hi beloveds,
these are very very very young thoughts on this topic. but i thought that in the spirit of vulnerability i would share, even if they aren’t perfect.
(a tree at Art Omi)
Two weeks ago I was at a beautiful writers retreat called Art Omi, in Hudson, with a bunch of One World authors. It was such a beautiful and creatively enriching space; we all had collective dinners together where we talked about our work, we attended and facilitated workshops and community conversations about craft, artistry and responsibility, we were surrounded by birdsong and nature in a way that felt really beautiful.
While there, I found myself speaking a lot about the idea of restorative justice. I’m still a baby at this work, but I’ve been adjacent to restorative justice communities for the last 15+ years: in college I studied how public art served as a memorialization of ethnic-based conflict, and how it could be a site of public mourning and restorative justice. My research also pulled me into looking at things like the truth & reconciliation committees in Rwanda, and the way that the Holocaust was/ is memorialized in Germany, and also I spent a year in Bosnia studying art and public healing after the genocides there.
When I moved to Chicago after my year in Bosnia, I was in poetry and activist circles that practiced restorative justice. As people who believe in a world without cops, and also as people who often are left outside of the justice system, many of us were active in learning how to do repair work in order to keep our communities safe.
In the last few years, I’ve found myself a bit at a cross-roads. I believe whole heartedly in the principals of restorative justice, I’ve also been burned by some of the practices of it. One of the hardest experiences I had was trying to enter a restorative justice process with someone who wasn’t ready, and the damage that trying to convince someone that they had hurt me did to my psyche and well being.
I think that restorative justice is as flawed as the people who practice it; which means that it has to develop alongside with us, in iterative moments. It requires everyone taking part—the people who are leading, the pod, etc., to constantly self-interrogate and to not inadvertently perpetuate more harm or judgement with such delicate subjects. It requires us to be present and go at the pace of now, not to assume fixed answers or adopt one-size-fits-all solutions to things that are so case by case specific.
I believe in the vision, but I’ve also been marred by the practice. And what I’ve also seen, is that for me, my own path to healing has actually been outside of those spaces, but with work that I’ve done in Indigenous community and ceremony and my own prayer work that allows me a space to access spirit and ancestors. Healing, and forgiveness work came from actually focusing on myself and having the space to fully transform in front of fire—to rid within me the shadow of the pain, the way that it was showing up through me in ways I wasn’t even aware, and how to rid it from my body and make amends to the people in my life I had inadvertently hurt by my behavior.
We’re all ever growing & evolving. Which means we must take stock of ourselves, our flaws, our spillages, and work to mop them up.
Something that I found myself talking about a lot at the retreat was how I was mourning, in many ways, my over fifteen year relationship to restorative justice work. I was seeing some of the pitfalls, and also seeing that maybe in my own experience, the work that I had intellectually believed in had actually done me incredible harm, and actually, the ways that I had found healing from that harm was through a different process entirely.
I think that these works can be married—that one can walk a restorative justice path after one has already done a lot to look in the mirror and self-reflect, assess, and work to get rid of the patterns that led them to cultivate harm in the first place. And then the principles of restorative justice—accountability with and in front of community—can be honored. But I think that so often, I see restorative justice process that happen simultaneously too early: before the person has been able to fully understand their harm, and also too late—when an individual’s behavior has resulted in a pattern of harm so great that its hurt multiple people in a community. The paradox is this: without the village structures that so many of us crave, these justice models can sometimes get hijacked by other forces, such as reputation/ social media or ego, or fall flat.
At Art Omi, one day I just wrote down “my justice isn’t in the limitation of another, it’s in the abundance of myself.”
I look at what’s happening right now in Palestine, in Sudan, in Haiti, in the Congo, in Kashmir, in Tigray—and I wonder, what would restorative justice look like in these situations? How can such a nebulous, watery term like ‘justice’ be achieved, given the horrors of what we’re seeing?
I think so much about the misalignment that colonization did to land and people. In a world where some of these original sins, these original pain points, were never addressed or corrected, can we ever truly have justice?
This week, I’ve also been sitting with the idea that justice is about a radical form of acceptance. Of recognizing what is now, versus clinging to the past, so that you can actually grieve what is happening. In this world, there doesn’t seem like there’s enough time to grieve what we are witnessing and experiencing. It seems like we could spend the rest of our lives grieving, and it wouldn’t be enough.
I desperately want justice and abundance for all of these people. I want justice for the ones who’ve died, the ones who are still under rubble, the ones who have had to flee, the ones who have lost community and family. I want a world of abundance for all of them. I want a world of freedom. I know so many of us are fighting for a glimmer of that world. I know so many of us struggle to keep our hope alight when it feels dim out there. I know, I know, I know.
A small reminder:
One of the paths that I actually found to my own healing after not only the original harm that I went through, but also the harm from the restorative justice process was to make my short film, RETRIEVAL, which I’ll be putting out next week on May 23rd.