Healing the mother wound: grief management and metal performance

Metal saved my life. It is not the first time and it probably will not be the last. The murder of my mother when I was twenty-one, meant I was alone and if it had not been for metal, my grieving process may have been the end of my story. The death of course is one thing, but mourning is something that characterises many years after the event. If I had not bought my first guitar the year she died, the last seventeen years of my life would be a very different narrative. I firmly believe that metal and metal performance, prevented my suicide and any plans for revenge. It matched my pain, sonically, texturally, musically and aesthetically. It initiated a cathartic process that I have returned to since, because it offers me emotional and psychological balance that other music forms do not. This may be a purely subjective engagement but that is precisely the point. Remembering this time in my life is not easy, and can often come in hesitations, blanks and painful memories. By using interpretive performance autoethnography, a methodology that Richardson calls CAP or creative analytic practice (2000b, p. 929) means, [it] allows the researcher to take up a person’s life in its immediate particularity and to ground the life in its historical moment. We move back and forth in time, using a version of Sartre’s progressive-regressive method. Interpretation works forward to the conclusion of a set of acts taken up by the subject while working back in time, interrogating the historical, cultural, and biographical conditions that moved the person to experience the events being studied’ (Denzin, 2001 p. 41). Through this methodological application, this paper seeks to analyse how metal and metal performance helped me write my trauma into a performing life that ultimately liberated me from my grief.