the transformative justice strategic science fiction reader

written & prepared for the allied media conference | 2012 | detroit

adrienne maree brown alexis pauline gumbs leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha jenna peters-golden

copyleft | table of contents

“Santa Olivia: Tricksters, Triumphs and Fighting Back” by Jenna Peters- Golden . . . . . 2-6

“Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor” by Alexis Pauline Gumbs ...... 7-21

“Woman on the Edge of Time and The Fifth Sacred Thing: Two White, Feminist, Transformative Justice Utopias with Interesting Ideas and Also Problems” by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha ...... 22-32

“why the dispossessed is required reading” by adrienne maree brown ...... 33-37

2 Santa Olivia: Tricksters, Triumphs and Fighting Back Jenna Peters-Golden

In my work doing transformative justice organizing and movement building I am regularly trying to answer what feel like big questions: Are there distinctions between vengeful retaliation to violence and fighting back? What are they? How can we distinguish between the two? Is there room for humor, tricks, and play in movements that deal with themes as serious as violence, sexual assault, and prison abolition? What extraordinary tactics and perspectives can youth offer us in our collective work towards liberation? How can we conceive of unique and radical identifications of spirituality and faith? The pages of Jacqueline Carey’s Santa Olivia (2009) are saturated with these questions and a whole lot more.

Young Adult (YA) literature is a special sect of fiction.[1] I don’t call it a genre because I think YA fiction is too gigantic to be contained in such a category. It’s a sort of boring, ageist assumption that youth and teenagers don’t crave or don’t deserve complicated, dynamic, and diverse books to read. Because, as most fiction lovers know, books can change us, offer a space for our voices, hurt us, save us, help us understand ourselves and our world with more scope and imagination, whatever age we are. And YA lit is no longer the dusty paperbacks of the Hardy Boys or any shit like that—for decades, as youth have been fighting for power, autonomy, leadership and voices in their lives and in their communities, YA lit has become more real and reflective of actual young people’s lives. Santa Olivia is a shining example of this (and it has smoking hot + realistic-ish queer sex in it. Did I mention that?).

Santa Olivia stands apart from many other dystopian sci-fi novels. For one, it’s a young adult book, which, I think, is a significant aspect of this book and of both genres. Secondly, it is a book of change, triumph and non-traditional resistance. It is not a story that rests in its own misery, obscurity, or desolation (although the potential is strong).

In the world Jacqueline Carey creates there is sickness, death, or war. The 50-mile stretch of land sandwiched between the border of Mexico and South Texas, already full of poor people, Spanish-speaking people, Mexican Americans, and Native people, was getting in the way. A predictable thorn in the side of the military, as people got poorer and sicker, General Argyle showed up to make a definitive statement:

“‘We are at war!’ ‘This is no longer a part of Texas, no longer a part of the United States of America! You are in the buffer zone! You are no longer American Citizens! By

3 consenting to remain, you have agreed to this! The town of town of Santa Olivia no longer exists! You are denizens of Outpost No. 12!’ No one knew what it meant, not exactly. There was something about sickness and something about the scourge to the south on the far side of the old wall. But there was too much dying to be bothered . . . Santa Olivia; Santa Olvidada, soon to be forgotten by most of the world” (2).

Like so many sci-fi novels, there are a lot of details that make this world specific and come alive. And in the tradition of dystopian novels, the reader has a strong and looming sense of “this doesn’t seem so fictitious.” It’s this closeness to reality that makes dystopian sci-fi so powerful and incendiary. And indeed, as we see Santa Olivia become a completely militarized town, as lack of citizenship becomes a perfectly sensible reason for rights to be revoked, and as a community of poor and mostly brown people sees already slim resources shrink even further, you have to focus on the other details of this story to make it clear that you aren’t looking out your window or reading the newspaper from Right Now.

Our lead character, Loup (pronounced Lou) Garron, is a teenage girl who is queer, of mixed race and also mixed genetic make up. Her father was an escapee GMO experiment sold to the U.S. military whose breeding made him inhumanly strong, fast, hungry and unable to experience fear. His daughter inherited those traits. This is a unique lead character for any book, especially a young adult novel and the character of Loup alone makes this book fantastic.

In Santa Olivia, things are slanted and skewed and a prime example of this is the Church, whose courtyard is where the sacred little girl statue of Santa Olivia resides. The Church is run by kind Father Ramon, pragmatic Sister Martha, and gentle Sister Anna. At first glance it appears to be a normal do-gooder church. However Father Ramon, Sister Martha, and Sister Anna don’t believe in God, they swear like sailors, and all three of them are in a highly functioning polyamorous relationship. When Loup is left parentless after her mother dies, she finds herself as one of ten or so orphans all living at the Church. A beautiful family forms, with the kids, or the Santitos (the little Saints) playing stickball, learning to fix things together, helping to run the makeshift hospital and soup kitchen, and interpreting the world in which they live so they can fight back.

In Outpost, the U.S. military runs the town, patrols the streets and has all access to people, booze, goods, and space. So, midway through the book when 15 year old Katja, one of the Santitos, is raped by a soldier, it’s no shock to the kids or to Father Ramon and the Sisters when nothing is done, except a declaration that no one can prove there was a rape and a suggestion by the Colonel that Katja “think twice before

4 putting herself in compromising positions” (109). Frustrated, exhausted, and hurt, the Santitos are determined to take action.

Their independent action in the face of systemic inaction is extremely familiar to the world we all know and live in, where victim blaming, the devaluing of teenagers (girls especially, and girls of color extra especially), and institutions of violence and patriarchy protecting and colluding with the perpetration of violence are normal and nearly expected. I also want to note that it is incredibly unique to find a young adult novel that not only talks about a teenager surviving sexual assault, but does so in a way that isn’t shaming, silencing, or the main plot point of the book. I can’t imagine how healing and important it might be for a teenager who has survived sexual assault to pick up this book and read about this rape in a story where people talk about it, believe the survivor, and where there is still sex positivity.

This (lack of) response by the military kicks off the rest of the story, the plot of which plot is driven by the Santitos responding to many acts of violence perpetrated by the military. While many of the Santitos’ actions may feel impossible or unrealistic, and while some of it falls into a category of retaliation that I don’t hold with in the real work, I think we have a lot to learn from the Santitos. Their tactic is to “bring to life” the town’s young girl patron saint, Santa Olivia, who (played by the extra fast and strong Loup Garron) plays meaningful pranks on the perpetrators of harm. They lure the soldier who raped Katja out of a bar and then truss him up and leave a clever note pinned to his chest; they dump snakes on the soldier’s friends who lied for him; and they stage a dramatic “faith based vision,” which includes destroying the windshield of an Army jeep whose driver intentionally killed an old man’s dog.

For the purposes of this story and this world, I think that Carey has these violent soldiers act as stand-ins for the U.S. military and other less specific institutions of systemic violence. For these characters that perpetrate harm are all white men (I’m pretty sure) and have the least amount of character development or description. And once we can all get on board with that—that these are violent acts perpetrated by the institution that is the Army—it changes what we are talking about. For, enacting physical resistance against a military force is, I believe, a starkly different practice than enacting violence towards a person.

And, yes, tying someone up, pouring snakes on them, and throwing a boulder through a car window are acts of violence. But, some would argue, these behaviors are not retaliation and merely vengeful, but are magical acts cleverly crafted by Outposts’ most energetic tricksters.

Trickster, as an archetype, shows up in many cultures, from Wesakechak in Cree

5 traditions and Anansi in West African and Caribbean traditions to Hershele Ostropoler in Jewish traditions. So much amazing work and thinking about tricksters has been done, a lot of which is done by first nations people: check out Trickster: Native American Tales: A Graphic Collection, edited by Matt Dembicki. At its root, the trickster archetype is deft at challenging power, offering experiences and narratives for ethical reflection, and inciting community awareness and resistance. The trickster exists in margins, cracks and liminal spaces to shift power, generate mirrors, and open people and communities up to the possibility of change with humor, play, and turning things topsy-turvy.

The Santitos are a beautiful band of tricksters in Santa Olivia who challenge the violence perpetrated by the U.S. military by seizing the Army’s unrelenting power and instead of using mirrored types of aggression and violence (even though they could with Loup’s super human strength and speed on their side) instead transform the idea and faith that the Outposters have in Santa Olivia into a mysterious stand-in for the community that is always surviving violence indirectly or directly from the military. These tricks are magic and smart because they take an already existing character that is made of plaster, paint, and rust, and breathe life into her. These tricks are clever because they have accessible wit and focused humor. These tricks are principled because they do the least amount of harm with the strongest and most clear messages —no one is unsure why a trick is being played—and because they are immediately made public to all of Santa Olivia.

