"There is a vitality, a life force,
a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there
is only one of you in all time. This expression is unique, and if
you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and
be lost. The world will not have it." --Martha
Graham
"No matter what, we can choose
to forgive."
--Takashi Tanemori
My journey, chronicled in my book Hiroshima:
Bridge to Forgiveness, has been long, difficult, and
inextricably linked to the seeming opposites of hatred and love.
My "path" of Hiroshima has taught me this most important
lesson: Those who have lost the most in war are also the ones
who have the most to gain by putting aside feelings of revenge
--going beyond our own cocoon, learning to forgive and making
peace with our own painful past. In my path from Hiroshima, conflicts
have shaped and redirected me, today allowing me to express my
love and gratitude for two countries that both nurtured and wounded
me.
In my long and difficult journey toward
manhood, I buried my Father. The lot of an orphan in Japan's
family-centric society is often miserable and I struggled
to survive. I was "blinded" by my rage, as stupid and
violent as an angry ox. I was a reminder that Japan lost the War,
and grew up in an atmosphere of contempt, shame and guilt in the
rubble of postwar Japan.
I began by seeking revenge for the death
of my father but found [an] inner battle was raging inside of
me --seeming opposites of hatred and love that brought me to the
present, ultimately finding a rite of passage created through
forgiveness. My life story demonstrates how a heart twisted by
hatred and revenge can be transformed by forgiveness, evolving
to a path of peaceful wisdom and the essential work of healing
human hearts.
It is my firm belief when we are able
to conquer the raging war in our own hearts, one forgiving heart-at-a-time,
what Japanese people call KOKORO NO YASURAGI-YUTORI, this inner
transformation is much more powerful than any atomic weapon or
war in shifting the world toward peace. My message is clear and
simple: Instead of resorting to violence, war or endless cycles
of revenge, humankind must learn to forgive, to reconcile and
make peace with its former enemies --whoever they
are! Victory over conflict hinges on the individual,
who must conquer the raging war in his or her own darkest heart.
I have been interviewed many times by prominent newspapers and
television producers. Always, these reporters have reported their
details of the story of destruction; always they have left on
the cutting room floor Takashi's most important story of all:
FORGIVENESS. No matter what, we can choose to
forgive; and I believe each one of us is part of the solution.
I am now in my 70's and a resident of Berkeley, California.
I live with my guide dog, Yuki, who is my second guide dog.
Takashi Tanemori, son of a noble Samurai family, is
currently writing his second book, "The Urban Samurai".
Takashi founded the Silkworm Peace Institute. He is also
a painter
and a poet.
“Peace is not a field of flowers. It’s
hard work.”
Despite personal tragedy, Aqeela Sherrills
seeks peace on the mean streets of Los Angeles.
By Tijn Touber
There are seals swimming in the bay in front of the hotel where
Aqeela Sherrills is staying. The sun is struggling to chase away
threads of mist hanging over the San Francisco hills in the distance.
The hotel lobby smells of fresh coffee and pancakes. The sense
of serenity that dominates this morning in Tiburon, an upscale
town across the bay from San Francisco, in no way resembles the
place where Sherrills comes from: a rough gang-dominated district
of Los Angeles. In that place, you’re asking for trouble
if you hit the street without packing some means of self-defence.
It’s estimated that over the past 20 years, at least 10,000
murders have been committed in these Los Angeles neighbourhoods.
That’s far more than all the victims of the conflict in Northern
Ireland.
But Sherrills has managed to accomplish what has eluded negotiators
in many international conflicts: getting two rival, violent groups
to the negotiating table and then making sure that the terms of
the ceasefire agreement stick. Ultimately, the Crips and the Bloods
signed an honest-to-God peace treaty. Sherrills then created an
entire structure involving 80 people dedicated to safeguarding
the terms of the treaty and teaching the gang members self-respect
and “life skills.” The treaty, signed in 1992, continues
for the most part to be upheld and has become an example to other
cities. But this is just the beginning for Sherrills. “I
expect that the next major peace movement will come from these
neighbourhoods,” he says.
The baggy sweater Sherrills wears this morning cannot hide his
muscles, important for self-protection as a young man. He doesn’t
need to fight today, but his eyes remain watchful. Sherrills is
no longer fighting with others, or with himself. He is fighting
deeply-ingrained patterns and prejudices: poverty, racism and
feelings of inferiority. They are so deeply-rooted that most people
don’t see them and even fewer dare to name them. “Black
folks hate themselves,” Sherrills says plainly. “And
they feel inferior. White folks have been conditioned to feel
superior. It’s so deeply rooted that it’s subtle; people
don’t even see it most of the time. But it’s there,
and it really needs to be addressed.” The problems of violence
aren’t limited to American ghettos, they’re everywhere.
And if there’s someone who can point out these problems and
has found a solution to them, it is Sherrills.
Watts was one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Los Angeles when
Aqeela Sherrills was born there 35 years ago. The area was split
in two by railroad tracks. One side was the territory of the Bloods
and the other belonged to the Crips. Conflicts over territory
and drugs were fought out on the street using state-of-the-art
weapons. Executions and drive-by shootings were daily occurrences.
