Irreconcilable Loss in Cristina Henríquez’sThe World in Half

Abstract

The intellectual journey is destined to have a geographical itinerary. — Édouard Glissant (4) Nearly a year after my mother’s death, a friend sent me an article titled “My Mother’s Death Isn’t Something I Survived. It’s Something I’m Still Living through.” Writing in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jenni Miller explains that grief is not linear and that the loss of her mother prepared her emotionally and mentally to survive the pandemic. Detailing nights with nothing to do except “lie sideways across [my] bed at 4 a.m. feeling desperately, bitterly lonely,” Miller suggests the value, if not inevitability, of dwelling in pain and discomfort. The exhortation to approach loss as complex and multifaceted should not be confused with the idea of loss as restorative or as one disconnected from other embodied experiences. As Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) scholars, activists, and public intellectuals point out, the COVID-19 pandemic has occurred alongside, and been exacerbated by, the ongoing pandemic of institutionalized racism in the United States and globally. BIPOC communities continue to confront COVID-19 alongside ongoing settler colonialism, state-backed xenophobia, and the disavowal of Black and brown dignity, whether that be on the US-Mexico border or the heavily policed streets of many US cities. At the same time, incidents such as the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent trial offered the opportunity to consider true accountability for some and was a call to “move on” for others.1 While Miller’s piece does not take up questions of racial justice, her accounting of her ongoing state of grief may resonate with individuals and communities confronting continuous loss. The ongoing twin pandemics of COVID-19 and institutionalized racism, moreover, make the idea of living with/in loss, and the differential impacts of race, gender, and nationality, particularly relevant. This exhortation to remain attuned to loss as an ongoing, potentially unresolvable process is central to Cristina Henríquez’s 2009 novel The World in Half. The COVID-19 pandemic has driven home the interrelatedness of personal and public grief, public health, and racial and economic disparities; so, too, does Henríquez’s novel offer a necessary meditation on the social and political origins and ramifications of intimate loss.