Gandhi once declared that it was his wife who unwittingly taught him the effectiveness of nonviolence. Who better than women should know that battles can be won without resort to physical strength? Who better than we should know all the power that resides in noncooperation?
The free man must be born before freedom can be won, and the brotherly man must be born before full brotherhood can be won. It will come into being only if we build it out of our very muscle and bone – by trying to act it out.
We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women-whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.
Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.
What is the revolution that we need? We need to dissolve the lie that some people have a right to think of other people as their property. And we need at last to form a circle that includes us all, in which all of us are seen as equal… We do not belong to the other, but our lives are linked; we belong in a circle of others.
Vengeance is not the point; change is. But the trouble is that in most people’s minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing the enemy coincide.
People may find it more comfortable to listen to us if we equivocate, but in the long run only words that discomfort them are going to change our situation.
The longer we listen to one another – with real attention – the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.
After the revolution, it might very well remain necessary to place people where they could not do harm to others. But the one under restraint should be cut off from the rest of society as little as possible.
Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try – by punishing the troublesome – to deter others. No doubt, in certain instances this deterrence actually works. But generally speaking it fails conspicuously.
I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision. . . is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive.
After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist – if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.
