Grief as a Grapevine
Reading performed at LAX Micro Fest 2025, excerpted from Yimkin.
“...it is really through grapevines that I know why I have this new type of searching grief at all. In my backyard, in the no man’s land between the fence and the trunk of a guava tree, there is a grapevine that has grown to about 13 feet, now exploding above the guava’s canopy after a winter of bare branches. In its growing, it sends out tendrils of coiling intelligence to find its next point of contact. Searching is this loving work, diligent work, and also the work of refusal. When it can’t find a branch supportive enough to climb on, it changes directions and tries again infinitely, sometimes making wild knots and curls of itself in the process. As it labors, it takes the shape of what meets it back, a sensorial map of the space it is in. This is a map of how we need to move now - intrepid, renewed by the effort, sprinting to catch the light - the grapevine holds loosely on what it's not sure of, and will not unwind from what it has become dedicated to. Grief, in the motion of searching, does the same thing. It compels you to drop what doesn’t reciprocate, what doesn’t progress, and what cannot support life, then to be most nourished in the working towards what can. Where the grapevine does find an attachment to something else, it knits itself on and shares this progress. From this new connection, it fills, tangles itself bigger, widens its leaves, thickens its canes, and continues bursting upwards for sunshine.
A grapevine, like grieving, is twisting, ancient, communal, and generative. They start vulnerable in their first rooting, then grow deep underground to stabilize their vertical, then become beings so prolific, so insistent, throwing their head back in the sun everytime they meet it. They are fueled by their searching, alive the most in it. Grapevines pop up everywhere, seeds moving across the land in the bellies of birds, then growing unceasingly in almost any soil, first in the shelter of the shade and then bigger than whatever it was climbing on, like a longing. And so, this function of searching, taken as a lesson, is the necessary mobilization of grief. Searching, as the grapevine does, is the part of grief that is invested in the survival of others, the pursuit of it. Searching is a posture taken with both bracing and loosening, and not knowing and going anyway at the same time,The grapevine does not stop searching even if it has never grown in this shape or in this place before. It is only in searching that the grapevine can survive at all. This work, in its culmination, is generous in the most effortless way. This grapevine in the guava tree gives dozens of golden bunches of fruit, hanging from the vine with all the breaktaking drama of an opera chandelier. Its leaves grow as big as dinner plates and seem to multiply overnight in a glorious show of living. Palestinians know that every piece and growing phase of the grapevine is nourishing to us. We grow the vines over our porches for shade, take tender leaves for pickling and stuffing and eating raw, use immature and sour grapes for fermentation, then make everything out of the sweetened fruit, reducing into molasses, drying into leather or sultanas for later - and so searching is filling, creating us again from the continuity of effort.”