In the early 1980s, Sherrills was just a kid at the time gang
violence in American ghettos started to escalate.
Sherrills grew up as the youngest of 10 children surrounded by
this horrific backdrop of violence. But in Watts, children never
stay young for long. Sherrills had his first son when he was 14.
That same year, his best friend, also 14, was shot to death. Sherrills
looks back, “I went completely crazy. We wanted revenge and
we hit the streets. Fighting. Shooting. Robbing.” By the
time he was 16, 13 of his friends had already died in gunfire
between the Bloods and the Crips.
The subculture of American gang life is dominated by violence
and drugs. But it’s more than that. It is also where fantastic
music, dance and clothing styles are created, which have a major
impact on global pop culture. Just watching MTV for a half-hour
makes it clear that gang culture has become hip. This makes Sherrills
laugh. “It’s cool now to say you come from a ghetto.
When I was young it wasn’t so cool; most of us wanted to
get out as quickly as possible.”
But Sherrills eventually pulled back from the gang life. Fantasy
is what saved him. “Together with my brothers and sisters
I fantasized a lot about a better world,” he remembers. “My
parents weren’t home much and we would tell each other never
ending stories. It usually started with a Chinese master who gave
us supernatural powers. We used those super powers to make the
world a better place. Those stories made me trust, at a young
age, that another world was possible and that I could do something
about it. I knew I was destined to do something big. I just didn’t
know what.”
Sherrills’ oldest sister was the first to get out of the
neighbourhood. She was accepted to college and moved on campus.
This sister had always been a major inspiration to Sherrills—albeit
because she was the one who always told the best stories. With
her help, Sherrills also got into college when he was 18, where
he studied electrical engineering. It appeared to be his ticket
out of the violence in his neighbourhood.
Initially, Sherrills didn’t want to return home, even on
weekends. Although he didn’t show too much interest in his
studies, he hung around campus. His first year was mostly spent
partying and dating lots of girls. But that summer, something
happened that changed Sherrills’ life. He read a book entitled
The Evidence of Things Not Seen by eminent African American writer
James Baldwin. The book describes what Baldwin saw as a plot against
black people, involving the shipment of drugs and guns into poor
neighbourhoods— with drugs and weapons. “The idea was,
Baldwin wrote: let the black people kill each other off. I was
furious and wanted to warn my brothers,” Sherrills recalls.
Sherrills joined the Nation of Islam, an American spiritual black
separatist movement. When he rejoined his fellow students after
the summer, some didn’t recognize him. He had lost 35 pounds
(15 kilos) and had given up alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and sex.
As befits a devout Muslim, he prayed five times a day. Meanwhile,
he began acting as a kind of Robin Hood, stealing money from drug
dealers and giving it to the neighbourhood’s poor.
The big task for which Sherrill was destined, started to take
shape. He continued to pay little attention to his studies; he
wanted instead to go back to the ‘hood” and help his
brothers break out of the vicious circle of drugs and violence.
Sherrills organized gatherings for fellow students around the
theme of defending black rights. He reminded his fellow black
students of their roots-–“People died so you could go
to college!”—but he didn’t get many to the point
of returning to the ghetto they came from. They simply didn’t
want to be associated with their old neighbourhood, Sherrills
discovered, and he slowly turned bitter.
Sherrills continued to have run-ins with the law and even landed
in jail once for physically resisting a police officer who was
beating on him. But what transformed Sherrill into a peace activist
was not being arrested, joining Islam, or reading Baldwin, but
by the love of a woman. “Before my celibacy stint,”
he explains, “I had a girlfriend: Lisa. I was crazy about
her, but very insecure about myself. I thought I was ugly and
couldn’t believe that she really wanted me. I couldn’t
handle her love and cheated on her—to break up the relationship
and to prove that I was right. But I regretted it so much that
for the first time in my life I did something noble: I confessed
everything.”
That confession had a miraculous effect. He suddenly saw the world
through different eyes. “Before that I didn’t trust
anyone,” Sherrills explains. “If things weren’t
going well for me there was always someone I could blame. Now
I was looking at myself for the first time in my life. It was
as if spirit came into me, as if I had become a new person.”
This rebirth gave Sherrills the wings and courage he needed to
go into his neighbourhood with a few friends with the aim of making
peace. He talked, discussed and listened on every street corner
to members of the Crips and the Bloods. That was in 1989. A short
time later, Sherrills got help from an American football legend,
Jim Brown, who made his house in the Hollywood hills available
as a neutral place where members of various gangs could meet.
Sherrills looks back on those early days: “We held six meetings
involving hundreds of cats from different neighbourhoods. We couldn’t
bring off a ceasefire, but relations got better and better.”
Brown was generous enough to donate a monthly sum so that Sherrills
and his buddies could rent a retail space and take their activities
to the next level. The cooperation with Brown led to the founding
of the Amer-I-Can project, which offers a program for “life
skills.” Sherrills explains, “Jim had been offering
this program to prisoners for awhile. It teaches you to develop
self-respect, solve conflicts, create a life vision, make decisions—that
kind of thing.” Sherrills followed the program himself and
started giving lessons, something he would do for the next 11
years.
