No Silence in the Afterlife comes out of live performances/lectures and experiments in dying and mourning, as author Abou Farman's partner of 15 years, Leo, was leaving her flesh due to a metastatic cancer. After her medically certified death, Leo kept returning in many forms—including, significantly, a cockroach. After this and years of breaking down his own rigid secular ramparts working as an anthropologist on questions of immortality, Farman fully embraced the afterlife as his life. What lies between these covers has been shaped by explorations in an invented afterlife practice. No Silence in the Afterlife has no beginning or ending, as it may be opened from both ends. Please do so: open life from both ends.

An anthropologist, writer and artist, Abou Farman is author of On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience, Clerks of the Passage and No Silence in the Afterlife. He is co-founder of Art Space Sanctuary, Casa Ojala and the Shipibo Conibo Center of NY.

"No Silence in the Afterlife broke my heart and healed it. Abou Farman gifts us a language that once belonged to our ancestors and to their ancestors, who exist as cosmos and earth, born up as we each were from ancient oceans. In this book, love is not love but rather a poetics of elemental earthly and fleshly beingness. Here language is a complex reciprocity—one magnet/ism—which peripheries us together, compels or repels us, beckons or scatters us, in whatever absence and presence a body was, is, and becomes of the world and its labyrinthine energies, ancient and futuristic, dangerous and static. The beloved's body becomes your body, and your body becomes the beloved's body, and each of those bodies become our ancestors' bodies, and our bodies of the coming mornings—a little lost, a little gone, arriving and receiving, and in these flickering states fully present, the ecstatic as a circle of cells that multiply us into and out of one another's lives. The 'I of you' as they call it, each of us inciting or reorganizing the other's 'desire to last.'" — Natalie Diaz

"Abou Farman mourns the loss of his beloved as she crosses into the invisible. He sends sonic and poetic gestures after her into the after-states and the cosmos, linguistically exploring the transparent realm as testament to his organic contact with what persists here, on this side, with him. Farman's words merge with an ironic glow, alive with his adamantine spirit, vibrating with luster, active within higher verbal forms, kinetic in spirit, and self-scrolling onwards as a living enigma." — Will Alexander

"In these searingly beautiful pages, an Orphic Abou Farman nixes euphemism and dissects cancer—molecularly and ontologically ('a tumor is … mutants in mutiny refusing death')—while daring to look back and retrace his partner Leonor Caraballo's deathmatch with the disease, which might as well be his deathmatch with her unmitigated absence. Tragically victorious through language, he transmutes his loss into the heartbreaking perfection of this elegiac work." — Mónica de la Torre