Throughout the book, the Santitos who know about Loup’s GMO secret poke fun at her for being a hero and wanting to save people and Outpost all the time. One of the strongest elements of this book (for me) is the unrelenting way that Loup and her friends use their tricks and ethics to demonstrate that everyone should be a hero to liberate the entire Outpost. Loup is more than just humble; in a sense, she deflects the “hero complex” with such principled strength that it liquefies and splashes everywhere, soaking everyone who stands close enough to Loup and the Santitos.

We have a lot to learn in our movements and communities as we struggle to fight ego, challenge the Radical Rockstar Syndrome, and destabilize the belief that we must rely on a supremely strong and capable individual (or small body of individuals) to save us. However, I’m less interested in squashing or eliminating that drive for heroism and more interested in harnessing that high level of energy and desire within many people in our communities, and generating something like a redistribution of heroism. The Santitos’ way of collectivizing heroism is, I think, inspiring.

And just to be crystal clear: while I am absolutely not suggesting that folks form crews and slash bike tires or leave hate messages for people who caused harm as a

6 way of confronting sexual assault (really, I’m not), I believe that we can handle the nuances that the Santitos offer us by returning to the questions that I began with, and asking ourselves and our communities/collectives to consider them when we read Santa Olivia.

[1] For much, much more on this, check out the blog Crunchings and Munchings— Rebecca Peters-Golden and Tessa Barber do an inspiring and thorough job of defining and lifting up the nuances of YA fiction in many forms.

7 Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor Alexis Pauline Gumbs

This is post-apocalyptic Africa. A cosmic afro-future where the people have the technological capacity to remember their rituals. There is a white-skinned tribe dominating, enslaving, and enacting genocide on a brown-skinned tribe. Is this future familiar? Rape is still an everyday tactic of war and an experience of violence that haunts every day for survivors and co-survivors.

Onyesonwu, the title character, carries the name “Who Fears Death?” and has supernatural abilities as a shapeshifter and sorceress. She also carries the weight of rape in her body. She is a child of rape, destined to bring an end to a genocidal conflict between her father’s tribe, the Nuru, the white-skinned tribe of the rapist, on behalf of her mother’s tribe, the Okeke, the brown-skinned tribe under brutal attack. We hear the story of her life, her history, and her journey while she is locked in a prison cell for her role in resisting this genocide. One way to understand the question in her name and in the title of the book is that the fear of death becomes specific and limited in a context of group death (genocide), while the experience of sexual violence is described in the book as an experience worse than death. One fuller articulation of the question (of many) could be, having survived rape, how can we fear death? Or anything at all.

Sexual Assault: The Origin Story

The central struggle of the book is a struggle between Onyesonwu and her father, the man who raped her mother, who is also a sorcerer at the center of a genocidal plan to destroy Onyesonwu’s mother’s race forever. Onyesonwu is a sorcerer and a warrior and a teenage girl at the height of the action in the book. She is a daughter, stepdaughter, lover, friend and may become a mother herself.

The original violence that frames the book is a brutal attack by the Nuru on a group of Okeke women when they have retreated to the desert to pray to the goddess Ani. A group of 40 Nuru people arrive on scooters to attack the women when they are physically weak from fasting and praying in the desert. The rapists, men physically raping and women pointing laughing, and participating, sing a song in which they call the Okeke “ugly filthy slaves,” and celebrate “slay[ing them] to dust” (19). The strategy of rape is a key strategy in this war because it is known that the Okeke women will not have abortions even in the case of rape and will therefore be bound to the Nuru as slaves through their children. It is understood as a strategy to destroy Okeke families as part of a wider program of genocide. Onye’s mother, Najeeba, is

8 singled out and a Nuru sorcerer who is a leader of the genocide takes her away and rapes her repeatedly while singing and casting a spell/curse.

After resisting, Najeeba (Onye’s mother) spiritually leaves her body to survive the violence, and feels “her voice leaving her forever” (18). She decides to die, but she lives. She returns to her village, which has been massacred, but her husband has survived. He rejects her because she has been raped, so she leaves to wander in the desert. She decides to survive when she realizes that she is pregnant. She gives birth and, in the act of birth, suffers through memories of her brutal rape. She names her daughter “Who fears death?”

Her voice remains a whisper for the rest of the book.

The evil eye of the rapist father haunts Onye in nightmares that are not just nightmares but acts of psychic violence that the rapist father enacts on the daughter through his powers of sorcery. His messages are very similar to the internalized social messages that are often a result of trauma and abuse. He puts mantras like “I am awful. I am evil. I am filth. I should not be!” in her mind (55). When she uses her own powers to move through time and space to confront him, his will towards her is “STOP BREATHING” (70). The negative messages that her father assaults her with resonate with the normative behavior of the Okeke tribe, her mother’s people. The lightened color of Onye’s skin makes her an outcast, a reminder for the whole community of the reality of rape, of the depth of their oppression. In this future, like our present, rape silences us, it haunts us day and night, it urges the collective to look away. In this future, like our present, rape is personal and political; it is a tool of war and an interpersonal violence in the same moment.

Who Fears Death is a story about a secondary survivor, or intergenerational survival. The mother who survives, quiet and transformed, weaves magic into the body and spirit of her daughter, hoping for justice, casting the daughter as a warrior who has the power—whether she wants it or not—to substantively change the world in which rape and genocide are a dominant form of relation.

How does she do it? What can we learn about survivor skills and survivor support here?

Najeeba: the Mother-Survivor

What can the resources and strategies that Najeeba, the mother and survivor, uses to create space for herself and her daughter, teach us? What does her story ask us to consider in terms of survivor support and intergenerational relationships impacted by

9 violence?

*Uses Her Quieted Voice

During the attack, Najeeba feels her voice literally leave her chest forever. “She screamed so loudly that all the air left her lungs and she felt something give from deep in her throat. She’d later realize that this was her voice leaving her forever” (18).

Because of this loss she can only whisper to her daughter. When she names her, she whispers “who fears death?” and acknowledges that her daughter will be the first person able to say her name in full voice. The loss of her voice is a major problem, as people make assumptions about her and ignore or don’t listen closely enough to hear her declarations, protests, and explanations about her own experience. “These people didn’t want to know the truth,” she observes (28). Throughout the novel, the quieted voice of the mother, which remains a whisper even in moments of chastisement and anger, highlights the impact of the daughter’s voice, which is always louder. Raising her daughter until the age of six in the desert alone, she hugs and kisses her daughter to affirm her when she shouts. “This was how Onyesonwu learned to use her voice without having ever heard one” (29). However, Najeeba’s voice also becomes more portable and ever-present, like an internal whisper or a truth on the wind, during Onye’s journey across the desert.

The quieting of Najeeba’s voice reminds us of ways that the voices of survivors often get subsumed under the louder sounds of the fears of others, the knee-jerk denial of the prevalence of sexual violence.

Does the quieting of Najeeba’s voice represent the forced silencing of survivors in the mass media’s use of the passive voice to describe rape?

If we take it as a reality that the voices of even the most outspoken survivors are undervalued and drowned out in our society, how do we account for that in our processes as community? What amplification needs to happen? What other noises need to be quieted down?

How should co-survivors, family members of survivors, and allies to survivors be mindful of the relative loudness of their own voices?

What is the power of a quiet voice, of the necessity of looking and listening? What is the value of leaning in?

Another way that Najeeba uses her voice is by sharing the story of the rape with her

10 daughter when Onye is eleven years old. She struggles around sharing something so violent with someone so young, but she promised herself that she would share the information with her daughter as soon as it became relevant. At eleven years of age it becomes relevant because Onye begins to experience her supernatural powers and Najeeba believes that information about her own experience of violence will be helpful to Onye on her journey. Najeeba also takes care to clarify the fact that even though in their society children born from rape are doomed to be violent or that “violence can only beget more violence,” she knows the truth, that Onye’s destiny can be healing and positive (31).

How can survivors face the difficult task of sharing their experience of surviving sexual violence with those who they love, especially children?

Does violence beget more violence? Can survivors of violence catalyze violence into healing, love, transformation, vision, purpose, positive energy, or something else?

What does information about experiences of sexual violence offer to co- survivors who may not be conscious of the event?