Brown’s fame, combined with Sherrills’ street credibility,
turned out to be a golden formula for getting the unique peace
process off the ground. But it remained a tall order; after all,
how do you get young men who consistently confuse the concepts
of “forgiveness” and “revenge” to take a seat
around a negotiation table? Sherrills: “It’s not magic.
It’s a step-by-step process. It’s about communication.
I appeal to their deepest feelings. I try to touch their heart,
so that each of them can get back in touch with their humanity.
This process is based on relationships and cannot be motivated
by anything but love. We simply talk about the important things
in life: what makes people happy or sad, what are we afraid of,
what can we do better? That kind of thing. Again and again it
becomes clear that we ultimately believe in the same things.”
In 1992, Sherrills finally sees a breakthrough: the Crips and
the Bloods sign a historic treaty. Sherrills describes that amazing
day this way: “Everyone was happy, grandmothers were crying,
everyone was calling each other, for the first time fathers were
able to visit their children on the other side of the railroad
tracks… Everyone was so excited. It totally changed the quality
of our lives.”
After this success in Los Angeles, there was no stopping the
initiative. What started out locally, expanded into an international
organization active in 15 cities. At the highpoint of his peace
activities, Sherrills’ Community Self-Determination Institute
had 80 employees and its budget included $ 3 million U.S. (2.3
million euros) in government subsidies. For three and a half years,
he lived like an urban nomad travelling from ghetto to ghetto
to initiate peace negotiations and exact a ceasefire. The success
of Sherrills’ approach is partly due to the fact that he
does more than just treat the symptoms of gang violence. He wants
to tackle the problem at its roots. “Violence on the streets
is a symptom of a deeper problem,” he notes. “As long
as there is poverty, we will never have peace. Poverty destroys
families, neighbourhoods, countries.”
Sherrills doesn’t see the problems of violence and despair
as confined to gang areas. “In fact there is no difference
between what goes on in Watts or in Beverly Hills. The emotional
pain that people experience is expressed in Watts by murder and
in Beverly Hills by suicide.” Sherrills then reveals a staggering
statistic: “Last year there were more suicides than murders
in greater Los Angeles.”
Sherrills shifts effortlessly between street slang and clearly
formulated spiritual and political statements. His charismatic
energy is both tough and loving. You can just as easily imagine
him both on a street corner in the ghetto and in a meeting with
top level government officials.
Sherrills’ approach works, in part because he speaks the
language of the street. “I honestly love my neighbourhood
and my brothers,” he remarks. “There is so much beauty,
so much talent. Sometimes in the roughest places, you find the
most beauty. Aside from the violence, there are few other places
in California where you find so much sense of community. That
gang feeling is a part of it; it was always there, even before
the violence escalated. A gang is like a kind of surrogate family.
For young men, fighting is a way to be initiated. You can’t
give up a gang without replacing it with something else. You have
to keep them intact and help the members start living according
to new values.”
The problem Sherrills runs into time and time again is the marginalization
and criminalization of gang members. “The word ”gang
member” is a way of dehumanizing someone. When someone gets
killed people say: “Oh well, it was a gang member.”
But that gang member was someone’s son, friend or loved one.
The perception is that people in these neighbourhoods are hardened
against this type of grief. That’s not true. They are deeply
wounded and use this way to express it.”
Nearly everyone in South Central Los Angeles is suffering from
a kind of post-traumatic stress, Sherrills believes. “We
have got to address our own illnesses. How? You have to take a
step back and look at the issue from a more fundamental perspective.
In order to be able to do that, the heart has to be bust open.
We try to do everything in life to keep our hearts from being
broken. But there is so much beauty in having a broken heart –-there’s
pain, but you discover things in yourself that you never thought
about before.”
And then in 2004 came the horrible test of Sherrills’ beliefs.
His oldest son, 18-year-old Terrell Sherrills, is shot while on
vacation visiting his father in Watts. Terrell had gone out to
a party with a friend, and around midnight a few gang members
arrive. Terrell is shot in the back and dies a short time later
in the hospital.
“Terrell led a peaceful life,” says Sherrills. “He
didn’t have anything to do with gang violence. He was in
college and was very popular—and not only with the girls.
He came with me sometimes when I did my work. It was a huge blow.”
He falls silent for a moment, showing that none of us can ever
defend ourselves against this pain. No one gets used to murder.
Sherrills says he had no choice but to choose love over revenge.
“It’s not about who killed my son, but what killed him:
a culture with no respect for life. I am not surrendering his
life to death, but reclaiming it and giving it new meaning.”
The man who killed Terrell has not yet been caught. When that
happens, Sherrills wants to talk with him and his parents. “I
want to ask them what kind of pain drove the guy to commit this
act. When did he become disillusioned? Where did it go wrong?
Of course, my son’s killer deserves to be punished, but mainly
I want to keep him alive. I want to invest in him towards a better
future for us all. My dream is still that children can grow up
in Watts safely and without fear.”
The main problem the United States is struggling with is that
it is a country built around violence, according to Sherrill.
“We can be angry with George Bush, but he’s doing just
what his predecessors did. We have to wake up to our culture.
