Something Unexpected
“Nonviolence is not a strategy. It’s an identity.”
Something unexpected has happened to my mind. When I think of this most recent war, which is a continuation of all war, I cannot easily conjure images of destruction. It's not that I don't know what war looks like. It's not that I don't read the news. It's that images of violence do not linger in my mind because, when I see them, I also immediately see something else: a line of strollers at a Polish train station, awaiting fleeing mothers of Ukraine; the zookeeper bicycling daily to the Kiev zoo to feed the animals and comfort them, especially Horace, the terrified elephant. Now he and his family have moved there. Love in response to aggression: that's courage.
I see images of mass nonviolence in India during the fight for independence - waves of unarmed Indian soldiers marching into British fire until the British soldiers, ashamed and weeping, could not continue shooting. Would we ourselves be willing to take such risks? That seems like a useful question for the global moment we are in.
I see my friend, Palestinian nonviolent peace activist, Ali Abu Awwad, who says that nonviolence is not a strategy, it's an identity. After being tortured and radicalized in an Israeli prison, he had planned to join the jihad. Then he had a change of heart: his brother had been shot and killed by Israeli soldiers. A Jewish woman who had lost her son to violence made a condolence call. It was the first time anyone in the family had seen an Israeli person cry. Later, when his mother was imprisoned and tortured, she secured her release by means of a hunger strike. When Ali followed her example, he realized the immense power of nonviolence - not only to transform political reality on the ground, but to nourish a new, life-giving identity.
I see the women of Liberia who managed to stop the fighting there after fifteen years of bloodshed. Some were Christian, some were Muslim, some were neither or both. Before, they would not have mingled. But, because they all had lost everything, they turned to each other. Every morning they gathered on the main boulevard of the capitol, at the old fish market, because it was visible from the street. In far-flung villages, they gathered along the roadside. From dawn to dark, in every kind of weather, they sat in silence, except to pray or sing. They fasted. They wore white. Bullets and grenades flew overhead. They remained.
Some of the women had dreamed the war before it came; they dreamed the streets would run with blood, and that a light-skinned dictator would rule Liberia for thirteen years, which is how long Charles Taylor was in power (a man with light skin as the dream foretold.) One woman spoke of how she went to a camp of child soldiers to beg them to come home; how sometimes fighters came to taunt the women for their steadfast sitting. Our friend told them: We are women. We are mothers. So long as we borned YOU, we will continue to sit!
One day, when the violence became too extreme, the women in the field were forced to scatter. Two of them began to walk, making their way toward the U.S. Embassy when a rocket propelled grenade exploded beside them. One of the women was killed. The other was knocked unconscious. When she came to, she discovered her friend's mangled body lying next to her. The woman forced herself to stand up. Not knowing what else to do, she turned and walked back the way they had come until she reached the field by the fish market and sat down by herself. At that moment, another of the women was walking past and happened to see her, so she went and sat, too. More women came, until all who were able had returned. In the days that followed, they moved to the middle of the street, where the president's convoy could not avoid them. The fighting stopped. Peace talks were held in Ghana; a delegation of the women traveled there. The negotiators were all men, so the women kept a vigil by the door. When talks broke down, they locked the hall and hid the key. No one could leave until an accord had been signed, not even to use the restroom.
The women created a space for peace and sat in it. Every day, in my mind, we still gather. I am with them. We all are. We bring our prayers and our songs, nothing else. We sit in a field of possibility. We sit in a future that exists because the past has been repaired by the fact of us coming together. Our leaders don't have the imagination or the will to insist on peace in a thriving world - but we do.