What does it mean that Najeeba waits until Onye shows her superpowers to share the story? (And even then Onye doesn’t feel ready to hear it.) How do we know when someone is ready to know about an experience of violence or trauma in their family or community?

What is the power of intergenerational sharing of traumatic, difficult, and violent experiences, as well as resilience and survival stories?

*Draws On the Refuge of the Desert

After she is rejected by her husband and has witnessed the destruction of her village, Najeeba takes refuge in the desert. The desert is understood to be the ultimate wilderness but, “because she was already dead, she was not afraid.” From her earlier journeys and retreats to pray with the other women, she has learned how to survive in the desert and how to relate to the non-domesticated animals in the desert. She identifies with the Alusi, desert wind spirits that travel through the desert and comprise an important legend in her family.

What does the desert represent for survivors?

11 Are there spaces, understood to be worthless by others, that serve as places of strength for survivors?

If this journey and identification with the desert represent the ways the experiences of survivors are pushed to the margins, what is the magic of the margins and how could it/should it influence those discourses, issues, and experience that have traditionally dominated the center?

Najeeba’s and Onye’s skill at navigating the desert suggests that survivors and co- survivors may develop skills that are crucial for survival more generally. How can we value, affirm, and support the wisdom that survivors in our communities, and especially at the edges of our communities, carry?

*Her Creation of a Loving Chosen Family

Najeeba moves to the village Jwahrir when Onye is six because she knows that her daughter will need community. The norms of the village are violent and oppressive in many ways, but Najeeba chooses to make them part of the community anyway. She chooses to partner with someone who (1.) has been one of the few people to honor her daughter for her brilliance as a person and not to judge her because of her “Ewu” status (known status as a child of rape); and (2.) subverts the norms of patriarchy by approaching their home wearing all white. He is a respected man in the village but he chooses to wear all white, which is a gesture of humility usually only done by women in their community.

What does it mean to create family after sexual violence?

Are there particular practices in chosen family that can be healing for survivors and their children?

Does a vision for a world healed from sexual violence require non-patriarchal relationships to family?

How do we know when partnerships and family are sought for protection (in patriarchal terms) and when they are sought for empowerment and healing? Can it be both?

*Her Support of Her Child’s Differences and Aspirations

When Onye first shares with her mother that she is going to engage in the dangerous

12 process of sorcerer initiation after the death of her chosen father, Najeeba supports her daughter’s decision by preparing her foods and teas that will sustain her and by affirming that her father would have approved of her decision to tap into her own magic intentionally. The only time that Onye hears her mother’s voice above a whisper is the day that she comes home from her first and most strenuous training ritual with her mentor sorcerer. When Onye makes the decision to cross the desert to confront her biological father/the rapist, Najeeba supports her decision even though she knows she may never see her again.

What does it mean to parent as a survivor? How can we support our children to grow and move in their power even though our trauma and fear makes us want to protect them and keep them close?

How can we manage the different impact of the same violence on our children? How can we support their different processes for healing when they look different from our own or too much like our own?

*Her Own Super Powers

Later in the novel, we find out that Najeeba has her own supernatural powers. In addition to being a human woman, she is a Kponyungo, or “firespitter,” a creature that embodies heat: “it was the brilliant color of every shade of fire.” Often demonized as dragon-like monsters, these creatures are part of the mythology that Onye grows up with. Najeeba is one of the only people who speaks to Onye of these creatures as “kind majestic beings” (283). Though Najeeba does not directly share her firespitter identity with Onye, at an important moment in the journey she appears to Onye as a Kponyungo and Onye, as a shapeshifter, is able to become a firespitter as well. Onye and her mother also have the power to “alu,” or fly high above the earth and across great expanses of space in very short amounts of time. They fly to a land beyond the desert where there are forests, a level of green life that Onye thought humans had destroyed. This vision of a place on earth with diverse plant life is crucial to Onye’s faith that her life and their society can be different then they are now. Onye learns that it was her mother’s will that made her a girl and not a boy. Her biological father tried to use sorcery during this rape to create a son that would help him destroy the Okekes, but the mother used her own power to shape her daughter into a different type of warrior. Onye later learns that her mother is planning to enter training in order to grow and develop her own powers.

How is it that the journeys and achievements of the children of survivors can invite the superpowers of survivors to grow, to show up and to transform?

13 How does gender impact our relationships to power, healing, and the legacies of violence in our families and communities?

Sometimes the power, brilliance, and insight of survivors are demonized as a threat to the existing society. How can we tangibly offer, believe in, and act based on an alternate reality in order to help the fearful let go of the violent status quo?

What is our “fire”—our internal and external fierceness—and how can we share it across generations?

Onye: the Daughter Co-survivor

What can the resources and strategies that Onye turns to as the daughter of a rape survivor, an oppressed person, and a target of a spectrum of sexually violent acts teach us about survival, intergenerational accountability, and the future we deserve?

*Trying to Conform

Onye’s first survival attempt after she learns of her status as child of rape is an attempt at conformity. Without her parents’ permission and against their desire she participates in a voluntary female circumcision ritual for eleven-year-old girls. The ritual can only be performed with the consent of the girls, and it is performed by the elders of the community (more on the ritual below). Onye participates in the ritual in an effort to become recognized as a normal girl in the community: “I believed that I could be made normal” (33). While her experience of the ritual does give her a relationship with the three other girls her age who participated, it also scars her body (her clitoris is removed before she knows what it is) and leaves her and the other girls cursed to suffer brutal pain if they engage in sexual activity before marriage. She believes that she needs to go through this ritual to not be seen as dirty and to try to relieve some of the shame her mother experiences in the community. From Onye’s perspective, “I brought dishonor to my mother by existing” (33). Onye’s participation in the eleventh year rite is what allows her biological father to find and torture her psychologically across space. Her mother is angry that she does it; in the village where she is from it is considered barbaric. Her chosen father/stepfather is disappointed that she has tried to conform out of insecurity. For Onye, the acceptance of her parents is not enough; she craves respect and acceptance from the larger community and believes that she can only get it by sacrificing her difference.

What rituals do we engage in in our society (supposedly of our own volition) as

14 desperate attempts to get the respect, rights, or recognition that we believe come with normalcy? What specific impact does this have on those of us who are queer and who may feel pressure to unqueer ourselves in order to gain community affirmation?

When we harm ourselves, or allow others to harm us, in order to conform to gender norms and other norms, how can we still affirm our healing?

What do we make of the parallel between the danger that Onye experiences as a result of participating in the ritual and the tendency to criminalize survivors for the survival actions they take, or the mistakes or weighted decisions we make out of trauma?

What do we make of the actions we subject ourselves to in order to try to correct violence that someone else has enacted on us or on our loved ones?

What rituals of healing can we create for people who are seeking a connection to community in the face of violence that do not cause more violence or punish difference?

*Builds Community

The one positive outcome of the female circumcision ritual is that Onye gains the alliance and friendship of the other three girls in her age group. They keep each other’s secrets confidential and support each other in difficult times. These are the people that Onye’s mother calls on to support her when she is not well. These are the three young women that ultimately risk everything to journey with Onye to confront her father and to help her achieve her purpose of intervening in the genocide.

How can we honor community even when we gain relationships in dubious spaces?

How do we build community across oppressions? Onye’s friends share her experience of gender oppression, but they often say things that reveal their bias and belief in stereotypes about her as an Ewu person. Can we build community with people who have internalized oppressive beliefs and practices that harm us? How?

Who are our fellow travellers? Are they travelling with us because of a shared vision or because of circumstances? Why are we travelling with them?

15 *Connection to Animals, Nature, and Voice

Early on, Onye shares that she has learned how to move quickly and to scratch at the men who target her for sexual violence because of her outcast status. As early as age six she describes needing to use the skills she learned from the desert cats to fend off older men when she and her mother relocate to the village. Later, after her training as a sorcerer, she uses the wind in order to defend herself from a group of men attempting to rape her.

What is there in the natural world that provides us lessons for our survival and tools against an imposed norm of sexual violence?

What are ways we can learn to physically defend ourselves from violence?

Onye expresses her relationship with the desert and with animals through song. Although she is self-conscious of her voice because she feels that she inherited it from her biological father, her mother encourages her to sing. When she sings, she attracts birds from all over the desert that come from near and far to listen to her. Her songs are how she keeps the memories that she has of her time in the desert before entering the oppressive norms of society. Throughout the text, in order to build community and create safe space for loved ones, she sings “a song I’d made up when I was happy and free and five years old” (53).

