Synergies: Women, Creativity and Peacebuilding

Synergies: Women, Creativity and Peacebuilding

Revised Presentation Notes from Keynote Address

Mount Mary University, November, 2013

Cynthia Cohen, PhD, Brandeis University

Background:In November of 2013, I was honored to be invited to a two-day symposium at Mount Mary University in Milwaukee. The event, Synergies: Women, Creativity and Peacebuilding, was coordinated by Lynne Woehrle and Jordan Anderson and involved students, faculty and staff from across the Mount Mary campus. Jen Freeman of the Women’s Peacemakers Program at the Kroc Center at the University of San Diego joined me in sharing stories about our careers with students, and in offering keynotes on the symposium theme. In addition, the film Acting Together on the World Stage was screened, and I led a workshop on peacebuilding and the arts for about 50 members of the Mount Mary community joined by local artists and cultural workers.

The keynote address afforded me the opportunity to integrate ideas from various fields that I had not previously attempted to synthesize: feminist theory, aesthetics and peacebuilding. My presentation was, and these notes are, still very partial and rough, but I welcome suggestions and comments from readers about how to more fully understand the core synergy among women, creativity and peacebuilding, which I take to center on questions of epistemology. I believe there may be important insights to be uncovered if this inquiry could be engaged more fully.

1. Dilemmas of the assignment.

Of course: Many women engaging communities through the arts to contribute to peacebuilding in creative ways; of course the arts themselves are contributing to peacebuilding in myriad ways. But we also know that there are many men engaging communities through the arts to contribute to peacebuilding in creative ways; and we know that women both intentionally and unintentionally participate in, and benefit from, and sometimes, from positions of power, even perpetuate systems of violence and oppression. We also know that while the forms of the arts – music, film, performance, visual arts, poetry, etc., are being crafted to contribute to peace, these forms are being used in both subtle and horribly overt ways to inflict harm (as when music is used as part of regimes of torture) and perpetuate systems of enmity (as in militaristic anthems and calls to arms).

So while honoring the powerful and creative and courageous women who are contributing to building peace in their communities, I do want to avoid a simple celebration, and try to understand at a deeper level the nature of the synergies among the three large spheres of 1) art/creativity/culture; 2) peace and justice seeking; and 3) women and feminist critiques of patriarchal values and gender norms. In doing this, I will say that I am stepping into waters just a bit over my head, so I offer this inside of a few question marks: do you think this is a valuable trajectory of inquiry? What other theories and approaches should be brought into the conversation among ideas that I am proposing here? So often in the peacebuilding field, which requires an understanding of such a wide range of disciplines -- law, economics, social psychology, anthropology, theology, literature, dispute resolution, etc. -- we enter into conversations with people who know more than we do about whatever we are discussing, so I’m looking forward to learning from responses to these notes.

1. Questions of epistemology: ways of knowing, understanding and making meaning.

One point of connection among creativity, women and peacebuilding can be found in overlaps among feminist epistemology, and the ways of knowing that are cultivated by aesthetic engagement and required by peacebuilding practice. Epistemological questions address not so much what we know, but ratherhow we know, in the ways we approach the relationship between the knower and what is known, and in the ways in which we construct meaning of ourselves and the world.

In suggesting this, I draw on the Quaker educator Parker Palmer, who argues that every model of knowing contains its own moral trajectory, its own ethical direction and outcomes. “Every epistemology tends to become an ethic, and every way of knowing tends to become a way of living,” he writes in “Community, Conflict and Ways of Knowing.”‘Objectivism’ is the hallmark of much of scholarly knowledge. This refersto the imperative to“hold everything at arm’s length” to avoid “contamination by subjective prejudice and bias”; and analytic, chopping objects up into small pieces to serve our understanding of what makes them tick; and experimental, that is, according to Palmer, our freedom to take dissected objects and move the pieces round the reshape the world in a way that is more pleasing to us, asserting this ‘power over the world.’

In contrast, the kinds of knowing required for restorative justice/reconciliation, for trauma healing, for conflict transformation is about relatedness. How do we come to know something, or someone, or some situation in ways that facilitate trust between the knower and the known? How can our inquiries honor indigenous knowledges and, in some cases, invest in enhancing the meaning-construction capacities of those whose lives we seek to understand?

Furthermore, for building peace, a key capacity is the ability to understanding suffering of the other. For this, we need an approach to understanding that encourages the engagement of both the heart and the mind. We must cultivate cognitive awareness that embraces feeling; embodied alertness that remains calm; and profound engagement that remains, paradoxically, detached.