We have killed millions of indigenous people. Our foreign policy
still means death for millions around the world. We can say Bush
is evil, but we are evil. We are trapped in a culture based on
revenge.”
Sherrills sees the same thing in his neighbourhood of Watts.
The treaty continues to be upheld, but not without problems and
obstacles. Sherrill says, “When two brothers have problems
with each other, everyone joins forces to take revenge. The treaty
is broken!, they shout. But I say: ”Wait a minute: a certain
person has a problem with someone else. That’s their problem,
not all of ours.” I believe that conflicts are healthy, but
you have to learn to deal with them in a constructive way.”
“Peace is a process, not a destination,” Sherrills
continues. “Peace is not a utopian field of flowers you parade
through together. It’s hard work. Sometimes the peacemakers
lose their lives. The point is that we continually return to the
peace talks and solve the problems. And we’re getting one
step closer all the time.”
Sherrills’ work in various U.S. cities has made him an authority.
Not only in the eyes of government officials and peace organizations,
but gang members as well. It’s becoming increasingly easy
to go into problem areas and start peace negotiations. Sherrills:
“We’ve been given a kind of carte blanche to go into
the neighbourhoods. Within a few days we have an idea of who is
playing what role in the community and what’s going on. Then
we make contact with the key figures to reach a ceasefire.”
When the peace treaty in Watts had been in place, and mostly
followed, for 10 years, Sherrills launched a 10-year plan entitled
The Passage to Peace to completely put an end to gang violence.
“We appointed key figures in neighbourhoods to keep the peace
in their community. We make people responsible for their own neighbourhood,
for their own problems. I say: ‘I don’t want to move
to a better neighbourhood. This is a better neighbourhood.’
Instead of seeing it as a ghetto, we have to see the beauty and
the potential. We have to get together; then we have a chance.”
Sherrills conveys that same message at conferences and seminars
where he is invited to speak. “Whether it’s environment
movements, peace movements or cultural creative movements, they
all want the same thing: respect for life. My suggestion would
be to get together and create one big movement I would call Reverence
Movement. After all, the violence we inflict on ourselves and
one another is the same violence we are using to destroy the planet.
If every movement continues to treat the symptoms, we won’t
get anywhere. We’re only wasting time and energy.”
“We have to create a culture where authentic emotions are
allowed to be expressed. That would create a real release. If
the head of the Los Angeles police department would apologize
for the injustice we have suffered under the guise of justice,
it would create a landslide. If George Bush would apologize for
the slavery in this country, it would give so much release. You
can only conquer hate with love.”
The hotel lobby has now filled up with people coming to attend
the conference in which Sherrills is participating. Every few
minutes someone gives him a hug. The conference is set to begin.
We’ve only spent one morning together, but it feels like
a couple of days. For Sherrills, this intense solidarity has become
a way of life. He has learned that every meeting can be the last
and that every strong connection between people can set something
major in motion. The meetings he has are seldom informal. There
is usually a lot at stake. The intensity of his presence can mean
the difference between forgiveness and revenge, between war and
peace.
Outside, the seals are still swimming happily. The wisps of fog
hanging over San Francisco in the distance have cleared. The impressive
Golden Gate bridge sparkles in the sun, a symbol of American accomplishment.
This is a country where newcomers founded a culture that became
an example to the world—a model of freedom, democracy and
limitless possibilities. Aqeela Sherrills stands squarely in that
American tradition. He, too, is working to establish a new culture—a
culture promoting reverence for life.
For more information about the Community Self-Determination
Institute: 9101 South Hooper Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90002, USA,
telephone +1 323 586 8791, www.wattsrecords.com,
e-mail: aqeelas@msn.com.
Her tale was brutal, sexual. No one believed
a slave woman could be so literate. But now Harriet Jacobs
has reclaimed her name.
Harriet Jacobs wrote a slave narrative, thought
to be the obscure work of a white writer until two decades
ago.
Annie Nakao, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 23, 2004
"Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew
what it is like to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law
or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel,
entirely subject to the will of another. You never exhausted your
ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated
tyrant; you never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps, and
trembled within hearing of his voice."
When North Carolina slave Harriet Jacobs penned those words in
"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," a book she
self-published in 1861, she became the first black woman to write
a slave narrative. As recently as two decades ago, the book was
considered an obscure literary oddity written by white abolitionist
Lydia Maria Child. Today, with Jacobs' authorship authenticated,
her dramatic narrative provides new generations with a revealing
look at a often-hidden side of slavery: the sexual exploitation
of women.
The brutalization of black girls and women by white slave-masters,
who justified their dehumanizing treatment by viewing them as
"sexual savages," was a daily fact of life under slavery.
Stripped, beaten, raped and forced to "breed" more slaves,
black women suffered a double burden of slavery because of their
sexual vulnerability.
"Jacobs wrote what nobody dared to write," said literary
scholar Jean Fagan Yellin, 73, who toiled for six years to uncover
the identity of Jacobs as the true author of the book in the late
1980s. Yellin has recently published a biography of Jacobs, titled
"Harriet Jacobs, A Life," and is working on publishing
Jacobs' papers. A PBS series, "Slavery and the Making of
America," now in production, will also feature Jacobs' story.
