Pacifica Reconciliation

[By: Samantha Gupta]

A Scene from Japan

In 2015, I was in Hiroshima, Japan as part of a multi-faith, multi-racial delegation by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) USA.

At the invitation of the Japanese, our small group shuttled from Hiroshima to Nagasaki, Nagasaki to Okinawa, Okinawa to Kyoto, Kyoto to Fukushima, Fukushima to Tokyo. We met leaders, activists, bomb survivors, religious leaders, organizers, artists, musicians, farmers, and psychologists, all with the hope that our witness to their stories might lead to improved relationships and understanding globally.

Brainstorming, dialoguing with young adult
Japanese activists on nuclear war and race (2015)

By the end of our trip, I was staring blankly at a dark green chalkboard beside my colleague, “Rina.” Rina identified as a queer woman of color, Muslim, and disabled, and had experienced our tour of Japan quite differently than myself. I am white, Unitarian Universalist, able-bodied, heterosexual, and cisgender woman. My ancestors had participated in (if not championed) these World Wars, had received the inheritance of land claimed by the US government and distributed to “white” Americans, had received the benefit of no doubt by businesses and law enforcement, had received the access to credit, wealth, and loans by banks, and had been carefully protected by law, by housing, and by access to health care. Rina identified herself as the ancestor of America’s ongoing genocide and harm of Black Americans—from slavery to the New Jim Crow.

There we were, two children of two different “American” experiences, two different transgenerational memories etched into our bodies, standing in front of a chalkboard at the Quaker Center in Tokyo trying to reconcile the use of nuclear weapons by the United States on Japan 70 years prior.

Chalk unsteady in hand, we broke up the word “reconciliation” on the board.

“Reconcile, as to come back together into council… to work harmoniously together” took the form of an aesthetic and affective question (Santa-Barbara 2012, p 174). What does it look like? What would it feel like?

Rina, a high school science teacher by trade, began imagining the relationships between atoms, including their potential to enter into chaos, to require heat to transform. Me, a Unitarian Universalist chaplain, began imagining the web of relationships that connect each to all. Would we have to go back to atoms to find this council we are returning to? How far back does one need to go to imagine this web, this council of relationship? And who decides when reconciliation is achieved—particularly in systems where power is so structurally and culturally unequal?

We’d often stop and regard each other, dumbfounded. This was not just about “Japan,” it included us—our own pasts, our present relatedness to each other, and our future.

It is in this way that I’ve come to understand “reconciliation” as both process and aspiration.

Aspiration: Returning to the Council of Our Relatedness

As aspiration, reconciliation is the manifestation of deep recognition of interdependence and commitment to witness the experience, being, and needs of another (Galtung 1996), with committed action towards that being’s flourishing at the personal, interpersonal, and structural levels.

Reconciliation is aspirational because, even as I may participate in practices that work towards this aim at the personal and interpersonal realms, I exist in structural systems that are architects to and perpetuate ongoing harm. This hints at the conditions of reconciliation: some conditions for witness and commitment to one another’s flourishing as interdependent beings is more within reach than others. To achieve reconciliation at its aspirational fullest would require the involvement of many others beyond me, and our collective reimagining and restructuring of a culture that perpetuates harm. While Rina and I might reweave relationships with the ancestors of the nuclear bomb, the machinery of nuclear war was still moving around us—our little coming to council was important, but not everything. We would need more than young adult and veteran peace activists—we would need a vertical gathering of leaders and representatives from our community to shift the structure of violence (Graf et. al 2007, p. 134).

I also see this in my work as a restorative justice practitioner. I serve as a co-facilitator for restorative justice practices in a California prison with men who are incarcerated for sexual and violent crimes. In that circle of men, each person claims responsibility for the harms they caused that led to their time in prison (and some that are off the record): each is witnessed by the other. For months, each begins a process of self-reflection and witnessing of their own path towards harm: their own memories and stories, their own family systems, lives, and experiences of sexual violence.

This is a form of reconciliation: in council with one another, people are “returned” to themselves. In parallel to TRANSCEND’s approach to conflict transformation, each person is doing the separate and necessary work to analyze and provide therapy to their pasts, as well as reimagining and providing a therapy to their futures (Graf et. al 2007). In this process, there is self-forgiveness and expressions of forgiveness or healing for the ones who have harmed them, even leading to deeper commitments to self-care—a kind of choice not to act with revenge on one’s own self in the future (Santa-Barbara 2007). These men are tending the web of relationships where they stand—the complex causal relationships—that have contributed to their expression of sexual or violent harm.

