634. Representing Grief
In Childhood, Inter/Transnational, Media, parenting, Politics, reflections, Stories, storytelling, United States on February 8, 2026 at 6:09 pm
My book group read Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, Hamnet, in the fall of 2021, at a time when we were emerging, shellshocked, from the COVID-19 pandemic. We loved it, even though the central fact of the novel is the unmitigated tragedy of the death of a child. Perhaps we all needed a way to weep over the world’s collective losses. When I heard that the novel had been made into a movie, my first instinct was to stay well away. I had already plumbed its depths and didn’t have the heart to go through it again. But when my friend Shoba invited me to watch it with her at our local independent cinema, I said yes.
Hamnet the novel is a work of fiction, at whose center is the historical fact that, in 1596, the playwright William Shakespeare lost his 11-year son, Hamnet. Between 1599 and 1601, Shakespeare completed the tragedy of Hamlet, choosing a name which was apparently used interchangeably with Hamnet at the time. O’Farrell’s novel focuses on Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway and the family’s life in Stratford-on-Avon, with her husband away in London most of the time. In it, Hamnet’s life is taken by the bubonic plague, although it is not known how the historical Hamnet died.
Hamnet the movie was beautifully made. When the dreaded, pivotal moment came, my friend reached out and squeezed my hand. I squeezed hers right back. I empathized, through my tears, with each of the very different ways in which the boy’s mother and father became strangers to each other for a time as they dealt alone with their terrible grief and the way in which the mother eventually came to understand how her (unnamed-but-illustrious) spouse had turned his own grief into art.
Of course, as with my first experience of Hamnet in the time of COVID, the way one responds to a book or film is shaped at least in part by the historical moment in which you read or watch it. Watching Hamnet the movie in December, 2025, there was one critical moment for me that was so jarring that it colored the whole experience—the scene of the mother bending over the dead body of her child. While no one can witness such a scene without their heart being wrenched out of their chest, what struck me in that moment was the fact I had seen thousands upon thousands of such scenes in the past two years, in Gaza, as thousands upon thousands of parents keened over the tiny, white-shrouded corpses of their children. When I told this to Shoba afterwards, she said that this was exactly what she had felt.
It felt almost obscene to be weeping over this one child, knowing that similar images had become daily fare on our screens. Where was the empathy, the outrage, the outcry? Was this one child who had died in an epidemic more than 400 years ago more worthy of our tears than the thousands of Palestinian children over the past two years who had been and were still being killed by the Israeli military, armed with U.S. weapons, paid for with our tax dollars? Were the tears I shed as I watched that one mother’s racking grief and guilt, also the tears I had not yet shed for all the innocents whose lives were as nothing to their murderers?
The theater was packed and the atmosphere electric the night Shoba and I went to see Hamnet, which has now been nominated for eight Oscars in the upcoming Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and 11 nominations for the BAFTA Awards, including Best Film and Outstanding British Film. What a contrast with our next outing to Amherst Cinema just two days ago, this time to watch The Voice of Hind Rajab.
The whole world had heard of the killing of this six-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza in January, 2024. The car that she had been riding in with six members of her family was targeted by the IDF. They were all shot dead around her, leaving her alone in the car. After hours of waiting, during which Palestinian emergency workers had stayed on the phone with her, helpless to get help to her as she called upon them again and again to come and get her. Later, much later, the car was found riddled with bullet holes—335 in all—along with the ambulance that had been sent to rescue her. Everyone in both vehicles was dead, including little Hind.
When Shoba called to ask me to attend the screening with her, I agreed immediately; I wouldn’t have had the heart to go alone. Neither of our husbands could bear it, so again it was just the two of us. I went early, to save seats, but need not have worried—there were fewer than five people in the cinema’s smallest screening room. Halfway through, one person left—we will never know why. At the end, Shoba and I clapped fervently, as is the tradition at our cinema, which regularly airs films that don’t get shown in the big chains. But nobody joined us.
I was wrong to have been afraid to see the film. Rather than focusing voyeuristically on the body of a defenseless child, it represented Hind through a few still photos, a short home videoclip but mostly through recordings of her brave little voice, as the title suggests. It underscored her helplessness by focusing on the desperation of the office staff of the Palestinian Red Crescent, who had to operate out of Ramallah in the West Bank because their facility in the Gaza strip had been shut down, and who had to navigate through Kafkaesque layers of bureaucracy to get their ambulance clearance from the Israel Defense Forces. The film also spared the grief of Hind’s mother, again by focusing on the effects of the extended and, as the audience knew, doomed rescue operation on the well-trained staffers, each of whom broke down in their own way.
