The Mourning Suit

Reading public grief and politics with Ann Neumann and Sandhya Dirks

This is an accelerationist moment.

You may have heard the term “accelerationism” in the news lately—in response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or earlier, to describe the seemingly deliberate pursuit of chaos exemplified by White House social media, given over now to an anonymous team of “very online” trolls. I’ve written about the term before:

“A simultaneous explosion and collapse of meaning…. ‘accelerationism’ is a relatively recent term, allegedly coined or at least brought into contemporary use in 2013 by two Marxist political scientists via the influence of a two-volume work of 1970s French theory called Capitalism and Schizophrenia. ‘While crisis gathers force and speed, politics withers and retreats,’ the political scientists’ #ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics announced. And: ‘The overwhelming privileging of democracy-as-process needs to be left behind.’ It was a rejection of the slow, small work of solidarity in favor of a ‘future more modern.’ Yes, said fascist “intellectuals,” adapting the concept to their own ends. Yes, let’s leave democracy behind. The new fascists liked the idea of hastening the end of a liberal order. They repurposed the term for the speeding up of decay—deconstruction or destruction of the old to make way for the new…”

And here, in a different vernacular, to different ends, is what Erika Kirk, the grieving widow of Charlie Kirk, has written about it, in her second post on Instagram, for her 5.2 million followers and rising, following the public murder of her husband:

The world is evil.
But our Savior. Our Lord. Our God. Не...Не is so good. I will never have the words. Ever.

The sound of this widow weeping echos throughout this world like a battle cry.
I have no idea what any of this means. But baby I know you do and so does our Lord.

They have no idea what they just ignited within this wife. If they thought my husband’s mission was big now..you have no idea.
You. All of you. Will never. Ever. Forget my husband @charliekirk1776 I’ll make sure of it.

You have no idea. That, too, rings accelerationist: What’s coming is beyond our imaginations. Events are moving faster—which is why I both want to keep up and slow down. To that end, I’ve been speaking to some friends about how they read the proliferating narratives and counter-narratives. This post gathers some of their thinking around public grief and politics. The occasion is not the assassination but the subsequent emergence, as Fox News has already announced (“the mantle,” they say, “the hand of God,” they say), of the grieving widow as a political force potentially even greater than her late husband.

Grief is a fact, not a moral position. Erika Kirk’s for her husband and the father of her children is just that, a fact, and the volume of online speculation about whether it is “real” is distraction at best and glib grotesque at worst, yet another accelerant. The rich also cry, those whose politics you may loathe also mourn. Emotion exists in a dialectical relationship with ideology, but ideology begins with feeling, a statement not of virtue but of empirical observation.

But then comes performance. This, too, is not a criticism of Erika Kirk; public figures are publicly mourned by those who loved them or would make use of their stories, or both. So these notes aren’t about the substance of Kirk’s grief, whatever that may be, but her public performance of it, via public platforms.

***

The first person I called for insight into her performance was was my friend Ann Neumann, a journalist and author of a brilliant book called The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America.

Ann’s first comment was: “Her hair.” She meant nothing snarky by it. Kirk, 36, is a former Miss Arizona. She began competing in beauty pageants, she told an Arizona magazine in 2012, to “further my causes.” There is an ugly tradition of commenting on the appearance of women in public life in lieu of discussion of their ideas, but it’s fair to say that for Kirk, who also runs a Christian streetwear line (Sample hoodie: “They also said Noah was a conspiracy theorist”), and defines herself—her Instagram account is “Mrs. Erika Kirk”—as the wife of a man whose major work was social media, appearances are the idea.

Ann was struck by what she saw as the centrality of Kirk’s hair to so many of her posts, but especially in the two dedicated to her grief. In the first, speaking at a podium next to her husband’s podcasting chair, it is a perfect cascade:

In the second, after the perfect white suit, shows Kirk in black baggy clothes, her hair draped over the body:

Ann said she thought of Rapunzel, hair from a fairy tale of sorrow and metamophosis; and then, as she clicked through the twelve frames of Erika Kirk grief post, she found several of Erika on sun-blasted tarmac as her husband’s body is loaded onto Air Force Two, the vice-president’s 757. The wind blows. The hair neither cascades nor drapes but is wild. In the first image it fills the frame; in the second it slashes; in the third it is a chosen veil. Ann thought: Demeter. Ancient Greece’s mother goddess of the earth and the underneath, that which is taken below and that which rises. In the third of the three tarmac portraits, Erika Kirk stands hidden by her hair, supported by stoic Usha Vance, the widow’s hand outstretched as if, like the language of her post, in prayer or command. It is, observed Ann, “a position of power at arguably the most debilitating moment of her life.

