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
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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
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!’
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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 putting herself
in compromising positions” (109). Frustrated, exhausted, and hurt, the Santitos are
determined to take action.
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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
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
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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 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—
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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.
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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 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.
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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
violence?
*Uses Her Quieted Voice
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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
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
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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 cosurvivors 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?
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?
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Najeeba’s and Onye’s skill at navigating the desert suggests that survivors and cosurvivors 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
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.
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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?
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?
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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
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?
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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?
*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?
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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 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
15
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 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
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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?
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?
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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?
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
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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?
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?
19
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?
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
20
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 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?
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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 oppressed trauma survivors, but left out
the reality that some of our brains and spirits really are different—sometimes painfully
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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 personal
space, but shares common space for eating, cooking, work, and celebration.

People are super queer, genderqueer and poly. There is no legal marriage.
23

Race and culture have been split. And no one gives birth.

Let me explain: the people have created a humanistic technology where no femaleassigned 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
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
24
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 smiled
wryly.”
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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.
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
26
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?
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
27
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.
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
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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 uppermiddle-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 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
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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 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:
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
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:

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-of31
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?
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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 selfpromotion 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 current systems.
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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 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
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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?
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
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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-todoor 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 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
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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 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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