Local and Transnational Dialogues on Memory and Violence in Jamaica and Toronto: Staging Letters from the Dead among the Living

Abstract

This essay describes, Letters from the Dead, a series of community-engaged performances that stage public ceremonies of mourning as a way of protesting the death of hundreds of youth in inner city violence in Toronto, in Kingston, Jamaica, and elsewhere. In different ways, the performances make visible the social cost of the devastating effects of violence. They create a symbolic public space for critical community reflection and for dialogue between those affected by violence across local and national borders. They draw on imagery from social movements in which commemoration becomes a protest against neoliberalism and they mix this iconography with local images and narratives to create dialogue about the relationship between colonial and contemporary power and violence. In multiple ways the performances remember those who have been killed so as to bring about the reimagination of human communities in which lives can have value in the present.