“Like all grief,” Ann continued, “the instagram post from Mrs. Erika Kirk is a collage of images, still and moving. First we see Erika and Charlie in a landscape of blue sky and red rocks, each holding a child. He is smiling, she is kissing the child he holds. Toggle to another time; the second image is of an open casket in a dimmed white room, Erika drapes the casket with her upper body, her unkempt blond hair tumbles to her waist. Her face is on her husband’s chest, we see only his tie.

“The third is a video that pans from Kirk’s red tie (we do not see his face), where Erika grasps the lapel of his blue suit with her left hand, to his hands, stiff, discolored, dead. She kisses his right hand, brings her face to it, says ‘I love you’ five times. The ‘I love you’s are whispered, spoken. ‘God bless you,’ she says before taking a deep breath. We first notice the difference between the color of her hands and his, embalmed andyellow, without blood. We notice her nails which are a perfect powder pink. And we notice Erika’s jewelry, two large gold rings and a thick gold bracelet. The viewer feels as though they are seeing something too intimate for a camera. Perhaps depending on how one views the life and legacy of Charlie Kirk, the viewer feels either in the Kirks’ confidence or as though we are watching a performance of grief.

“The outpouring of grief for Kirk has been fraught with controversy: The old ruse of not speaking ill of the dead has melded with Republican righteousness to warp newspapers’ reporting and lead to the sacking of employees for saying the truth about Kirk: He called enemies “maggots” and “vermin,” he suggested that Black women lack “brain processing power,” that Jewish financiers fund anti-whiteness, that children might benefit from viewing televised executions. He said it all with an affable affect. It made him rich and powerful.

“Grief for Mrs. Erika Kirk has been less complicated. From politicians far and wide we have heard condolences and prayers for Erika Kirk and her two children. An outpouring of grief from admirers floods social media. We have heard from Erika twice since her husband’s death. Her first public appearance was two days after her husband’s death.

“In a double-breasted white suit—once a feminist uniform—Erika stood behind a podium in the office from which Charlie broadcast his wildly popular podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show. Her hair is straightened, very blonde, hanging down her shoulders. Her eye liner is dark, her expression austere.”

Ann’s writing stopped there; she had a plane to catch. Later I asked her to explain: “She’s showing us how to grieve,” Ann said. The composure, the power. And, then, with the image of the the body, “There’s no greater truth than a corpse. She’s showing us how to grieve, and showing us what ‘we’—the guilty—have done.”

***

Next I turned to Sandhya Dirks, a new colleague at Dartmouth College and until recently a national correspondent for NPR. I thought of Sandhya because she’s brilliant, and because I’ve been reading an essay project she’s been working on called “Cartographer of Grief.”

Sandhya writes:

“i keep thinking about kirk and this moment and grief -- and how this group of people who reject empathy, who practice the dark alchemy of turning grief into grievance, who cause endless grief and then deny the emotion and shit on the mourning -- how they are now demanding the performance of grief in THIS case. and anyone who does not pretend to join in these rituals of mourning is targeted and attacked… the calls for vengeance for anyone who doesn't bow in ‘grief’ -- how it is weaponized/ captured...

“grief -- or the performance of grief can seize so much territory. this is exactly what i've been thinking through -- how that is happening in this moment. how grief is speedballing fascism, completely. (because so often grief is denied i think people are also hungry for a chance to mourn, and this is the only thing the regime -- and the larger media narrative -- has sanctified as "grievable" -- (grieving palestinians/ being a grieving palestinian is basically illegal, grieving covid and mass death is only allowed on anniversaries and then pushed back down again, the brief moment in 2020 when it was okay to grieve racism and the murder of Black people by a violent system has been again, drowned).…

“i've been thinking about emmett till; we were in memphis when the 70th anniversary happened last month. anyhow I couldn't help thinking of Kirk's open casket as a kind of perverse echo of Till's…”

***

I told Sandhya some of what Ann had said about Erika Kirk’s hair, and Sandhya wrote:

“Erika's blonde ice princess hair like a silky guillotine blade”

A well-turned phrase, I thought.

I called Ann again.

“Her husband’s body a mirror-reverse of Emmett Till’s,” Ann reflected. “Like Erika Kirk’s mourning suit of perfect white.”