Although worthwhile, this only represents part of the journey in the aspiration of a restored council.

Insight Prison Project - Victim Offender Education Groups
(2015)

This restorative process does not attend to the harm caused to their victims/victim-survivors or their families or communities, nor does it reconcile and return the men to their communities. This restorative process does not account and “reconcile” the system of incarceration that incarcerates some men over others, perpetuating the cycles of violence that have often contributed to the very crimes committed, nor does it attend to the dominant culture’s use of sexual violence, gender violence, homophobia, and patriarchy—all of which structured the very cultural environment for their act of violence to occur. While these men sit in cells for nonconsensual and violent sexual acts with women, for example, another man is elected to the highest office in the United States government having admitted to similar sexual acts. The culture that architects sexual violence remains.

Here, a full reconciliation—a full return of these men both to themselves and to their world, and the world to these men—and the assurance that the harms caused by them and to them would be lessened, is aspirational. It gives us something to aim towards, a memory of relatedness to form the basis of a future worth working towards—if we lose sign of this aim, we lose sight of the real council we are returning to, and our reconciliation work becomes aesthetic or minimalist, rather than moving towards depth.

Process: Returning to the Relationship

This “working towards” is what makes reconciliation a process.

As process, reconciliation is the ongoing work of returning to witness and commit to the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural culture that allows for that flourishing. This is the daily grind of relationship, the tending that is one’s consistent commitment to “return” to the council of one’s relationship. It is the one who says to the other, “I will commit to tending this, I will commit to returning again to you and to our relationship.”

When architects for peace agreements describe that a peace agreement must be “lived in,” they are speaking to this quality—that reconciliation is a living and breathing thing: “To say that peace has happened when an agreement has been signed is akin to saying that the end and be all of owning a home is signing a mortgage. Much like a home, a peace agreement must be lived in… … it also requires a new structure and a new culture” (Graf et al. 2007, p. 126). When the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate acknowledge the “bad history” of slavery and Jim Crow, and their impacts long after its official passing, but refuse to build a new house to live in together and its de facto continuance in the daily lives of Black Americans—the process of reconciliation has stopped before it even started, having been at a loss for a real vision of what racial community and council could even look like and no real reckoning with the council’s past (Scott 2014, p. 16).

As a young adult, I began a non-profit that partnered with social work leaders and youth organizers in South India and Southern California. Both groups of youth leaders used techniques by Paulo Freire, hosting dialogue circles led by youth and young adults to identify the issues that mattered most to them in their local communities. Although guided by a commitment to our local contexts, we were also curious about what it might look like to engage one another in relationships across national borders. Is it possible to have authentic relationship, even given our complex histories of harm caused by and continuing through colonialism, imperialism, and neo-liberalism? During the summers and winters, our two organizations would raise the funds to support exchanges between peer-aged young adults, building relationships, friendships, even young adult romances between young activists in the USA and India.

Real relationships, and especially young romances, have conflict—conflict that became both

Young adults organizing, working
and loving from the USA to India (2012)

interpersonal and organizational. As tensions flared, so would the cultural and structural tensions between us. Who should raise the money and decide how it was used? Who should have the power? Who decides how our work is represented in our respective countries? Who can say “no” and who can say “yes”? These structural and cultural questions all co-existing alongside, “Did you mean what you said when you told me you loved me?”

In reflection with one another on the ways we were able to reconcile and remain in relationship with one another through these periods of conflict—including periods of non-contact, awkward Skype calls, and very pained international trips—we identified an ethic that guided our work: poittu varen.

Poittu varen is a Tamil phrase that roughly translates to “you go—and you come back.” Used by mothers and fathers to their children as they run out the door to school, or to dear friends before parting, poittu varen is the invitation and the request to always return to a relationship because that relationship is important to you—because you need one another.

The commitment to always return—to the conversation, to the Skype call, to the community, to the structure—is one example of the process of reconciliation. It means that our “council” requires our attention, our tending, to be a true council—it requires maintenance.