The growing recognition now given to Jacobs is long overdue,
said Arnold Rampersad, Stanford University professor of literature
and noted biographer of such African American figures as W.E.B.
Du Bois and Langston Hughes.
"It's a very important slave narrative because it takes
into account directly the experience of being a woman in slavery,"
said Rampersad. "It raises the question of whether slavery
was worse for women than it was for men, which was not really
talked about much."
Slave narratives have been a critical part of the telling of
African American history. But unlike other narratives dictated
to others by illiterate slaves, Jacobs' own eloquent recounting
of her remarkable life -- she hid for seven years in an attic
to escape her white slave master before escaping north and becoming
an anti-slavery activist who wrote dispatches for famed abolitionist
William Lloyd Garrison's the Liberator -- makes her, in Yellin's
view, as heroic a figure as 19th century African American giants
Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman.
"We know of the heroic Harriet Tubman and her work during
the war as a Union spy," Yellin wrote in Jacobs' biography.
"We know of the heroic Sojourner Truth and of her relief
efforts. But because of slavery's anti- literacy laws, neither
Tubman nor Truth could write her own story. ... Astonishingly,
Jacobs managed both to author her own book and to get it published
before Emancipation."
Beneath the soaring atrium of the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero --
she'd recently addressed the American Literature Association in
San Francisco on the Jacobs papers -- Yellin, a small woman with
short gray hair and deep-set brown eyes, looked even tinier. But
she had an air of a woman used to plowing ahead, which probably
served her well in the years she, a lone white academic, spent
poring over an obscure slave narrative that few other scholars
seemed to care about.
"Listen, my hair was a different color when I started on
this years ago," quipped Yellin, a professor emerita at New
York's Pace University, where she taught English for 30 years.
It was her Irish Catholic father's and Jewish immigrant mother's
Old Left influences and the changing times that sparked an interest
in what she called "the nontraditional" and "oppositional."
"In the 1960s, the civil rights movement influenced everybody.
So I started looking at things I could study that made sense in
terms of the changes going on in the country."
While researching her dissertation on black figures in American
literature, she came across Jacobs' narrative, which at the time
was published under the pseudonym Linda Brent. She was fascinated.
But it wasn't until the feminist movement of the 1970s that Yellin
went back to "Incidents" as she tried to draw connections
between race and gender.
"At the time, nobody was interested because the book makes
people uncomfortable," she said. "It tells the terrible
story of sexual exploitation."
Yet from abolitionist times, many of the details of that history
remain veiled. White anti-slavery advocates avoided the topic
so they wouldn't shock their Victorian audiences. And despite
the handing down of stories of sexual oppression over generations
of black families and the now substantial body of eloquent writings
by black female authors about the struggles of women during slavery,
the magnitude of the sexual exploitation of millions of black
women slaves remains muted.
Reminders are unavoidable as revelations surface that the late
senator and segregationist Strom Thurmond at age 22 fathered a
child with a 16-year- old black maid who worked for his parents,
or that one of the fathers of our country, Thomas Jefferson, also
sired a child with his slave, Sally Hemings. Poles apart when
it comes to their places in history, Jefferson and Thurmond were
nevertheless participants in a system of sexual oppression that
for Jefferson was codified in the law of the land, and for Thurmond
was a vestige of social custom.
Central to that system of oppression was the centuries-old perceived
sexual availability of black women that even today fosters stereotypes
and assumptions about their sexuality.
"The whole myth of black women's sexuality, availability
and compliance is ingrained into the culture," Yellin said.
The issue surfaces in complicated ways -- provoking, for example,
uneasiness among some African Americans about Halle Berry's Oscar
win two years ago for "Monster's Ball." There was happiness
that a black woman finally won as best actress but pain that her
highly sexualized role was viewed as stereotypical.
It's there, too, in the anger of some blacks about the criticism
heaped on Janet Jackson earlier this year after Justin Timberlake
ripped her bodice during a Super Bowl performance and exposed
her right breast. Granted, this is a woman who, like many other
female entertainers, black and white, is marketed for her sexually
suggestive persona. Yet, would an equally suggestive Madonna have
received more sympathy?
"I'm not a student of popular culture, but that does seem
reasonable," Yellin said. "The fact is, there's a public
role out there and someone walks into it."
That public role, she said, stems directly from chattel slavery,
which used rape as a form of terror against every black woman,
including Jacobs.
Born in 1813, Jacobs lived a peaceful childhood until she turned
13 and her mistress, who had taught her to read and write, died.
She was willed to the baby daughter of an Edenton, N.C., doctor
named James Norcom.
Norcom, a tyrant who had already had 11 children by other slaves,
quickly began stalking Jacobs as a sexual prize. He did not rape
her but constantly harassed and threatened her about having sex
and even had a cottage built for that purpose far from the house.
"He told me I was his property; that I must be subjected
to his will in all things," she wrote.
That she was not raped was unusual, given that slave masters
either bribed their slaves with extra rations or better treatment
for their children, or beat or starved them into submission.
"That always comes up -- why didn't he rape her?" Yellin
said. "I am told that there are men who want acquiescence.
But that's not the issue. It's that she resisted him, defied him."