How can we use creativity, arts, music, and dance for healing and community building?

How can art, creativity, music, dance, etc., provide us access to joy within ourselves and remembered and envisioned freedoms? What songs, dances, art forms would do that for you?

Does our creative work have a spiritual function beyond our own healing?

How can our access to our own creativity draw the resources, relationships, and possibilities that we need for our healing closer to us?

Onye also builds community beyond her own species through song and communication with animals. In the midst of her journey through the desert she and her friends befriend a group of camels. Onye insists that the human travellers introduce themselves to the camels with respect. She continues to communicate with the group of camels and they provide companionship for the human travelers during

16 the journey, but they also have their autonomy and leave when it suits their own journey. Onye refuses to use the camels as transportation even though it would make the journey faster.

What is the role of animals in community practices of healing?

Do we need to reach beyond our own species for healing?

How do we respect the autonomy of animals beyond our own desires for them?

*Leaves Her Body/Transforms Her Body

Onye’s superpower makes her an “Eshu.” Drawn from a god in the Yoruba cosmology, Eshu/Elegba, who is the messenger, the protector of travelers, a trickster and shapeshifter, being an “Eshu” means that she can leave her body and take on different forms. She can transform into the different animals and other creatures with which she comes into contact. Onye describes the experience thusly: “I could escape. When things felt too tight, too close, I could retreat to the sky” (58).

Many survivors and co-survivors respond to trauma by leaving their bodies or not being present in their bodies in particular or multiple ways.

Is leaving the body more than a coping mechanism?

Could it be understood as a transformative power?

Could it be recontextualized and practiced as a strategy for intentionally facing difficult situations?

These experiences give her contrast in relationship to her human form, and may have the result of making her more present to her humanity when she is in human form. Onye transforms into a vulture most often in the beginning, but as she develops her power she also tries on the different experience of size, power, and time of a mouse, a lizard, a fly.

Could the experience of leaving our bodies be related to empathy? Might we intentionally use the mechanism of leaving ourselves as a practice of clarifying our experiences and connecting to the experiences of others?

Onye sometimes meditates during difficult times. She cries every time she meditates. She experiences so much stress and holds so much tension on a daily basis that “when

17 I let it all go I literally cried with relief” (69). Can you relate to that?

As a survivor I intentionally practice becoming present to my own embodiment (through dance and other superpowers) as a daily practice.

How do you relate to your own body? Does the relationship change throughout the day or based on different practices?

How can we empathize with each other across experience using our bodies?

Later in the novel Onye discovers a way to heal her clitoris and to reverse the effect the initiation had of sexually disempowering the girls in her age group. A lot of sexual drama ensues in the teenage group after the healing and sometimes Onye feels responsible for the sexual decisions of her peers when she disagrees with their practices.

How do we make our healing tangible?

What are the connections between our emotional and psychic healing and our physical bodies?

How can we support each other in reclaiming our bodies?

How can we honor each other’s embodied autonomy without causing harm to our communities or individuals in our communities?

How can we resist the internalized criminalization of each other’s bodies and sexual practices?

*Builds Her Skills

Onye struggles against a gendered bias that says that girls cannot be trained in sorcery in order to finally convince a sexist sorcerer to train her in the five mystic points. He teaches her the term “bricoleur” which means “one who uses all that he has to do what he has to do” (143). Onye builds her skills and learns to be in a relationship with nature, the spirit world, and spirits and creation, accompanied by her own specific gifts of shapeshifting and singing, in order to be able to achieve her purpose.

What skills have you built? What is a time when you used what you do something you needed to do?

18 What are the particular gifts you bring to your community? How can you nurture those gifts? How can we nurture each other’s gifts and talents while sharing skills in a non-ableist way?

How can building our talents and skills in collaboration with our communities offer affirmation and healing?

What can give us the space to recognize and work on our own passions and talents?

One of Onye’s skills is the ability to move between the worlds of the living and the dead. She can perceive ancestors in her own chosen family and their spiritual presence in her life, and she can also go into the “wilderness,” aka the place where the dead and magical creatures live, to bring back knowledge or even to bring people or animals back to life.

What can we learn from Onye’s ability to move between the world of the living and the world of the dead?

What is the relationship between death and other consequences of violence?

How can we intentionally draw on our ancestors for healing in our families and communities?

How can we create practices in our families and communities that provide healing for the suffering of our ancestors?

Another one of Onye’s powers is her ability to cause other people to see visions of things that they have not witnessed. In a moment of anger, she causes the people gathered in the market in her village to see the murder and rape that people in other villages are experiencing because she is so frustrated about their denial of the situation. At another time, she shows her age-mate friends the experience of her mother being assaulted in order to invoke their empathy with their permission.

How can we bring understanding to people with different experiences when they are in denial about violence within our communities?

How can we be witnesses for each other even when we did not physically witness violence?

19 What are creative, healing, and transformative ways for us to share stories of violence, resistance, resilience, and community responses that will move other folks to action?

Onye studies the legends in a text called The Great Book, which is a standard socializing text and a mythology drawn on by both the Okeke and the Nuru. Onye herself does not believe in the book and remembers that it was created by people with their own motivations for telling history/myth in particular ways. However, she still reads the book over and over again and develops her own critique of the way that the book normalizes destructive norms about gender, race, and sexuality. She also believes that her actions can rewrite The Great Book, remove its curse, and provide liberation.

What are the standardizing texts that create norms in our society? How do those overriding texts influence our movement communities?

Are there other so-called alternative texts in our communities that also have a destructive normalizing impact?

Are there texts and bodies of work that create healing and bring us back to presence in our movements?

How can we use text and critiques of texts to build strategies for responding to violence and, ultimately, a shared world free from gendered and sexual violence?

*Builds Trust and Love On Her Own Terms

A major resource for Onye is her relationship with her partner, Mwita. Their relationship does not conform to patriarchal marriage and it is a source of mutual learning, support, reflection, and companionship. The complicated thing is that the sorcerer who first trained Mwita and then killed Mwita’s biological family is Onye’s biological father.

How do the connections we make in our communities weave and interweave?

What does it mean when those who have done us harm are intimately involved in many ways with other people close to us in community? Does this make healing justice more or less likely? When and why?

20 How can people who have been harmed by the same conditions or the same person ally with each other as survivors? What happens when different survivors have different needs in terms of accountability or forgiveness?

*Confronts Her Own Death

During Onye’s first and most strenuous training as a sorcerer, she sees her own death. The act of confronting her own death is designed to make her fearless, but it also projects a sense of doom on her life and causes her pain in anticipation of her death. She may or may not be able to rewrite the conditions of her life and death.

What does our relationship to our own mortality offer us for healing and for justice?

What does knowing that we are perishable and can be harmed offer us in our community processes?

What does the knowledge that we will not physically live forever provide us in our community processes?

*Seeks Confrontation With the Rapist/Father

Justice? Vengeance?

Ultimately Onye seeks a battle to death with her father, who is the rapist of her mother, and also a genocidal leader. What does this direct and psychic battle with the rapist, by the daughter, mean?

Is it for future generations to confront the violence of elders?

Are the co-survivors and intergenerational survivors the ones with the skills to transform and end the violent behavior of elders?

Who could possibly hold this person, with what looks like supreme power, accountable?

Given the two endings of the stories, is there death and sacrifice for fighting this fight, a fragmented, dualized self? A narrative break due to trauma?

21 Responding to Child Sexual Abuse and Incest: the Secondary Story?

When Onye participates in the female circumcision initiation rite for girls entering puberty, she meets a friend named Binta. In the circle of the women elders and her fellow eleven-year-old initiates dedicated to the female god Ani, the girl confesses that her father repeatedly rapes her. And that she wants to kill him. While the girls are surprised, the elders do not seem surprised. It turns out that the elder women have known this all along and have waited for this ritual as an opportunity to take action. According to the tradition, after her initiation rite, Binta, the survivor, is both a child and an adult and her “words will finally matter” according to one elder. However, their role as young women in the community is complicated. The elder leading the ritual explains, “You’ll become child and adult. You will be powerless and powerful. You will be ignored and heard” (37-38).

