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The Revolution Starts at Home | Interview
Mini-interview with Revolution Starts at Home contributor Vanessa Huang (4/13/11)!
Vanessa Huang (is a badass): http://tinyurl.com/68bfy9w
Vanessa Huang (http://vanessahuang.com) is a poet, writer, and community organizer whose practice feeds resilience from the margins and draws on a history of collaboration with and teachings from the anti-prison, gender liberation, migrant justice, anti-violence, disability justice, and reproductive justice movements. Vanessa’s poetry manuscript quiet of chorus was named a finalist for Poets & Writers’ 2010 California Writers Exchange Award. A Macondo and Kundiman fellow, Vanessa lives in Oakland, California and also works as a consultant for social justice organizations.
what does community accountability/transformative justice mean to you?
Community accountability invites me practice how we, in the broadest, broadest sense of “we”, account for each and all. How do our cumulative choices of movement and stillness, sounding and silence touch each other’s lives and the blessings all around us? How might the energy behind these choices not feed the multiple violences of isolation and shame, and hold all of us in inhabiting and nourishing our bodies, our spirits, our beloved communities with ease? Transformative justice feeds my longing for this practice and trust in the work and resilience born of immense collective humility and immense collective power.
how have you seen anti violence organizing change in the last six years since we started working on the book?
My journey through this time has brought me closer to the lived, intergenerational wisdom of our bodies. I am learning day by day how to befriend and transform the impact of trauma and secondary trauma from challenging the violence of escalating police and prison terror. I am learning how to grieve and be with the deep sorrow of so many lives and loves stolen from us. I am learning to steward my senses. Slowing down enough to integrate this work has been vital for me in recalibrating a sustained political practice and invite new openings towards how we all want to live and create together.
what excites you in your organizing and community building against violence right now?
I am learning so much from and with my peers inviting us to step into the grace of living, sharing, and organizing that practices and celebrates collective care and access. I’m held and enlivened by the real shifts we’ve made through the journeys you’ve collected here, and in our continual work to more collectively reveal and transform the violence of isolation and shame that remain internal to practice: How have we enabled capitalism and abelism to so infiltrate our organizing and community building? How do we rebuild the muscle to live, work, and play in a way that leaves no one behind, and honors us all?
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Mini-interview with Revolution Starts at Home contributor Alexis Pauline Gumbs (4/2/11)!
http://tinyurl.com/3jlj5jc
What does transformative justice/community accountabilty mean to you?
Transformative justice means that we are all loving participants in an intentional journey towards justice and wholeness with each other, with the planet and within ourselves at the same time. It means we do what it takes to be present enough with each other to be transformed by each other. Community accountability means we give an account of our reality to each other, and then we give it again and we listen. It means we can really speak to each other and listen to each other and transform our actions accordingly. It means we build structures that allow us to do this collectively and to invite more of our community into the process.
How do you create justice and safety in your communities without using the police or the state?
In Durham, out of the work of UBUNTU (a women of color/survivor led coalition to end gendered violence and create sustaining transformative love) and a delegation from North Carolina to the Critical Resistance 10 Conference we created something called the Durham Harm Free Zone. The manifestation of the Harm Free Zone include an initiative facilitated by the Ella Baker Women’s Center through which residents in a local public housing community have implemented their plans to create safety in their community by building relationships and pushing back against the imposed criminalization that the housing authority levies against them.
This has been an inspiring process to witness, especially in the name of Ella Baker who was raised in communities creating safety without even the option of calling in the police. Another exciting outgrowth is the Safe in Our Streets youth organizing and awareness collective which is part of the SpiritHouse youth program. It has been amazing to watch visionary youth collect stories and create transformative performances, PSA’s and campaigns that are accountable to the safety needs of queer youth of color and other criminalized youth of color in our communities.
The miracle that impacts me the most everyday is that by ritualizing our relationships and intentionally building radical alignment I have the rare and priceless experience of having a network of comrades to call on in times of need, times when I don’t feel safe, and times when I don’t know how to help someone else arrive at safety. This is the ongoing fruit of organizing together, the trust and action built from knowing who has your back and who will support you in having someone else’s back too.
How has being in this book changed your life?
The conversation that this book collects is a crucial international conversation that proves the point that we are participating in a paradigm shift and a deep and old legacy of resistance on the level of relationships, interpersonal intentionality and alternative structure building that happens through small acts of presence and rituals that help us to transform our relationships to the idea of community itself.
Just yesterday as I arrived in Portland, Oregon, I had a conversation with a young organizer of color who is doing this work, specifically working to build safety without the Prison Industrial Complex through processes of community accountability. He expressed the frustration he has felt doing this work in Portland where the liberal dominant class assumes that the police are necessary and the ostensibly radical anarchist folks don’t see the work transforming interpersonal relationships to address interpersonal and state forms of violence as “real” radical work. He talked about how much it meant to him to know that there are people around the US and beyond working on this together and valuing this form of work. I think the community that this book speaks to and helps to create is crucial for those of us who continue to do this work. It means we can do this work in harmony, in chorus, not in isolation.
http://tinyurl.com/3jlj5jc
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