To escape Norcom, Jacobs -- ironically -- used her sexuality
to find a protector in a white lawyer with a higher social standing,
with whom she had two children.
"At 15, she was no fool," Yellin said. "She chose
the lesser of two evils. "
Yet she was later haunted by her choice. Years later, it pained
her to reveal her story to her activist friends. Determined, in
her words, to "try and be useful in some way," however,
Jacobs wrote the book, using the pseudonym.
Still pursued by the doctor, who remained her owner, Jacobs hid
in a tiny crawl space in her grandmother's attic for nearly seven
years before escaping north. Her two children eventually joined
her. Even in New York, the doctor and later his heirs continued
their search for years, until an abolitionist friend finally bought
her freedom.
Jacobs became an anti-slavery activist and Civil War relief worker
and correspondent for Garrison. She also opened a school for free
blacks in Alexandria, Va.
After she died in 1897, Jacobs was largely forgotten and her
book given short shrift by critics who discounted the work as
inauthentic.
"Some of us say those critics were unable to accept the
idea of a literate black woman held in slavery," Yellin said.
Nearly 107 years after Jacobs died, Yellin had the satisfaction
of having the listed author of "Incidents in the Life of
a Slave Girl" changed to Jacobs at the Library of Congress.
"I wanted her to be there, in American cultural history,"
she said.
Jacobs was a large presence in Yellin's life as well.
"I have lived with Harriet Jacobs for a very long time and
am eager to get her presence out of my head, her papers out of
my house and her story into the hands of readers," she wrote
on the preface of her biography. "But I truly cannot imagine
life without her."
Harriet Tubman was a runaway slave from Maryland who became known
as the "Moses of her people." Over the course of 10
years, and at great personal risk, she led hundreds of slaves
to freedom along the Underground Railroad, a secret network of
safe houses where runaway slaves could stay on their journey north
to freedom. She later became a leader in the abolitionist movement,
and during the Civil War she was a spy for the federal forces
in South Carolina as well as a nurse.
LAST JANUARY thousands of us from across the world gathered in
Porto Allegre in Brazil and declared — reiterated —
that "Another World is Possible". A few thousand miles
north, in Washington, George Bush and his aides were thinking
the same thing.
Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs — to further
what many call The Project for the New American Century.
In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years
ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are
openly talking about the good side of Imperialism and the need
for a strong Empire to police an unruly world. The new missionaries
want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of dignity.
And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited
to `debate' the issue on `neutral' platforms provided by the corporate
media. Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and
cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?
In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodelled,
streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in
history, a single Empire with an arsenal of weapons that could
obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic
and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open
different markets. There isn't a country on God's earth that is
not caught in the cross hairs of the American cruise missile and
the IMF chequebook. Argentina's the model if you want to be the
poster-boy of neoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you're the black
sheep.
Poor countries that are geo-politically of strategic value to
Empire, or have a `market' of any size, or infrastructure that
can be privatized, or, god forbid, natural resources of value
— oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal — must do as they're
told, or become military targets. Those with the greatest reserves
of natural wealth are most at risk. Unless they surrender their
resources willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will
be fomented, or war will be waged. In this new age of Empire,
when nothing is as it appears to be, executives of concerned companies
are allowed to influence foreign policy decisions. The Centre
for Public Integrity in Washington found that nine out of the
30 members of the Defence Policy Board of the U.S. Government
were connected to companies that were awarded defence contracts
for $ 76 billion between 2001 and 2002. George Shultz, former
U.S. Secretary of State, was Chairman of the Committee for the
Liberation of Iraq. He is also on the Board of Directors of the
Bechtel Group. When asked about a conflict of interest, in the
case of a war in Iraq he said, " I don't know that Bechtel
would particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be
done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it. But nobody
looks at it as something you benefit from." After the war,
Bechtel signed a $680 million contract for reconstruction in Iraq.
This brutal blueprint has been used over and over again, across
Latin America, Africa, Central and South-East Asia. It has cost
millions of lives. It goes without saying that every war Empire
wages becomes a Just War. This, in large part, is due to the role
of the corporate media. It's important to understand that the
corporate media doesn't just support the neo-liberal project.
It is the neo-liberal project. This is not a moral position it
has chosen to take, it's structural. It's intrinsic to the economics
of how the mass media works.
Most nations have adequately hideous family secrets. So it isn't
often necessary for the media to lie. It's what's emphasised and
what's ignored. Say for example India was chosen as the target
for a righteous war. The fact that about 80,000 people have been
killed in Kashmir since 1989, most of them Muslim, most of them
by Indian Security Forces (making the average death toll about
6000 a year); the fact that less than a year ago, in March of
2003, more than two thousand Muslims were murdered on the streets
of Gujarat, that women were gang-raped and children were burned
alive and a 150,000 people driven from their homes while the police
and administration watched, and sometimes actively participated;
the fact that no one has been punished for these crimes and the
Government that oversaw them was re-elected ... all of this would
make perfect headlines in international newspapers in the run-up
to war.