Conditions: Interdependence, Creativity, and Authenticity

I sense that our ability to sit in circle in a prison, or to take the flight across the ocean for difficult truth-telling with friends and lovers, is deeply rooted in a belief in our interdependence—we believe we need each other and that meeting one another’s needs is part of our responsibility to each other. We feel related to one another, and we feel empathy for one another. This cosmology may or may not be conscious: more conscious is the sense that something of your willful participation is necessary for my needs to be met.

This may sound a lofty goal. It is. This is not about cold war agreements. I distinguish, here, between “reconciliation” and “compromise”—yes, it is possible to require a formerly incarcerated person with child sex offenses on their records to “register” to stay away from minors—this agreement (forcibly required and publically available in some states) may contribute to preventing future acts of harm. However, this has not transformed the personal, interpersonal, structural, or cultural contributors to that harm or impacts of that harm. It has not provided analysis or therapy to the past, nor the present, and certainly not the future.

The kind of reconciliation that does that is rooted in a belief that “causality is complex” and that guilt for the harms caused are shared across more people than just one, and that we are interdependent, and that interdependence requires us to “return to council” with one another. This kind of reconciliation requires some belief that the person who caused harm is needed and valued, that the victim is needed and valued, and that we all contributed in some way and are needed to respond and transform.

It is not a forcible process, although conditions for its creation can be cultivated.

I once worked alongside a priest who often led dialogue groups in the local juvenile hall. In jail, the religion of choice took the shape of a 12-step program: “cleaning house,” “recognizing one’s powerlessness,” and “forgiveness” was strongly emphasized. Teenaged men and women quote 12-step chapters as scripture. In these circumstances, “forgiveness” takes the scent of dogma—a checklist that begins with amnesia for one’s own past.

Youth dialogue circle
San Bernardino, CA (2016)

To release incarcerated teenagers of their tormented task of “forgiving and forgetting” the harms caused by abusive parents, school systems, and police officers from their jail cells, the priest would often provide a tender reframe:

“Forgiveness,” he’d say gently, “is like love… it comes as a surprise. The moment it becomes forced, like love, it becomes abuse.”

Like love and forgiveness, reconciliation requires spontaneity, creativity, responsiveness to the moment, witnessing, noticing—qualities that do not emerge upon force, but emerge in openness and freedom (Graf et. al 2007, p. 130). It is technique, and it is art (Ibid). We can cultivate the conditions for it. We can embody and practice what we’ve learned helps support it. We can invite it, ready the dinner table for it, make room for it, invite it to come back again with a tender poittu varen. However, its authentic emergence in bodies of the participants through creativity, spontaneity, willingness—that comes as surprise.

Poittu Varen

From Japan to the prison, from India to juvenile hall, this is what I’ve learned: the table that is set for council takes tending. You must prepare the table well, ready the chairs, provide the nurturance that truly feeds people. We must be the intentional and strategic hosts to the possibility of surprise. Tables, at times, may be turned over—chairs may be thrown, glass unintentionally and intentionally broken. Some will come and sit but refuse to eat, waiting to observe. Others may want to show up late—only for the desserts. It is not an easy or simple task to build, rebuild, and then rebuild a culture we live in together.

However, should we be willing to return again and again to that table, we will certainly find ourselves fed.

Works Cited

Graf, W., Kramer G., & Nicolescou, A. (2007) “Counselling and training for conflict transformation and peace-building: The TRANSCEND approach” in Webel, C., & Galtung, G. Handbook of peace and conflict studies. New York, NY: Routledge.

Oberg, J. (2007). “Former Yugoslavia and Iraq: a comparative analysis of international conflict” in Webel, C., & Galtung, G. Handbook of peace and conflict studies. New York, NY: Routledge.

Santa-Barbara, J. (2007). “Reconciliation” in Webel, C., & Galtung, G. Handbook of peace and conflict studies. New York, NY: Routledge.

Scott, I. (2014). Crimes against humanity in the land of the free: Can a truth and reconciliation process heal racial conflict in America? Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.

Pacifica Reconciliation

Wednesday, March 1, 2017

3/1

Monday, January 30, 2017

Reconciliation: Aspiration, Process, Table

Friday, January 27, 2017

Welcome, Some Readings and Assignment 1