Bennette - Project Lead Reflections

“It is the quality of our relationships that determines how well we are able to share, provide and caretake with other living beings around us.”
-Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in Theory of Water, excerpt at this link

In our current social, political and ecological climate, it feels like we are constantly being asked to metabolize a seemingly never-ending continuum of violent oppression, brutality and suffering. Conflict transformation has never felt more necessary, and more urgent, which Bayo Akomolafe says calls for slowing down (“The Times are Urgent: Let’s Slow Down”). Taking our time to meet and tend to the multiple interconnected layers and scales of conflict - personal, interpersonal, structural, historical, systemic, ecological - that permeate our collective existence is crucial, and can be illuminating in ways that offer more possibility when things feel foreclosed. 

As one of the co-leads for the Conflict Transformation in the Arts and Beyond project, I’ve felt my heart and mind expand to this question of what does conflict transformation even mean?!, and thinking through all the other questions it brings to life for us: How do we name the conflicts, or tell stories of conflict with care? How can we physically and psychically enact repair, or transformation? How do we invite ourselves and others into holding space for transformation? How could our gathering around this question in itself be the doing? 

Early on in the project, I felt drawn to think more deeply about conflict as it’s experienced internally. How are we at war with ourselves? I thought of Audre Lorde, Black lesbian feminist warrior poet mother and how she wrote, “the language by which we have been taught to dismiss ourselves and our feelings as suspect is the same language we use to dismiss and suspect each other” (169). 

Thinking about her work on difference, power, and coalition-building, helped clarify for me how our capacity to heal our relationships with ourselves teaches us something about how to heal our relationships with others. When we can begin to find the language to engage our inner tensions, not to uncritically smooth over or avoid them but recognize them as reflections of deeper and broader fractures in our worlds, how does that shift the ways we relate? I think this has been a key lesson for me in this learning journey - we can’t meet others where they’re at unless we meet ourselves where we’re at. 

We’ve also been trying to imagine how conflict transformation can be an anti-colonial practice, especially in the context of working in the arts. Some growing seeds of clarity: recognizing that even before the popularization of institutional modes of conflict management we might be familiar with, there have been, and continue to be, rich lineages and histories of Black and Indigenous communities theorizing, practicing and living deeply relational modes of conflict and transformation. 

Conflict is not something to be resolved; we don’t go through conflict processes to arrive at an endpoint where conflict no longer exists, but it’s the process itself that is a fundamental part of the nature of change, and is what allows us to grow, go deeper, and move forward as interdependent communities. By reckoning with the ways we have been conditioned to reiterate colonial and extractive habits of erasure and separation from our own feelings, from one another and the land, we might be able to understand conflict as, in Audre Lorde’s words, a generative and creative force, “an energy that [makes] the future,” as we “bond to survive the enormous pressures of the present” (Lorde 144).

I came across a passage from “Revolutionary Hope,” a dialogue between Audre Lorde and another very influential Black and queer writer, James Baldwin, and thought it was beautiful how they kind of get into a conflict transformation process, speaking from their own perspectives on the American dream, the intersections of race, gender, and power, and how these forces and their legacies affect us all - differently, of course, yet affect us all the same. Their words are still ringing in my ears!

Audre Lorde: It’s vital for me to be able to listen to you, to hear what is it that defines you and for you to listen to me, to hear what is it that defines me – because so long as we are operating in that old pattern, it doesn’t serve anybody, and it certainly hasn’t served us.

James Baldwin: I know that. What I really think is that neither of us has anything to prove, at least not in the same way, if we weren’t in the North American wilderness. And the inevitable dissension between brother and sister, between man and woman – let’s face it, all those relations which are rooted in love also are involved in this quarrel. Because our real responsibility is to endlessly redefine each other. I cannot live without you, and you cannot live without me – and the children can’t live without us.

AL: But we have to define ourselves for each other. We have to redefine ourselves for each other because no matter what the underpinnings of the distortion are, the fact remains that we have absorbed it. We have all absorbed this sickness and ideas in the same way we absorbed racism. It’s vital that we deal constantly with racism, and with white racism among Black people – that we recognize this as a legitimate area of inquiry. We must also examine the ways that we have absorbed sexism and heterosexism. These are the norms in this dragon we have been born into – and we need to examine these distortions with the same kind of openness and dedication that we examine racism…

…

JB: We are behind the gates of a kingdom which is determined to destroy us.

AL: Yes, exactly so. And I’m interested in seeing that we do not accept terms that will help us destroy each other. And I think one of the ways in which we destroy each other is by being programmed to knee-jerk on our differences. Knee-jerk on sex. Knee-jerk on sexuality…

(See full conversation at this link).

So. We are born into a distorted world, and those distortions seek to alienate us, make us so focused on our own struggle that we forget our shared responsibilities to each other. Lorde's provocation—how do we make sure we don't destroy each other in the process—highlights the relational nature of conflict transformation. We’re bound together both by the reality of a conflict-ridden world and by the hope that we might be willing to be responsible to each other. 

In our next posts, we will begin to share highlights of the teachings facilitated by our educators Moyo, Urpi and Meenadchi around the somatic and relational tools skills we can build to become resourced and attuned in our bodies to build this chosen responsibility to one another.