The Voice of Hind Rajab won the Grand Jury Prize at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in September 2025 and has received one Oscar nomination for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, and one nomination for a BAFTA Film Award in the Film Not in the English Language category. Neither Hamnet or Hind Rajab—both of whom have female directors, Chloé Zhao and Kaouther Ben Hania, respectively—is favored by the bookies to win. But when a child dies, nobody wins.
Some Statistics: According to UNICEF, in the two years between October 7, 2023 and October 8, 2025, more than 20,000 Palestinian children have reportedly been killed across the Gaza Strip, including at least 1,000 babies, and another 44,000 maimed. We may never know how many more have died due to preventable illnesses or are buried under the rubble. As of mid-January, 2026, since the so-called ceasefire deal brokered by the United States in October 2025, more than 100 more Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza. And the addition to deaths from bombing and gunfire, children are continuing to die from starvation, hypothermia, disease, and delayed medical care. All entirely preventable.
All children are our children. How can the Palestinian people bear this terrible grief? How can we shoulder this terrible guilt?
To the United States Government I say:
STOP FUNDING GENOCIDE!
633. Students of Life, Singers of Songs
In culture, history, Immigration, Music, Politics, singing, Stories, United States on January 26, 2026 at 6:56 pm
On Saturday, January 24th, before driving to join my monthly RUSH group (Rise Up Singing in Harmony, see TMA 331, 450, 487, 556), I hastily drafted a new verse to Holly Near’s It Could Have Been Me. She wrote the song in May, 1970, after police shot dead students demonstrating against the Vietnam War at Kent State University in Ohio and Jackson State University in Mississippi. Subsequent verses remembered Victor Jara in Chile, women in Vietnam, Karen Silkwood in Oklahoma, and people struggling for freedom in Nicaragua and El Salvador. More recently, Near wrote a new verse in the aftermath of the 2016 mass shooting in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Her chorus goes like this:
It could have been me, but instead it was you
So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two
I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs
A farmer of food and the righter of wrongs
It could have been me, but instead it was you
And it may be me, dear sisters and brothers, before we are through
But if you can die/sing/work/live for freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom
If you can die for freedom, I can too.
Arriving a little late, I slipped into the circle as the first song was chosen:
John Brown’s Body (Rise Up Singing (RUS) p. 61)
This is a 1959 Smithsonian Folkways Recording, by Pete Seeger. “John Brown’s Body” is a marching song sung, and most probably written, in 1861 by Union soldiers in the U.S. Civil War about the radical abolitionist of the same name. The tune, also that of Julia Ward Howe’s 1861 The Battle Hymn of the Republic, dates back to religious camp meetings of the late 18th century.
We sang it with gusto, starting the afternoon on a high note. Still, as I reflect on it later, both songs had come out of a deeply divided nation in the midst of a civil war; ominous, given that the United States is again deeply divided today, but I dread more than almost anything else the thought that it might descend into another civil war.
Forgive me for listing the rest of the songs out of order and with a few omissions, since I am reconstructing the list from memory.
Loch Lomond (RUS, p.153)
An old favorite of our group, always sung with great longing. I particularly love this less-known version by the Corries. And here’s a more upbeat rendition of the traditional version, sung by Molly Whupple.
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Where Have All the Flowers Gone? (RUS, p. 165)
Pete Seeger’s anti-war anthem, sung here by The Kingston Trio. The words were inspired by a Cossack folksong and the tune borrowed from an Irish melody.
Hymn for Nations (RUS, p. 159)
To the tune of Ode to Joy, a chorale in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, sung here by the great Paul Robeson—see the lyrics of his English verse below. (It had been the 50th anniversary of Robeson’s death just the day before, January 23rd, 2026.) Pete Seeger also sang it, slightly tweaking the lyrics as was his wont: you can read the lyrics of his version here.
Build the road of peace before us
Build it wide and deep and long
Speed the slow and check the eager
Help the weak and curb the strong
None shall push aside another
None shall let another fall
March beside me, O my brothers
All for one and one for all.