The day after the ritual, the father is required to meet with the elders of the community. Binta does not know what happened in that session but she says that “afterwards he looked . . . broken. I think they whipped him” (47). Binta’s mother also had to meet with the elders, and the parents and the children in the family were required to have counseling for three years with “the Ada,” the elder woman who also conducted the initiation/circumcision rite. Later, we learn that the Ada has also experienced sexual violence. As a young woman she was socially coerced to have sex with a partner who threatened her. She ultimately became pregnant as a result and was forced to give up her twin babies. Her response to the violence against her is to consent to the process of female circumcision with a special added component that makes it painful for girls to engage in sex before marriage, ostensibly to try and protect their virginity.

But, in fact, this community response, comprehensive, though belated, is not effective in ending the violence. The father continues to rape the daughter, which becomes even more painful because of the ritual. So, ultimately the community process imposes more pain on the daughter and does not stop the violent actions of the father. In addition, the community, now aware of the violence, blames the victim. Binta becomes known as “the girl so beautiful her own father cannot resist her,” an act of discursive violence that articulates the violence she is experiencing as if it is inevitable and blames her for her father’s actions.

Ultimately, Binta decides to leave the community, joining the journey of Onye across the desert, but not before she poisons her father. She puts poison in his tea and watches him drink it all on the day that she leaves the village. She grins when she confides what she has done to Onye. “He had it coming," she says (167). Binta is also the first person to be killed on their journey. She dies while standing up for Onye and

22 demanding respect in a crowd of Okeke people that has gathered to stone Onye and her partner because of their mixed heritage. Someone throws a brick at her head and kills her and for the rest of the journey her adolescent fellow travellers seek to honor her memory.

Why would elders who know that sexual abuse is happening within a family in their community wait to confront the perpetrator?

The Ada responsible for this ritual is also a survivor. What is the power of survivor-led processes for communities? What healing might elders need to engage in, in order to be resources for community healing?

What happens when elders impose violence or force in order to try to stop the traumas they experienced from happening to other people? What do we do when elders project their trauma onto their community work?

What rituals and forms of support are necessary for change? What rituals prioritize the status quo over safety, healing, and transformation for survivors and perpetrators?

Does leaving a perpetrator “broken” help them to transform or not?

What dangers do survivors face when they are forced to leave their communities, or even when they see it as the best choice to end the violence?

What does violence by a survivor mean when a community process has failed?

How do we create a space for survivors of child sexual abuse and incest beyond martyrdom?

23 Woman on the Edge of Time and The Fifth Sacred Thing: Two White, Feminist, Transformative Justice Utopias with Interesting Ideas and Also Problems Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

When I was a kid, I got into feminist utopic science fiction because I wanted to run the fuck away from a violent, unsafe house. And I did. I would go dreamily into books that depicted loving, safe, multiracial futures where rape and family violence were unknown. As an adult, twenty years later, I return to those texts that have shaped my searching for alternate forms of justice with an appreciative eye and critical eye.

Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy, and The Fifth Sacred Thing, by Starhawk, are two anarchist feminist utopic/dystopic novels written by white, Jewish, anarchist feminist writers, almost twenty years apart, that I read obsessively from my teens on. I like these books because they're realistic and imperfect models of dealing with sexual abuse and intimate violence without cops that are also hella concrete. They are also undoubtedly filtered through the white racial lenses of their authors. Both Piercy and Starhawk are white, Jewish ciswomen, one working-class, one middle-class, who write multiracial futures through the lens of their white feminism. This lens, and the ways they do and do not advance anti-racism, undoubtedly affects how they can imagine justice in the dream world to come.

Here’s my examination of how both of them grapple with how to create systems of justice and safety without cops or prisons—what’s amazing and what I have questions about.

Woman on the Edge of Time’s Practical, Queer, Anarchist Vision:

White, Jewish working-class anarchist feminist writer Marge Piercy wrote Woman on the Edge of Time in 1976. We enter the future through Consuelo, the main character, a Chicana living in poverty in 1970s New York who has been criminalized by the interlocking forces of the prison industrial complex, welfare, and the mental health system. Her daughter has been seized by the foster care system and her parental rights severed, she’s done time in prison for shoplifting to get above the poverty line, and she has struggled with sexual violence and the violence of the welfare system and the State. Imprisoned in a state mental hospital for much of the book, she is not, however "crazy"—she doesn't see alternate visions of reality or identify as cognitively different. (And, in general, Woman on the Edge of Time depicts most folks who are in the psych ward as not crazy, but oppressed, in keeping with a wave of psych survivor/mental patients liberation movement organizing of the late 70s, which was awesome in being clear about how many people were locked up due to being

24 oppressed trauma survivors, but left out the reality that some of our brains and spirits really are different—sometimes painfully so.)

Before and after her latest psychiatric incarceration, Conseulo begins to be able to make contact with Luciente, a person (female assigned, Latina/Native appearing, and arguably genderqueer) who lives in the year 2137, in a socially just future brought about by a protracted, armed, global revolutionary struggle. Connie begins to visit this future, and we learn about it through her eyes. As the doctors in the psych ward enlist Connie in an experimental psychosurgery program funded by the state Department of Health and the Department of Corrections to control the brains of the broke, mostly of color, queer patients of the hospital, she begins to also be able to travel to a dystopic possible future, introducing the idea of time as a continuum of possibility—that what we do today affects the possibilities of the future.

Some Things About the Potential Future Piercy Imagines (Because It’ll Help Us Have Context for the Justice System She Imagines):

 In 1976, movements for mass liberation are turning to armed struggle— something Luciente accepts. The war goes on—and it's armed. The vision is of a global, armed struggle against the enemy, yet nonviolent with each other— struggle is in the flesh, in practice.

 Piercy brings her current reality of armed movements for national liberation in Vietnam, Latin America, Africa, and North America together with a queer, polyamorous vision of family-making (she has written about her own nonmonagamous bisexuality), her move to live rurally (Mattapoisett is based on the Cape, where she moved and started intensively gardening and working the land in the 70s with her chosen family of lovers), and her non-liberal feminism and history of work in both black civil rights and attempting to be a part of feminist movements that were multiracial and working-class.

 Piercy's working-class feminism always brings a pragmatic realism to all of her writing. "There was a thirty-year war that culminated in a revolution that set up what we had. Or else there wasn't, and we don't exist," says Luciente, while also saying, "[Revolution] . . . is everyone who changed the way people bought food, raised children, went to school . . . who made new unions, withheld rent, refused to go to wars, wrote and educated and made speeches" (198).

 In Luciente's positive future, people live in small communities, not cities, that strive to be "ownfed"—able to feed themselves. Everyone has their own

25 personal space, but shares common space for eating, cooking, work, and celebration.  People are super queer, genderqueer and poly. There is no legal marriage.  Race and culture have been split. And no one gives birth.  Let me explain: the people have created a humanistic technology where no female-assigned people give birth—babies gestate in a "brooder" and are delivered to three co-mothers (who may be of any gender). And the link between race and culture has been severed. Each village has a different assigned culture (we hear that the village Cranberry is a "Harlem/Black flavor village”; Luciente's village of Mattapoisett are "Wamapnoag").  Bee, one of Luciente's lovers, explains, "A grandcil—grand council—decision was made 40 years before to breed a high proportion of dark-skinned people, and to mix the genes well through the population. At the same time, we decided to hold onto separate gender identities. But we broke the connection between genes and culture, broke it forever. We want there to be no chance of racism ever again. But we don't want the melting pot where everyone ends up with thin gruel. We want diversity, because strangeness breeds richness" (104).

 So, Piercy is arguing that cultural difference and people's belief that such differences are genetic is the birthplace of racism, the reason why racism exists —not capitalism, colonialism, Christian supremacy, etc.

 This is a hmmmmmn moment for me. One that I just thought of as “interesting” when I was 12 and first read about it. Currently, I don’t think that racism began because of people freaking out over difference, but over people creating mythologies around difference to justify them grabbing wealth and resources and power. Is this a place where Piercy’s feminism is a white one? The concept of “breeding more dark skinned people” in some ways reminds me of forced reproduction during slavery, even though the context is different.  About the choice to split childbearing from female-assigned biology, Luciente explains, "It was part of women's long revolution . . . Finally there was one thing we had to give up too, the only power we ever had, in exchange for no more power for anyone. The original production: the power to give birth. Cause as long as we were biologically enchained, we'd never be equal. And males would never be humanized to be loving and tender. That's why we all have three mothers. To break the nuclear bonding" (105). (It's unclear how birth control between people with ovaries and people with sperm happens.)  Genderwise, there's a diversity of genders—one male-assigned character wears a dress, there's a mixture of forms of beauty, but less hard cissexist gendered

26 differences. People use "per/person" as a gender-neutral pronoun. (And it's amazing to think of the struggle to argue for gender neutral pronouns in feminist/lesbian science fiction in the 70s-early 90s, where in contemporary North American queer and trans populations the pronouns they, ze, or asking someone which pronoun they use has caught on.)

