media Justice; Malkia’s grief and loss in their own life has focused them on how we turn our collective attention toward grief. As the founder of Pandemic Joy and the Freedom Cleanse, Malkia knows a lot about how online community can meet real-life needs.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, I’ve spent my nights scrolling through videos of dead Palestinian children, etched in Instagram and backed by blue light. I scroll because as much as I cannot bear the gruesome brutality of missing infant arms, bloody 5-year-olds screaming for their mother, grandfathers on their knees holding their dead child in one arm and dead grandchild in the other—I also cannot bear to turn away.
As a Black masc genderqueer lesbian, to turn away from this evidence of imperial violence would be to turn away from Sandra Bland, from Mike Brown, from Tamir Rice, from the anti-Black state violence that has, on digital display, taken hundreds of young Black lives over the last decade.
To turn away from the supremacy and militarism wielded by Israel, that has been concentrated into a fascist regime financed by the United States, is to turn away from the politics of resentment that birthed the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s policy of caging migrant children, many of whom are Black.
To condemn the Palestinian movement against colonial occupation and for sovereignty would be to condemn the millions of Jewish people across the globe struggling for a new kind of peace and protection beyond Zionism. It would mean turning away from the Black radical tradition passed to me by my mother’s leadership in the Black Panther Party and my father’s work in the Black Liberation Army. It would be an act of self-recrimination, and I will not cosign my criminalization or the criminalization of our movements for peace, justice, and freedom.
I will not turn away from the American Indian Movement of the 1960’s, or the Landback movement of today. I will not turn away from the Arab Spring as it grows into a global summer of resistance. I will not turn away from the multigendered fight for control over our reproduction, or the workers’ fight for control over our production. Even though I am terrified that following the Cold War we have entered a fourth world war, terrified that we are too petty to build something popular and progressive; terrified that my wife, dead in my arms at the young age of 42, and my mother, dead in my arms at the young age of 59, simply join the ranks of the dozens of others I have personally lost in my lifetime, becoming a pain I cannot void—even still, I will not turn away.
Instead, my faith will reach out to touch your face sweetly, like my wife Alana once touched mine. Our terrorized bodies will find resonance in protest and will find armor in our congregational acts of public mourning. Together, in the millions and in every country, we will build a new demographic: the grievers. And we bereaved will remind those who seek to disenfranchise our loss, confiscate our hope, and weaponize our identity: We will rise from rubble, we will dance like the dust. Wherever our love is, there will be living, after all.
There Will Be Living After All
there are decades
that shatter everything you are
collapse it, stomach to back
till the three dimensions it once was
now fit, flat onto the page
maybe our children will read the story of us
maybe one day our children
those who survive the 21st century
will read that there were years littered with human longing
loss stretched across the memory
exponential
a shadow over 3,650 afternoons
shade from an unbearable blinding,
an unbearably binding truth
there will be living, after all.
there are decades sojourned like an open casket
Black Brown death on high rotation,
on digital display
high-tech loss immortalized in ways
found can never be
not when the air we breathe is saturated with
force and lies, the parents of an empirical grief
that partitions the memory
its absence gnawing
a desperate dementia
the kind with pieces you don’t want to pick up
so you leave them where they fell
you let them be
familiar
breadcrumbs of a life
a marked trail
a masterful alchemy of moments
a hidden transcript, love’s pidgin dialect
I speak you and remember how you
rolled off the tongue
my God, I know this road too well
this artery of land where my memory is sunless, hungry and alone
or, a trial that always finds me guilty,
insufficient
weaker than I meant to be
I follow it, then, through back streets and alleyways
back to the moon in your eyes
and am reminded, again
there will be living, after all
even though we walked, my love
I know
that it felt more like
we shivered against a brutal night
crawled into and out of hospital beds
more medical patient than person
a withered lonely
one foot in love’s mass grave and
one foot in its rebirth
I know it seems that way
like our bones are but rubbled stone
like death is all we have
like life is full of loopholes
like what we dreamed was just that,
aspiration and holy grail
doomed to fail, but
if you’re like me
grief may mark you
raise you keloid and braided
pockets and decades full of loss
a quilt of time pulled tight over a
buried past
stitched
across those broken moments
a whole life
spoken
in the parlance of tears
if you’re like me
grief might arm you
wield your open tumult
in full public view
until you are
a border of absence
a juggernaut of lonely
perpetually estivated in a burning
sorrow
the heart’s affliction militarized
a towering wall of
deep/cold/rage
if you’re like me
grief might crown you
in season
a solstice ordained by life’s forfeiture
if you are
willing to ascend to love’s trembling heights
like me
be an unwitting student
in a master class on meeting God with
every verdant breath
like, my beloved
do you remember
before life’s lambent afterglow?
how it was the sharp sweet sap of death that bled
you from each day
left you satisfied as worked land
sagacious
steaming
and threaded through my every/open/door
yes, remember
remember
I have loved
and been loved completely
grief
to the mirror
might say I am
love
if you’re lucky
like me, so
if you wondering what I been up to
if you came to ask after me
I been a crescent moon
defended against the soft night
I been a world war
training for freedom
for that day when hope and history align
when dead languages let me speak to you again
alive
on that day
they will probably call me crazy
redact my victories
tell me to get myself together
on that day
they will remind us of their charity
how they allowed some of us to breathe
gave some of us water and bread
but I will not pick up the parts of myself
discarded by disease and distorted relations of power
I leave my loving on the ground
plant it like old seed in new earth
my memory will unpave the streets
my love will carry on the wind
as my wife is not lost to me
none of my dead are
as they leave no lack in me
I will leave nothing out nothing, because
after all is said
and after all is done
there will be living
after all
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Malkia Devich-Cyril
is an activist, writer, and public speaker on issues of digital rights, narrative power, Black liberation, and collective grief. Devich-Cyril is also the founding and former executive director of MediaJustice—a national hub advancing racial justice, rights, and dignity in a digital age. After more than 10 years of organizational leadership, Devich-Cyril now serves as a senior fellow at MediaJustice and is a contributing writer to various publications including The Atlantic, Wired, TechCrunch, The Washington Post, Truthout and We Will Not Cancel Us—a book by adrienne maree brown, among others.
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