Lucinda J. Garthwaite
Bryan Stevenson is an activist, attorney, teacher, writer and founder and executive director of the
Equal Justice Initiative. I’ve mentioned him here before, and if you don’t know his work, I encourage you to explore it. Stevenson is in my view one of the great thinkers, leaders and change-makers of our time. So when he speaks, I always make a point to listen.
In a recent interview, Stevenson spoke about hope and love in powerful terms, declaring that hopelessness is the enemy of justice, that hope is, “the thing that gets you to stand up when others say, “Sit down.” It’s the thing that gets you to speak, when others say, “Be quiet.”*
Something else caught my attention in what he said, something about the way he referred to
witness. He tells a story his grandmother told him of his great-grandfather, who had been enslaved, standing to read the newspaper to other formerly enslaved people at his home each evening. Stevenson’s grandmother described sitting next to him as he read, loving the feeling of power there, the calm that settled in as people for whom the news of the day had been forbidden listened carefully and took it in.
In telling that story, says Stevenson, his grandmother was demonstrating what he calls, “the long view ... the power of an eternal witness.” She had, like a lot of older black people he knew, “an instinct for creating these memories that just shape you for the rest of your life.”
Popular understanding of the term “witness” generally rests in legal proceedings, or proclaiming theology, or simply seeing something happen. Witnessing in these ways has to do with verifying truth. But the kind of witness Stevenson describes seems to be something different.
I am reminded of a poetry anthology edited by Carolyn Forché,
Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (1993). It is a collection of poems of genocide, violent repression and war. These are difficult poems to read, and come to think of it now, reading them changed me -- called me into a more serious consideration of those histories and my responsibility in their long wake. In her introduction to the anthology, Forché suggests that these poems “call on us from the other side of extremity and cannot be judged by simple notions of ‘accuracy’ or ‘truth to life.’” These poems, she says, “will have to be judged by their consequences.”
And
that reminds me of a classic essay by the writer and activist Audre Lorde, “
Poetry is Not A Luxury,” (1985) which begins with this, “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.”
So it seems there is another kind of witness to consider, the kind of witness that works against forgetting, that requires us to scrutinize our lives for their impact in the world. This other kind of witness is defined by its staying power and its consequence. This kind of witness is weighted by strong imagery, so it shows up in stories and poems, in dance, music and visual art.
Forché writes that the witness reflected in the poems she collected generate “insistent memory.” She says that “makes the world habitable... makes life possible.” Lorde speaks to an "direct bearing" on how we live, Stevenson to the "shaping of our lives."
That is mighty stuff. It calls on us to recognize this insistent witness, to take up the light it offers, as Lorde suggests, to "scrutinize our lives." Because as small a thing as each life may seem, it's that "product which we [each] live," that carries hope, and the possibility of change.
*A link to that interview is in the Liberatory Resources of this issue of
Intersections.