Piercy's vision is arguable an anarchist one. Power is shared. People make decisions through a spokescouncil/consensus decision-making process. Government officials are very regional, and aren't elected but chosen by lot—except for the Earth Advocate or Animal Advocate, who are chosen by dream. The chosen-by-lot regional council meets for a year, then leaves, so power does not concentrate. There is overarching coordination but no centralized control. People change their names as they want to. There is no central computer, FBI or government apparatus tracking everyone.

OK, Now That You Have Some Background, Here’s the Transformative Justice Part:

The judicial system is similarly decentralized? decolonized? anarchist? feminist? Piercy wrote Woman on the Edge of Time in 1976, but the justice system she imagined pre-dates much experimenting and thinking into restorative or transformative justice today, almost 40 years later. We first glimpse it during a "worming"—less a trial than a community mediation, called by Luciente and Bolivar (Luciente's lover; Jackrabbit's other lover), because of the jealousy between them that's creating tension and drama within the community. How I wish we had a structure like that to deal with some of the polyamory stress in my and other's lives!

Parra, the “referee” for this worming, explains the structure:

"‘I'm people's judge for Mouth of Mattapoisett this year, and tonight I'm refereeing.’ [Ed: Note that Parra says they are the judge "that year"—power is passed on so it doesn't rigidify and stagnate.]

‘Luciente and Bolivar have not been communing. Meshing badly. Sparks and bumps. Tonight we try to comprehend that hostility and see if we can diffuse it.’

‘Aren't people allowed to dislike each other?’

‘Not good when they're in the same core. Jackrabbit is close to both. Such bumping strains per. They compete for Jackrabbit's attent. They are picky towards each other's ways. We have critted them for it before, but matters lift only briefly. When they crit each other it does not hold up under scrutiny as honest—but self serving,’ Parra

27 smiled wryly.”

This system hangs on the idea that the community is precious. It also feels like Piercy is saying that many "crimes" might be prevented by having a working system to deal with intercommunity tensions.

Parra is not a judge but refers to themself as a "referee": "Here to make sure the group crits each justly. I can point out injustice. Watch for other tensions that may surface, clouding the issues, weighting the reaction. Someone not from this village must play referee."

Connie "frowns at this short, plump [Ed note: and Chicana] woman who called herself a judge . . . younger than her and no more imposing, surely" (208).

Parra, however, is also more: they "act in case of injury." She explains to Connie that if Connie stole something, that most people don't have much private property —"Likely, I'd give you what you asked. But if you did take something, everyone would give you presents. We'd think you were speaking to us of feelings of neglect and feelings of poverty. We'd try and make you feel good—wanted."

If Connie hurt someone, "like rape and murder and beating someone up," Parra explains that everyone is trained in self-defense and to respect each other (208). She has never heard of a case of rape. She compares it to cannibalism in how it seems extremely horrifying to her.

Connie is disbelieving, "Nobody ever takes a knife to anybody? No lover's quarrels? No jealousy? Don't hand me that." Her voice is "brassy with skepticism" (208)— especially coming from a slightly earlier passage where she tries to imagine what it's like to live in a culture where sexual violence and gender violence simply do not exist, and has a very difficult time doing so—one that is full of grief for the sexual assaults she has survived.

Parra explains, "Assault, murder, we still have. Not as common as they say it was in your time. But it happens. People get angry and strike out."

The process when that happens? First, "we ask if person acted intentionally or not—if person wants to take responsibility for the act." If they say they didn't know what they were doing, "We work on healing. We try to help so that never again will person do a thing person doesn't mean to do." Again, violence is seen as a mental/spiritual imbalance.

28 When Connie asks, "Suppose I say I'm not sick. I punched him in the face because he had it coming, and I'm glad." Parra replies, "Then you work out a sentence. Maybe exile, remote labor. Sheepherding. Life on shipboard. Space service. Sometimes crossers [i.e., people who have crossed the line of mutual respect into harm], cook good ideas about how to atone. You could put in for an experiment or something dangerous" (209).

Parra continues to explain, "The crosser, their victim and the judge work it out. If the crosser has killed, a "mem" [part of the person who was killed's close chosen family] negotiates. If the person says they didn't do it, by lot, someone is picked to investigate. When the investigator thinks the crosser has been found, we have a trial. Our laws are simple [Ed: what are they? how created?] and we don't need lawyers. The jury [Ed: how picked? by lot?] decides. A sentence is negotiated by all parties.”

Parra explains, however, "The second time someone uses violence, we give up. We don't want to watch each other or to imprison each other. We aren't willing to live with people who choose to use violence. We execute them."

This has always fascinated me. It is so real and pragmatic. It does not pretend that with a just society where everyone has enough, where Black, Brown and Indigenous people are not locked up in prisons to make money, where there is no gender injustice, where queerness is completely accepted, that no violence will occur. It also holds an understanding of a society's limited capacity, while also committing to values that no one will be police; there will be no prisons.

Currently in transformative justice work, one of the most common places we struggle is over capacity. We struggle with working with people who have perpetrated violence or harm in transforming because it can be fucking hard, exhausting work. We all have jobs and kids and illnesses. We believe in transformation, but we also know that the road is not straight. Shit happens. People get tired.

This choice also leads the mind to think, is this “two strikes and you’re out” death penalty a deterrent to violence and harm? Knowing that if one kills twice, one will die? This is something that proponents of the death penalty have argued for a while. How is it different in a small, radically democratic society with no frozen systems of power in place?

There are also many questions I am fascinated by, but which Piercy doesn’t talk about. Who kills that two-time murderer? How are they killed? Where are they buried? How are they collectively remembered? What happens to the people who were close to and loved them?

29 I can believe that rape and child sexual abuse are almost gone in the almost five generations that Woman on the Edge of Time’s Mattapoisett exists in, but I want to know more about how they got there, and I want to know more about what concretely happens. I have a hard time believing that sexual assault and intimate violence are so rare that Parra has almost never heard of them—and I want to know what she would do to judge a case where they had. However, in looking at the worming, even if Piercy didn't necessarily mean it as such, I wonder: could this prevent intimate violence from occurring, this working out of the poly jealousy between Luciente and Bolivar? How does just knowing there is a community-based structure in place to work out said tensions help prevent them from building to a fever pitch in the first place?

Finally, later on in the book, we see and interact with someone who has committed a crime of violence—Waclaw, a visitor with a small tattoo on his palm, which marks those who have created a crime of violence. Connie asks Luciente, "He's a criminal, isn't he. I saw a tattoo," and Luciente responds instantly, "Not anymore. He atoned." When Connie presses her for more information, Luciente says, "Don't know what person did to atone. Ask, if you must, but we usually don't. We feel it's closed— healed. Forget!" (273).

There is a mark, but they consider it closed. Memory, and yet not. What would the knowledge created and held by that healed person who perpetrated violence add to the collective knowledge of a people?

The Fifth Sacred Thing: Berkeley, With No Fossil Fuels, But A Lot of Nonviolence, and Some Exile:

The Fifth Sacred Thing's imagined future inhabits a time and place much closer in time and space to our present one. It’s the year 2050—two generations ahead, not five. It also depends much more on chaos. Published in 1993, the mass global movements for armed national liberation of Piercy's 1970s are in transition, have been defeated or do not exist in the same way. However, anarchist, feminist, radical environmentalism, radical queers and the "multicultural heaven" of the San Francisco Bay Area do, as well as new movements like the Zapatistas (who aren't anywhere in the goddamn book . . . but maybe it was 1994 when they declared war against Mexico and I stormed into a bank somewhere near Bryant Park and stuffed the ATMs with stock market sheets smeared with red paint to look like blood to protest Wells Fargo’s support of the Mexican government. Oh, 19-year-old me). It's also a future shaped by Starhawk's identification and strong involvement with nonviolence as a political orientation. There is little armed resistance by the forces of social justice in this book; what there is is frowned upon.

30 There is much more pre-millennial tension in her book. Much more of a sense that the earth is fucked up; fundamentalist Christianity has risen and, combined with globalized multinational corporations, is a huge threat. AIDS has made the threat of superplagues real. The revolution that gives birth to the liberated Bay Area of The Fifth Sacred Thing does not come from a unified global armed resistance of Global South and First World nations; in fact, it's nonviolent, and believes that the enemy can be transformed from within, should they choose it. This is one vision of transformative justice—that people make choices, and those who choose to be violent can choose to transform if they are supported in this believe.

