“i am a house swollen with the dead”: Seroconversion, Disenfranchised Grief, and Heterotopic Deixis in Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead

Abstract: This article explores how poetry, an ancient technique of remembering the dead, may facilitate the work of mourning today. Focusing less on the elegiac mode than on a specific category of language use known in linguistics as “deixis,” Dean argues that deictic utterances, by virtue of their capacity to bring persons, times, and places closer to the speaker, can serve in poems as part of the labor-intensive process of mourning. Dean shows how the contemporary poet Danez Smith’s distinctive use of deixis helps to mourn a barely recognizable loss—that of seroconversion. Since Black gay men becoming HIV-positive is not generally viewed as a prime occasion for grief, Dean develops the notion of “disenfranchised grief” to convey the originality of Smith’s project.