Next we know, our cities will be levelled by cruise missiles,
our villages fenced in with razor wire, U.S. soldiers will patrol
our streets and, Narendra Modi, Pravin Togadia or any of our popular
bigots could, like Saddam Hussein, be in U.S. custody, having
their hair checked for lice and the fillings in their teeth examined
on prime-time TV.
But as long as our `markets' are open, as long as corporations
like Enron, Bechtel, Halliburton, Arthur Andersen are given a
free hand, our `democratically elected' leaders can fearlessly
blur the lines between democracy, majoritarianism and fascism.
Our government's craven willingness to abandon India's proud
tradition of being Non-Aligned, its rush to fight its way to the
head of the queue of the Completely Aligned (the fashionable phrase
is `natural ally' — India, Israel and the U.S. are `natural
allies'), has given it the leg room to turn into a repressive
regime without compromising its legitimacy.
A government's victims are not only those that it kills and imprisons.
Those who are displaced and dispossessed and sentenced to a lifetime
of starvation and deprivation must count among them too. Millions
of people have been dispossessed by `development' projects. In
the past 55 years, Big Dams alone have displaced between 33 million
and 55 million people in India. They have no recourse to justice.
In the last two years there has been a series of incidents when
police have opened fire on peaceful protestors, most of them Adivasi
and Dalit. When it comes to the poor, and in particular Dalit
and Adivasi communities, they get killed for encroaching on forest
land, and killed when they're trying to protect forest land from
encroachments — by dams, mines, steel plants and other `development'
projects. In almost every instance in which the police opened
fire, the government's strategy has been to say the firing was
provoked by an act of violence. Those who have been fired upon
are immediately called militants.
Across the country, thousands of innocent people including minors
have been arrested under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) and
are being held in jail indefinitely and without trial. In the
era of the War against Terror, poverty is being slyly conflated
with terrorism. In the era of corporate globalisation, poverty
is a crime. Protesting against further impoverishment is terrorism.
And now, our Supreme Court says that going on strike is a crime.
Criticising the court of course is a crime, too. They're sealing
the exits.
Like Old Imperialism, New Imperialism too relies for its success
on a network of agents — corrupt, local elites who service
Empire. We all know the sordid story of Enron in India. The then
Maharashtra Government signed a power purchase agreement which
gave Enron profits that amounted to sixty per cent of India's
entire rural development budget. A single American company was
guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for infrastructural development
for about 500 million people!
Unlike in the old days the New Imperialist doesn't need to trudge
around the tropics risking malaria or diahorrea or early death.
New Imperialism can be conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on
racism of Old Imperialism is outdated. The cornerstone of New
Imperialism is New Racism.
The tradition of `turkey pardoning' in the U.S. is a wonderful
allegory for New Racism. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey
Federation presents the U.S. President with a turkey for Thanksgiving.
Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the President
spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving
the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan
Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the
50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and
eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has
won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky
birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children
and the press. (Soon they'll even speak English!)
That's how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully
bred turkeys — the local elites of various countries, a community
of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin
Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like
myself) — are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park.
The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their
homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die
of AIDS. Basically they're for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls
in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for
the IMF and the WTO — so who can accuse those organisations
of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey
Choosing Committee — so who can say that turkeys are against
Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are
anti-corporate globalisation? There's a stampede to get into Frying
Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?
Part of the project of New Racism is New Genocide. In this new
era of economic interdependence, New Genocide can be facilitated
by economic sanctions. It means creating conditions that lead
to mass death without actually going out and killing people. Dennis
Halliday, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between '97
and '98 (after which he resigned in disgust), used the term genocide
to describe the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid
Saddam Hussein's best efforts by claiming more than half a million
children's lives.
In the new era, Apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and
unnecessary. International instruments of trade and finance oversee
a complex system of multilateral trade laws and financial agreements
that keep the poor in their Bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose
is to institutionalise inequity. Why else would it be that the
U.S. taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi manufacturer 20 times
more than it taxes a garment made in the U.K.? Why else would
it be that countries that grow 90 per cent of the world's cocoa
bean produce only 5 per cent of the world's chocolate? Why else
would it be that countries that grow cocoa bean, like the Ivory
Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try and turn
it into chocolate? Why else would it be that rich countries that
spend over a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand
that poor countries like India withdraw all agricultural subsidies,
including subsidised electricity? Why else would it be that after
having been plundered by colonising regimes for more than half
a century, former colonies are steeped in debt to those same regimes,
and repay them some $ 382 billion a year?
For all these reasons, the derailing of trade agreements at Cancun
was crucial for us. Though our governments try and take the credit,
we know that it was the result of years of struggle by many millions
of people in many, many countries. What Cancun taught us is that
in order to inflict real damage and force radical change, it is
vital for local resistance movements to make international alliances.
From Cancun we learned the importance of globalising resistance.
No individual nation can stand up to the project of Corporate
Globalisation on its own. Time and again we have seen that when
it comes to the neo-liberal project, the heroes of our times are
suddenly diminished. Extraordinary, charismatic men, giants in
Opposition, when they seize power and become Heads of State, they
become powerless on the global stage. I'm thinking here of President
Lula of Brazil. Lula was the hero of the World Social Forum last
year. This year he's busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing
pension benefits and purging radicals from the Workers' Party.