Instead, when the shit goes down—when drought, plagues, and a giant earthquake devastate California in 2028 and The Stewards, a far right wing political/fundamentalist Christian force, cancel the elections and declare martial law, backed up by military force and attempts to commandeer food stockpiles—"Las Cuatro Viejas," four old women who live in Bernal Heights (and who seem to be white, Latina, Chinese and Black) march out into the middle of Cesar Chavez Avenue in the Mission and start smashing up the pavement, planting seeds. The people unite around them, barricade the highways, and live through a hard winter. The Stewards choose not to attack, but try to starve them out. And then, for whatever reason, the Stewards leave these nice Bay Area people, in their isolated liberated zone, alone for twenty years (except for the occasional human-created plague) and they have a chance to build a liberated zone. Fossil fuel is almost gone, it's hard to grow enough food, water has become an incredibly precious resource that many do not have, and things like flying airplanes have vanished—so the Stewards concentrate their efforts on LA and the South. It's unknown in the book what the hell is happening in the rest of North America, as all communication has been jammed by the Stewards.

We learn about the North's systems for dealing with rape, incest, violence and harm when Madrone, one of the main characters, a younger queer Black, Latina and Indigenous ciswoman healer born and raised in the City (the Bay Area) of the liberated North, goes to the South on a mission to support the resistance there and meets up with (and is sheltered by) a crew of upper-class white women who have a sort of upper-middle-class whitelady feminist lunch resistance club (sarcasm intended). Like many white, class-privileged, liberal feminists, they're trying, they hate the system, and their own racism and classism really hold them back from making alliances.

When they ask her how the North deals with rape and child molestation (in contrast to Woman on the Edge of Time, murder and stealing aren’t mentioned at all), Madrone has a clear/much more fleshed-out answer (one that, unlike in Mattapoisett, does not

31 begin with the assumption that such things simply don't exist anymore):

"We don't have the kind of social isolation that breeds [childhood sexual abuse]. We have a lot of different kinds of families. Some of us grow up in big collectives, like I did. Some are in extended families, with aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents; some in small nuclear families. But we make sure that no family is isolated. The Neighborhood Councils form support groups of people from different kinds of households and backgrounds—to give different perspectives. So every kid has half a dozen aunties and uncles from the time they're tiny. They're encouraged to talk about things, to ask for help, to protect themselves. And we train all our children, early on, in self defense, both boys and girls. Oh, I've read a lot about incest and child abuse, but we don't have the climate of secrecy and shame that lets it go on for any length of time. I'm not saying it never happens, but nothing supports it [emphasis mine]. The same with rape. Our men aren't raised to believe they have the right to rape. In fact, we consider it the most shameful, degraded thing a man could do" (276- 277). [Ed note: men are seen as the only people who are rapists, it's not a multigendered universe).

When a woman asks what happens if rape does happen, Madrone replies that “Everyone in his family would talk to the person who raped and tell them how shocked and horrible they feel—along with his compas, his friends and lovers, his work guild, his Neighborhood Council—maybe even the whole City Council.” There is an immediate social consequence: people openly and clearly lose respect for the rapist. "He wouldn't be welcome in anybody's house, or work group, or to eat with anybody."

There is a lot that is and has been immediately appealing to me and many other survivors of rape in this set up. Instead of the current status quo-—where no one talks about rape openly, no one confronts the rapist, and there are no immediate social consequences—something happens, all right.

Rape is not punished by an organized judiciary system, per se, and is seen as a mental health/spiritual health issue: "The mind healers might take him in if he wanted to get better, but it would take him years to regain people's trust" (277). Again, there is a sense that choosing to rape has broken people's trust, and that this is a consequence. In a community where the community is sacred and interdependent and where everyone knows your business, this is a big deal. Madrone continues, "Maybe he'd have to go off to live with the Wild Boar People, the ones who can't fit into society."

The Wild Boar People are interesting. Referred to in passing, they rarely speak for themselves, but seem to be a last bastion of those who, as Madrone says, can't fit into

32 the liberated society’s rules. This seems to include folks who have been violent. They are exiled.

Madrone also explains that they have no police: "We find it's better not to assign that role to any one group of people. For one thing, they generally aren't around when you need them, and for another, they tend to abuse their power." Instead, everyone gets advanced self-defense and conflict de-escalation training. Madrone describes an incident where someone was being "banished to go live with the Wild Boar People," where ten people managed to restrain a man who was fighting and yelling, put him on a fire truck, where, she guesses, someone takes him to the Sonoma Hills, where the Wild Boar People live by hunting feral pigs."

So we have several values and systems operating here:

 Prevention through the conscious creation of a social structure that actively teaches pleasure and consent, and where rape is not part of the social package of being a cisgendered male.  A social structure where people are not socially isolated, where a social value is encouraging everyone to talk about things that often would be considered secret (i.e., rape and abuse).  A society that values autonomous response, where people are raised to feel empowered to respond right away to violence or harm, and have both self defense and de-escalation strategies to do it. Madrone says, without hesitation, when a woman asks her, since the City is nonviolent, if one maniac with a laser rifle could take over the city, "No. Somebody would stop them. People would stop them together, even if some of them got killed doing it."  A culture where there is an organized, if not legislated, response when rape happens; it is of immediate social consequence.  And, finally: exile. For, either a rapist is socially exiled—no one from their work guild or household with sit with them—or isolated in a more extreme fashion, by being sent to live with the Wild Boar People.  And one wonders: how do those exiled people make a living, eat, vote, or take place in the social organization of the City while these things happen? At what point does the perpetrator of harm earn the trust back? What do they have to do to earn that trust? Does the news go out on the Net then, that they have earned it back? How do the Wild Boar People govern themselves? What are their communities like? Nowhere do we get to hear them speak for themselves.

All of these elements raise questions:

33  What happens when someone—as surely someone would—contests that what they did isn't really rape or abuse? That they have been falsely accused?  What do race, class, ability and gender have to do with crime and harm in the City? Are there for real no factors affecting who is believed, who is criminalized? (There’s this reference to “a dreadlocked figure in the Wild Boar People”’s corner of the city Council. Could be a white dread, could be a Black person. The fact that this isn’t broken down feels suspect to me.  The Fifth Sacred Thing offers a multiracial, POC majority future where everyone speaks English, Spanish, and Sign—but where the main characters' people-of-color elders have all died, and where the multiracial grandchildren refer to race as an "outdated concept," but where Starhawk presents fairly stereotypical points of view of POC cultures. An early scene depicting a Council meeting is particularly argh-worthy, as she depicts Native communities wearing basketry hats and undifferentiated Asian communities wearing silks or Mao style jackets. I mean, this might happen—some POC might choose these styles post a decolonial revolutionary process, but what about blue jeans or fitteds? What about hip-hop culture (it's 1993, three years before Tupac is murdered), or any other kind of youth of color culture?  Although the clarity of Madrone's response—that there are direct and immediate social consequences for rape—was very comforting to me as a 19 year old whose sexual assaults had not had any social consequences for the people who had perpetrated harm to me, as a 37 year old who has witnessed many incidences of sexual assault, unconsensual sex and intimate violence/shitty relationships within my communities, I have big questions.

 Such as: yes, there should be consequences for someone who rapes. But, if they are to transform, and their community has completely written them off, where is the firm support that will support them to transform? (See Hollow Water’s Community Holistic Circle Healers model.)

 Do the Wild Boar People just sit in the hills raising pigs and being stinky ’til they’re dead?

