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In Archetypal Grief Fanny Brewster engages the impossible, important task of articulating the emotional toll taken by slavery, especially from slave mothers and their children. This book confronts the reader with the emotional and cultural legacy of slavery that has been, and remains, largely consigned to our collective shadow. This story has remained untold because the magnitude of African American sorrow has been too overwhelming to bear.
Brewster's purpose is ‘to find a deeper understanding of the emotional impact of grief on intertwining generations of… slaves and their descendants’ (p. 132). she seeks to bring ‘the deep loss of enslaved mothers, children and their descendants more into the light, out of shadow, through attention to archetypal grief’ (p. 105). Slavery still defines the life of a nation because it has lacked the fully felt remembrance necessary for healing.
The word ‘grief’ is drenched with feeling and meaning. From Latin it means ‘to burden’. It comes to include ‘hardship, suffering, pain, bodily affliction’, and ‘wrong, grievance, injustice, misfortune, calamity’ and as if that is not enough, ‘to make worried or depressed; to make angry, enrage’, and ‘to be physically painful, cause discomfort’ (Online Etymology Dictionary).
Brewster contends that the generational grief of American slaves, suffered over centuries, is archetypal. This is a fitting concept for the experience of millions of Africans who were abducted, enslaved, and persecuted after ‘emancipation’ by Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. African American grief is visible in today's police shootings and imprisonments, and invisible in the myriad ways social wrongs remain embedded in our collective.
Brewster posits that, without hope of release, opportunity for change, or the ability to exercise fundamental life choices, grief as depression may have been normalized in the lives of slaves. ‘The depression that probably set in upon being captured in Africa, took hold and was never really released