Huzuni na Hadithi: Grief and Stories in Southern Tanzania
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15173/nexus.v23i1.987Keywords:
grief, mourning, storytelling, ritualAbstract
For two months in the summer of 2010, I lived in Peramiho Village with a Tanzanian family and conducted ethnographic fieldwork on grief rituals and support systems for my undergraduate thesis. When I returned to Peramiho from September 2011 to November 2012, my further observations of the mourning process more clearly foregrounded narratives. This article focuses on grief narratives in Tanzania as stories that connect people to each other and to the land. Short-term narratives in particular act as rites of incorporation: storytellers initiate others into a shared community and show survivors grappling to ground their experiences with death, a form of control over chaos as they repeatedly narrate events. The mourning process that follows, which includes a secondary funeral ritual and year-long restricted practices, transforms grief and memory, and therefore the narratives themselves. Collected stories provide the structure of this essay, marking shifts in my experience and understanding of the grief process in Peramiho.
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