34 why the dispossessed is required reading adrienne maree brown ursula le guin is a subtle and gifted storyteller—so far i have read nearly twenty of her books and stories, and i would recommend every single one of them, for different reasons. the dispossessed, her 1974 novel about utopia, is required reading. le guin explores freedom, humanity, justice and imagination through the lens of a brilliant scientist named shevek living on an anarchist moon. when i first read the dispossessed, it felt like a 341-page first kiss from a new beloved. le guin uses imagination to take us into a fully functional anarchist society, letting us see it from multiple angles: education, justice, housing, food, relationships, work, health, government, individual creativity, and discovery. it’s visionary; it assumes that some group of humans succeeds in manifesting our visions of shared power, peace, and equality. in this novel, we can understand what works, where the challenges are, and how it compares to a capitalist utopia. it's a huge education on what anarchism actually means—a world without the state, without hierarchy, without the centering of the self, without the capitalist practice of self-promotion and human competition. it doesn't feel like the education it is, until you finish it and realize you have been deeply challenged to rethink how you are living. and, even as le guin shows us a capitalist utopia (the planet around which the anarchist moon orbits), it is from the perspective of an anarchist society, and it is done with a gentle touch—of course luxury and personal accolades feel good; this doesn't mean it's the healthiest way for humans to be. we need to imagine viable alternatives to capitalism, to luxury. part of the reason i read science fiction passionately, geekily, and studiously is because I want to learn how humans generate imagination and vision. i have been part of movements trying to improve the world my entire conscious life, and i have noticed that we have a massive deficit of imagination in that work. we are skilled at critiquing, analyzing, deconstructing, memorizing, reiterating, complaining about and hating on the system (capitalism), the people who hold power in the system, those complicit in it, and, of course, ourselves. and these are important skills, in their place: they help us to share a whole complex picture, lay the foundation for strategy, vent . . . sometimes articulating the problems helps us to survive to work another day. but i have this longing for audacious visions and dreams that move us forward, that titillate and incite and guide us through and around and above the

35 current systems. particularly when it comes to the aspects of our life that can challenge us on a personal level, such as interpersonal justice. le guin gives us a powerful reimagining of justice through a simple tale of shevek being pulled into a fight—a petty thing. the fight goes on until it's done, and no one intervenes. the relationship to violence in this imagined future is neither fear nor obsession, so no one stops to watch, and no one stops the fight. the assumption is that people are powerful, not victims, and only need help if they ask for it. since shevek doesn't call out for help, the conflict is left to be completed by the two fighters. this feels somewhat more realistic to me than a vision of total peace, or at least a step along the journey towards peace. humans get frustrated and angry with each other. this vision of a society in which violence is not interesting is fascinating. a vision of a world where everyone is seen in their power and full emotional breadth creates a yearning in me—i want that world to be true. i find i am not inspired by reformist visions of how we can make capitalism a little nicer, or less lethal, or greener. i want revolutionary visions about how we are going to realize the promise of our miraculous reasoning evolving existence. i want you to read this book with your whole heart and your curiosity, so i won't reveal more than this now. but read the novel as a love note, as an inspiration, as a specific set of guidelines for how to be differently.

“the only way to deal with an unfree existence is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion” —albert camus. this book is an exploration of that deeper self-liberation. don't wait to unlock the gates, cages, doors, and windows and experience the uniquely human freedom that we each have the potential to practice and embody. ok? read it! butler and emergent strategy

“all that you touch, you change. all that you change, changes you. the only lasting truth is change. god is change.” octavia butler was a black science fiction writer, a hermit recluse, a tall, broad- shouldered woman with a voice like a ceremonial drum poured through scotch, and a

36 genius. for the past couple of years the allied media community has been building a shared analysis of butler's science fiction writing. we knew, through casual, late-night conversations, that her work was impacting us very seriously on a personal level—but we wanted to explore how we could apply her wisdom on the level of political organizing. at the same time, some of us were geeking out learning about emergence and other science theories that seemed to really capture the approaches we were using in our political work. emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. rather than laying out big strategic plans for our work, many of us have been coming together in community, in authentic relationships, and seeing what emerges from our conversations, visions, and needs. we knew that we were seeing deeper commitment and radical transformation in this community work, but how could we articulate it as being strategic? we were reminded that “strategy” is a word of military origin, and refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. the fact that many of us were using a military definition in order to achieve an evolution in humanity was both ridiculous and illuminating. that alone was a driver for some redefinition. it was also a little funny that we have been saying strategic like it’s a subjective thing, a sign of good. it simply means something that is planned towards a goal. it can be an inflexible, outdated, hierarchical, colonial, imperial, urgent, haphazard plan towards a goal and still be strategic, technically . . . we needed to be able to get more specific in what we meant, what we wanted, and how we could measure our progress. we also had experiential reasons for thinking a change was needed—many of us had been in meetings where we developed goals and laid out a plan of action, only to find, by the next meeting, that the conditions had changed and, thus, what we thought was strategic wasn't going to work anymore. sometimes we didn't realize we weren't being strategic until after we'd invested tons of precious human and material resources. could we redefine strategy, or claim it as something deeper than a plan of action toward a goal—something that acknowledged the constantly changing conditions of our complex society?

37 and, with new definitions and shared understandings, could we begin to develop strategic minds, rather than strategic plans? as we were learning together, and trying to bridge towards those folks still doing traditional strategic planning and campaign-based organizing, we saw that we needed a language and a process to speak about doing work that is strategic because it accepts the emergent power of changing conditions. fortunately, butler's work is basically one case study after another about leaders who are using emergent strategy in post-apocalyptic conditions that are completely relevant to our work right now. the most successful strategies in her books are those where the characters themselves shift conditions (or are caught in shifting conditions) that allow new possibilities for saving and growing healthy, liberated communities. instead of being stuck in outdated plans, butler's characters are constantly emerging new strategies that are only possible because of relationship, being present, being able to communicate about what is happening and changing, being able to acknowledge when things aren't working. here are some examples of emergent strategy in butler's work. her writing is hard to spoil, but if you haven't read any of it, there may be some spoilers in these next few paragraphs. in the parables (parable of the sower and parable of the talents), we follow a young, black woman, lauren, who creates a new survival and spiritual path for humanity in the midst of a radical right-wing apocalypse. lauren forms an intentional community that embodies her philosophies around embracing change and redefining the purpose of humanity. when it is attacked by the radical right wing, lauren has to devise a new strategy. she is holding a spiritual and philosophical vision, not just a political one, and ends up going door-to-door to share her philosophies with one person at a time. this story is particularly relevant to consider in a movement culture that is often engaged in institution building. do we understand the philosophy we are trying to advance, and are we flexible enough to embody and prioritize that philosophy, regardless of structure? in these books, emergent strategies include relationship- building, seeing each and every person as a potential revolutionary or ally, and focusing on spreading ideas and redefining human purpose, as opposed to institution- building.

Butler's xenogenesis series, (published collectively as lilith's brood) is the ultimate emergence collection, including three novels. the lead character, lilith, wakes up all

38 alone in an alien world, and becomes a leader in the process of evolving humanity by integrating with another species. as she goes through the process of figuring out her survival, it becomes more and more clear that the alien oankali have power and they are the ones integrating her, and other humans, into their existence. lilith has an immense capacity for grief, loss and being alone, having lost her family on earth before the apocalypse happened. the emergent strategies in this collection are lilith's learning and adaptation based on what she's already survived—having survived makes her the strongest possible next leader. this echoes one of the principles of the allied media community: “the most effective strategies for us are the ones that work in situations of scarce resources and intersecting systems of oppression because those solutions tend to be the most holistic and sustainable.” perhaps most relevant to us in movements to transcend capitalism is the strategy that brings the downfall of the evil, seemingly-immortal body snatcher, doro, in the four- book patternmaster series. doro's daughter, mary, is able to conquer him by working with a full interconnected network of his children, telepaths who have developed the capacity to flow all of their smaller, individual energies together to bring down one massive, oppressive, and deadly opponent. doro underestimates them because he cannot even understand what they are doing. the emergent strategy here is collective organizing with trust—doro lost because he couldn’t be a part of the collective or the whole. the other strategy was clear understanding of the necessary roles— understanding the nodes, who could connect the network, and those who had enough energy to be drawn upon. in the next two books of the series, this liberated network of telepaths evolves into the oppressive patternmasters—oppressing non-telepathic humans, whom they call “mutes,” and battling a new human-hybrid species created by an alien disease. the new species becomes a revolutionary force in the wild, an organic force that primarily exists in their bodies, not their minds. as the conditions change, what is most radical changes—we have to be vigilant not to ignore how fear, dominance, and superiority make even our best work and intentions toxic. so, thinking through these examples, and many others from butler's work, we can define emergent strategy as intentional, strong, because it is decentralized, adaptive, interdependent, and creating more possibilities. bringing emergent strategy to our organizing means we become creators of our future together. we are not limited to how things have been done in the past, in terms of how we share leadership, how we manage interpersonal justice, how we make decisions, how we

39 grow our work. even our smallest acts of integrity grow our collective capacity to live our visions into reality. the juxtaposition of butler's work and this learning has created an exciting space in which we can reimagine organizational development, strategic planning, and movement building.

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