On the Fullness of Grief
Yellow Arrow Publishing would like to announce the next guest editor for Yellow Arrow Journal, Tramaine Suubi. Tramaine will oversee the creation of our Vol. IX, No. 2 issue (fall 2024).
This next issue of Yellow Arrow Journal explores the concept grieful, whether grief is unconventional, unexpected, unpredictable, unabashed, undying. How can grieving and its rituals and odes be a loud testament to what it is that one is grieving and gratified for? To learn more about this term, read Tramaine’s words below. Mark your calendar! The theme will be released next week. Submissions open August 1 and the issue will be released in November.
Tramaine Suubi (she/they) is a multilingual writer who was born in Kampala. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her forthcoming debut is a full-length poetry collection titled phases, which will be published in January 2025. Her forthcoming second book is also a full-length poetry collection titled stages, which will be published in January 2026. Both books will be published by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Tramaine was one of our 2023 writers in residence and their poem "begin again" was included in Yellow Arrow Journal ELEVATE (IX/01). We appreciate all that she has done for Yellow Arrow and are excited to welcome Tramaine on this new venture.
Please follow Yellow Arrow on Facebook and Instagram for the theme announcement. Below, you can read more about Tramaine’s perspective on grief. We look forward to (re)working with Tramaine over the next few months.
Show some love to Tramaine on YouTube here.
By Tramaine Suubi
The idea we plan to explore for the forthcoming issue of Yellow Arrow Journal (Vol. IX, No. 02) is grieful. This term was created by my psychologist, and it feels deeply resonant for our current times. My life, my very body, feels full of grief. As I tried to find home on 15 wildly different streets, in five cities, across four nations, on three continents, my body certainly kept the score. We began the COVID pandemic with emails hoping to find us well, when most of us rarely were. Government officials and publications often wrapped the chaos of our lives in the package of “these unprecedented times.” The times were definitely unprecedented, but they are also so much more than that. Many social media users still allude to the profound exhaustion of living through major historical events. I am right there with them. Decades from now, I wonder what scientific studies will teach us about the unquantifiable loss that our society is simply not processing.
As a writer, editor, and teacher, I am obsessed with words. Not only is “Words of Affirmation” my primary love language for receiving, but it is also the primary way I give love. When it comes to grief, words do not feel adequate because language is inherently limited. I eventually found freedom from this finitude of language by being content to bear witness to the infinity of human experience. There really is an art to witnessing. My favorite essay is “Poetry is not a Luxury” by the late, great Audre Lorde. She is one of my guiding lights not only in the practice of writing but the practice of living. In the first half of the essay, she illustrates the beauty of the dark as a place of transformation. She believes, “These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness.
In my present season of life, I am reclaiming darkness and blackness as spaces of goodness—as spaces of rest, reflection, and revival. And so, as I wade through these depths, I keep encountering grief. I commune with my grief and listen to her diligently. She is teaching me so much. Whenever I come up for air, I am struck by what grief leaves in her wake: gratitude for the good that remains. My philosophy studies taught me how to ask questions more than they taught me how to find answers. My creative studies are teaching me how to ask better questions. I was trapped in why we suffer, now I am exploring how we love as we suffer. Grief and gratitude are often intertwined in my findings.
Through my chronic pain and chronic fatigue, I try to adhere to a daily gratitude practice. The muscle is weak, but the movement is growing. In this issue of Yellow Arrow Journal, I invite us to meditate on communal grief and communal gratitude. The infinite manifestations of our griefulness can find space here. A teacher once told me that we write out of the wound. Though the wound never fully heals, the wound always changes. I hope we move beyond the farce of individualism and into the power of collectivism. After all, as a beloved once reminded me, wounds are for community.
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