I'm thinking also of ex-President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela.
Within two years of taking office in 1994, his government genuflected
with hardly a caveat to the Market God. It instituted a massive
programme of privatisation and structural adjustment, which has
left millions of people homeless, jobless and without water and
electricity.
Why does this happen? There's little point in beating our breasts
and feeling betrayed. Lula and Mandela are, by any reckoning,
magnificent men. But the moment they cross the floor from the
Opposition into Government they become hostage to a spectrum of
threats — most malevolent among them the threat of capital
flight, which can destroy any government overnight. To imagine
that a leader's personal charisma and a c.v. of struggle will
dent the Corporate Cartel is to have no understanding of how Capitalism
works, or for that matter, how power works. Radical change will
not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people.
This week at the World Social Forum, some of the best minds in
the world will exchange ideas about what is happening around us.
These conversations refine our vision of the kind of world we're
fighting for. It is a vital process that must not be undermined.
However, if all our energies are diverted into this process at
the cost of real political action, then the WSF, which has played
such a crucial role in the Movement for Global Justice, runs the
risk of becoming an asset to our enemies. What we need to discuss
urgently is strategies of resistance. We need to aim at real targets,
wage real battles and inflict real damage. Gandhi's Salt March
was not just political theatre. When, in a simple act of defiance,
thousands of Indians marched to the sea and made their own salt,
they broke the salt tax laws. It was a direct strike at the economic
underpinning of the British Empire. It was real. While our movement
has won some important victories, we must not allow non-violent
resistance to atrophy into ineffectual, feel-good, political theatre.
It is a very precious weapon that needs to be constantly honed
and re-imagined. It cannot be allowed to become a mere spectacle,
a photo opportunity for the media.
It was wonderful that on February 15th last year, in a spectacular
display of public morality, 10 million people in five continents
marched against the war on Iraq. It was wonderful, but it was
not enough. February 15th was a weekend. Nobody had to so much
as miss a day of work. Holiday protests don't stop wars. George
Bush knows that. The confidence with which he disregarded overwhelming
public opinion should be a lesson to us all. Bush believes that
Iraq can be occupied and colonised — as Afghanistan has been,
as Tibet has been, as Chechnya is being, as East Timor once was
and Palestine still is. He thinks that all he has to do is hunker
down and wait until a crisis-driven media, having picked this
crisis to the bone, drops it and moves on. Soon the carcass will
slip off the best-seller charts, and all of us outraged folks
will lose interest. Or so he hopes.
This movement of ours needs a major, global victory. It's not
good enough to be right. Sometimes, if only in order to test our
resolve, it's important to win something. In order to win something,
we — all of us gathered here and a little way away at Mumbai
Resistance — need to agree on something. That something does
not need to be an over-arching pre-ordained ideology into which
we force-fit our delightfully factious, argumentative selves.
It does not need to be an unquestioning allegiance to one or another
form of resistance to the exclusion of everything else. It could
be a minimum agenda.
If all of us are indeed against Imperialism and against the project
of neo-liberalism, then let's turn our gaze on Iraq. Iraq is the
inevitable culmination of both. Plenty of anti-war activists have
retreated in confusion since the capture of Saddam Hussein. Isn't
the world better off without Saddam Hussein? they ask timidly.
Let's look this thing in the eye once and for all. To applaud
the U.S. army's capture of Saddam Hussein and therefore, in retrospect,
justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq is like deifying Jack
the Ripper for disembowelling the Boston Strangler. And that —
after a quarter century partnership in which the Ripping and Strangling
was a joint enterprise. It's an in-house quarrel. They're business
partners who fell out over a dirty deal. Jack's the CEO.
So if we are against Imperialism, shall we agree that we are
against the U.S. occupation and that we believe that the U.S.
must withdraw from Iraq and pay reparations to the Iraqi people
for the damage that the war has inflicted?
How do we begin to mount our resistance? Let's start with something
really small. The issue is not about supporting the resistance
in Iraq against the occupation or discussing who exactly constitutes
the resistance. (Are they old Killer Ba'athists, are they Islamic
Fundamentalists?)
We have to become the global resistance to the occupation.
Our resistance has to begin with a refusal to accept the legitimacy
of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. It means acting to make it materially
impossible for Empire to achieve its aims. It means soldiers should
refuse to fight, reservists should refuse to serve, workers should
refuse to load ships and aircraft with weapons. It certainly means
that in countries like India and Pakistan we must block the U.S.
government's plans to have Indian and Pakistani soldiers sent
to Iraq to clean up after them.
I suggest that at a joint closing ceremony of the World Social
Forum and Mumbai Resistance, we choose, by some means, two of
the major corporations that are profiting from the destruction
of Iraq. We could then list every project they are involved in.
We could locate their offices in every city and every country
across the world. We could go after them. We could shut them down.
It's a question of bringing our collective wisdom and experience
of past struggles to bear on a single target. It's a question
of the desire to win.
The Project For The New American Century seeks to perpetuate
inequity and establish American hegemony at any price, even if
it's apocalyptic. The World Social Forum demands justice and survival.
For these reasons, we must consider ourselves at war.
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