Feminist theories about knowledge construction, and aesthetic modes of understanding, are strongly aligned with these peacebuilding imperatives. Both tend to link cognition with embodied, relational, emotional and sensory modes of understanding the world and constructing meaning. And both aesthetic modes of apprehension and feminist notions of knowledge construction rest on collaborative and collective processes of meaning-making and knowledge construction, requiring keen listening to those whose perspectives are different and, sometimes even opposed. Parker Palmer writes that feminist epistemology tends to put the tools of objectivity, analysis and experimentation in the context of the relational nature of reality, and in tension with other ways of knowing, such as the ways of intimacy, the way of personally implicating oneself with one’s subject. When engaged in this sort of inquiry, we bring that which we seek to understand close to our hearts, allowing “objectivity and intimacy to walk hand in hand.”

In socio-political contexts that require peacebuilding – for instance in the midst of direct and structural violence, and in the aftermath of human rights abuses, and in contexts of gross inequality and the kind of injury to cultural systems of meaning-making that accompanies colonization – regard for the sensibilities of adversaries and enemies is often lacking. In contexts like these, artists’ can choose to restore the quality of respect into a community practices by virtue of the way that the forms they create are calibrated to the sensory capacities and proclivities of the other. Their works can be crafted to mediate tensions – for instance between the individual and the collective, innovation and tradition, rigidity and chaos, challenge and support -- in ways that can reach beneath people’s defenses and support metacognitive awareness among people on all sides of conflicts.

To illustrate the connections among feminist knowledge construction, aesthetic ways of apprehending and interpreting the world, and the kinds of knowing required for peacebuilding, I turn next to the words of two women artists, one a poet and one a theatre artist: Adrienne Rich and Ana Correa.

1. Adrienne Rich on poetic ways of apprehending the world and constructing meaning.

According to the American lesbian feminist poet Adrienne rich, engaging with poetry is urgent not because of what it helps us know, but how it helps us know. Poetry, she writes, “makes us aware of states of longing and desire.”

For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still-uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, torture and bribes, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom – that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the “free” market. This ongoing future, written off over and over, is still within view. All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented: through collective action, through many kinds of art. – Adrienne Rich, ‘Poetry and Commitment’

Metaphor, Rich argues, the ability to see resemblance in difference, lies close to the core of poetry, and, she writes, “is the only hope for a humane civil life.” In language that peacebuilders will surely find familiar, she adds: “The eye for likeness in the midst of contrast, the appeal to recognition, the association of thing to thing, spiritual fact with embodied form, begins here. And so begins the suggestion of multiple, many-layered, rather than singular, meanings, wherever we look, in the ordinary world.” Rich’s injunction to seek multiple meanings aligns strongly with the “embrace of paradoxical curiosity” that is a core discipline of the moral imagination identified by the peacebuilding scholar/practitioner John Paul Lederach in his book The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace.”

Rich concludes her book What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics in this way:

Forms, colors, sensuous relationships, rhythm, textures, tones, transmutations of energy, all belong to the natural world. Before humans arrived, their power was there; they were nameless yet not powerless. To touch their power, humans had to name them: whorl, branch, rift, stipple, crust, cone, striation, froth, sponge, flake, fringe, gully, rut, tuft, grain, bunch, slime, scale, spine, streak, globe. Over so many millennia, so many cultures, humans have reached into preexisting nature and made art: to celebrate, to drive off evil, to nourish memory, to conjure the desired visitation.

The revolutionary artist, the relayer of possibility, draws on such powers, in opposition to a technocratic society’s hatred of multiformity, hatred of the natural world, hatred of the body, hatred of darkness and women, hatred of disobedience. The revolutionary poet loves people, rivers, other creatures, stones, trees inseparably from art, is not ashamed of any of these loves, and for them conjures a language that is public, intimate, inviting, terrifying and beloved.

1. Comments from Ana Corea of Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani and from Dr. Salomon Lerner Febres, President of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

As documented in the Acting Together anthology and toolkit, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, a noted Peruvian theatre ensemble that has developed relationships with indigenous communities over 40 years, was invited in the aftermath of the civil war to accompany Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In an interview at Brandeis University, Yuyachkani’s Ana Corea, spoke eloquently about themes related to this inquiry: embodied knowledge and the reciprocity between women recovering from violence and herself, as a theatre artist working with them and their stories. These stories can be found in the Acting Together toolkit, in a short video entitled Ana Correa and Roberto Varea, Peru: Performances Addressing Gender-Based Violence:

Ana Correa: I think the entire world is committing atrocities against women. A woman’s body has been converted into a space for war. Many women preferred to give testimony (to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission) about the disappearance of their sons and husbands, and did not give weight to being raped by the armed forces… In Rosa Cuchillo and these meetings with all these women, we search in our memories for what we have of our grandmothers, of our homes, of our culture, to reconstruct ourselves and to continue to grow. Because we cannot live our lives defending ourselves, we must reconstruct ourselves to live. We search for our strength.

