Composting Death

• In Event: COMPOSTING Feminisms and Environmental Humanities 4. Beginnings and Endings

Abstract

This paper is a fictocritical account of the nursing to death of my two parents in Columbia, Missouri over the same two and half years that saw the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the rise of Black Lives Matter and the election of Trump; events that saw me return to my home in the Midwest for the first time for longer than the few days it had been for over three decades; bringing my own children back with me, the sound of crickets and fireflys; the packing up of their home of forty years. And while I appreciate that the violence and undoing of these events are not related cause and effect nor commensurate according to a logics of scale - I do not want to be ‘whitesplaining’, in this sense, reducing what are differential inequities or to be making my narrative the one - nevertheless the events are materially entangled in what Karen Barad might call a ‘strange topology’ or ‘geopolitics inside a morsel… an implosion/explosion of no small matter.’ It is this matter and the mattering that has taken place since, that ties racism, the rise of neo-facism, to the death of my parents, to a hauntological that won’t quit; a brutal facticity of indeterminancy that is constitutive; what I call composting death. This then is a paper of the slow, of a staying with, not a working through; of compost as process, as condition; of what death, grief does; festering, irresolve, heat on the rise.

Author

• Jennifer Loureide Biddle, National Institute of Experimental Art UNSW Art & Design