Morning Has Broken (RUS, p.154)
This beautiful Eleanor Farjeon poem was famously recorded in 1971 by Yusuf/Cat Stevens.
I think that the words and the melody complement each other perfectly.
The Gypsy Rover (Rise Again (RA), p. 4)
Dublin songwriter Leo Maguire’s modern ballad, sung here by Liam Clancy of The Clancy Brothers.
Deportee—Plane Wreck at Los Gatos (RUS, p. 50)
Woody Guthrie wrote this in 1948; tragically. it could have been written yesterday. I can never forget or forgive the meme on the current U.S. president’s social media page as he threatened to send the military into Chicago “to curb crime.”
By the Rivers of Babylon (RUS, p. 63)
This is the 1970 recording by The Melodians. I first encountered it in the film, The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff, who died just two months ago, in November, 2025, and chose it in his memory.
Roll On, Woody (RA, p. 249)
This song was written by folksinger-songwriter Reggie Harris in honor of Woody Guthrie. It is sung here by Annie Patterson and Peter Blood, champions of group singing and compilers of the Rise Up Singing books. (I’m still looking for a good video-recording of Harris singing it himself.)
We Shall Not Be Moved/No Nos Moverán
Originating as a religious hymn in the early 20th century United States this song became an anthem for social movements, starting with unionizing struggles in the 1930s, then the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, and on until today. It crossed the Atlantic to be sung as “No Nos Moverán” in the resistance against dictator Francisco Franco in Spain, and crossed back to Salvador Allende’s Chile, before he was killed in the military coup of 1973. It is still being sung wherever people need unity, strength, and resolve.
Here, Mavis Staples sings the English version and Joan Baez, the Spanish.
America the Beautiful (RUS, p. 1) I write about this song in TMA #452, America. I think it was chosen at this particular moment because, like the song’s author, Katharine Lee Bates, we recognize that while this country is blessed with abundant natural beauty, the beauty of its nation-state is clearly an as-yet-unrealized ideal. I chose this unpolished video-clip to honor the singer Evelyn Harris, formerly of Sweet Honey in the Rock and beloved in our community, whom we lost just last month, and who would sing it on July 4th every year at the joyful, welcoming citizenship ceremony organized by the Center for New Americans.
Down in the Valley to Pray (RA, p. 12)
A traditional American spiritual. This was recorded in 2003 by Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, Ricky Skaggs, and Alison Krauss.
Hard Times Come Again No More (RUS, p. 101)
An old Stephen Foster song, and a favorite in our group. Performed here by Mark O’Connor, James Taylor, Yo-Yo Ma, and Edgar Meyer.
Singin’ in the Rain (RA, p. 250)
This was the title song from the 1952 movie, sung and danced by Gene Kelly, and a welcome break from the sombre tone of the day.
Let It Be Me (RUS, p. 126)
We sang this with feeling. I never tire of the Everly Brothers’ harmonies.
A Song of Peace (RUS, p. 163)
Written and sung here by the late Bill Staines, dearly beloved in this part of the country, the lyrics reflect an inclusive nationalism, a much-needed antidote to the virulent strain that is now endemic worldwide.
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean
And sunlight falls on clover leaf and pine
But the other lands have sunlight too, and clover
And skies are everywhere as blue as mine
So Hear this song you people of all nations
This song of peace for other lands and mine
This song of peace for other lands and mine.
It Could Have Been Me (RUS, p. 215)
I chose Holly Near’s beautiful song, and added this verse to her sad but resolute memorial to the martyrs of U.S. wars:
One cold Minnesota morning
On her child’s kindergarten run
A trigger-happy agent
Killed Renee Good with his gun.
Masks, profiling, violence
In homes, workplaces, towns
But we’ll stand together, support each other
And force ICE to stand down.
Ch. It could have been me. . .
Tragically, the new verse was already out of date: a name was now missing, the name of Alex Pretti, who just that morning had been shot 10 times in five seconds by masked Customs and Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis as he tried to help a woman whom they were accosting.
RIP Renee Nicole Good, Alex Jeffrey Pretti. Students of life, righters of wrongs.
If you can work for freedom, we can too.
May singing together help to sustain us through these hard times.
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Tell Me Another 