I started to do theatre within a very oppressed society, where many poor people exist. And throughout these years, I had to lend my body to many women and a lot of pain. Also at times I feel, and say to myself, “I am going to die and I have not achieved any social transformation.” Thus, when I act, I give strength to myself at the same time. And then I realize that what I do is simple, but important, for those few people who watch me. Because I do not do movies or radio. I do theatre which lives in the moment of the representation. The moment of the encounter with the other is so intense that it allows me to heal.

Dr. Salomon Lerner Febres, a moral philosopher who was president of Peru’s TRC, was responsible for inviting Yuyachkani to precede the Commission into the indigenous villages to help people prepare to testify before the Commission if they chose to. Yuyachkani engaged communities through traditional rituals, theatrical performances and conversation, resulting in the Truth Commission receiving testimony from hundreds of indigenous people who might otherwise not have testified. At a conference at Brandeis, Dr. Lerner presented “Memory of Violence and Drama in Peru: The Experience of the Truth Commission and Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani,” commenting on the critical role that theatre can play in justice-seeking in the aftermath of gross violations of human rights. His comments address the qualities of presence and the modes of knowing that are required in these contexts:

Dr. Lerner: In bringing theater to public paces, Yuyachkani demonstrated its commitment to justice. It was a way of underlining that it was not enough to be on the side of the victims and marginalized peoples. One had to be AT their side. A theatrical act is not an event already endowed with authority and legitimacy but rather it acquires these through interaction with its audience. A Theatrical performance is an emblematic example of how meaning in a work of art gets constructed through, with and for a community. Meaning emerges only then and is never predetermined. It is only fully fleshed out in action before an audience…. (p.11)

Theater is a natural ally to transitional justice in that both emphasize participation and only therein the emergence of meaning…. (p.11)

…Acts of justice are capable, indeed, of producing changes in subjectivity, which in turn led to significant social change. For example, those who previously felt marginalized and underrepresented by the law can afterward lift their faces and feel themselves full participants in civic life, aware of their rights. Others receive the message that they will not be able to perpetrate their crimes nor act out their racist and exclusive sentiments and escape punishment by society and its institutions.

Theatrical performance offers parallel benefits, in bringing similarly new faces onto its stages and into its scenes. This act of representation sends a new message to those historically excluded, conveying to them that their lives deserve to be told, and that their suffering, along with their dreams, merits a place on theater’s stages. In giving, in a most powerful way, this leading role to those always excluded from Peru’s official history, the dramatic art of Yuyachkani became a very worthy complement to the efforts of the Commission, which might be summer up in a word: recognition. It is therefore that in speaking on the prospects for transformation through art in the aftermath of conflict, the work of this theatre group comes to the fore, as a case worthy of taking into account on an international scale.

…..The reconstruction of memory will always call for words, for the discursive recovery of the past, tor the formulation in terms of legislative norms and interpretive histories of the atrocious experience of violence. But that is not all. Facing the past also involves work in the domain of feelings, in the emotive realms, in reconstructing also the visual and auditory dimensions of the drama….Art and memory dovetail naturally: Art restores meaning in bringing us, as responsible human beings, face to face with the undeniable facts and circumstances. Through this encounter with the undeniable, withour collective life captured in a work of visual or dramatic art, we are perfecting our moral judgment, and, above all, feeling the challenge and hearing the call to act, for the sake of our own ethical identities. This maybe the key to the transformative power of art over a violent past that seems irredeemable, immutable, but which is always subject to the creative force of our imagination. (p.12)

Conclusion: In these pages I have laid out a rough outline for the shape of an argument that synergies can be found in feminist epistemologies, aesthetic modes of knowing and peacebuilding theory and practice. It is an early version of a paper that, I believe, is still in need of more extensive inquiry, particularly into feminist epistemologies, and examples from artists and peacebuilders working in different parts of the world, using different art forms, working with communities addressing violence of different kinds and at different stages. I hope to deliver a more refined version of this paper at the International Peace Research Association Conference in August, 2014, and welcome critiques as well as suggestions about the structure of this draft and about additional theoretical and practical material to incorporate.