To celebrate National Women’s Day, Barnard will host the African Women’s Rights and Resilience symposium with Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee, co-sponsored by the Gbowee Peace Foundation, Barnard’s Africana Studies Department, the Athena Center for Women’s Leadership, BCRW, and the Barnard College President’s office. The symposium will consist of three panel discussions addressing integral points of continental women’s movements: “Women’s Rights and Transnational Feminisms,” “African Men and Feminisms,” and “Intergenerational Organizing.”
This semester, I am taking Professor Tina Campt‘s Feminist Theory course, a staple for any Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies major. I was happy to discover that this semester’s course is co-taught with Ms. Gbowee. I often find myself treading the lines between optimism and realism, so it is easy to understand why, when reading that Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee would be co-teaching this course, I assumed the syllabus had a typo. After reading excerpts from her book, Mighty Be Our Powers, and watching the film Pray the Devil Back to Hell, I was in disbelief as Ms. Gbowee casually walked into my classroom, sat down and introduced herself. I don’t think I am adequately expressing the gravity of this moment: Leymah Gbowee walked into my class–MY classroom–she who helped lead a women’s peace movement with a coalition of Muslim and Christian women, helping to bring an end to the Second Liberian Civil War and to fight the violence against women’s bodies. I could go on and on about her incredible work, but I will spare you the time. Instead I will focus on how she approached our class discussion.
During this class Professor Campt proposed that we interrogate the relationship between “agency”, “resilience”, and “redress”. What stood out to me in particular was the definition of redress. Saidiya Hartman writes in Scenes of Subjection: “redress is a remembering of the social body that occurs precisely in the recognition and articulation of devastation articulation of the broken body.” Redress becomes synonymous with restorative justice.
Ms. Gbowee approached this discussion through the physicality of students’ bodies. She asked two students to join her in the front of the class as she tied them together at the wrists with her scarf. She then asked them to walk in opposite directions and separate themselves. When they were unable to, she elaborated on how progress is limited if we are burdened down by the individuals who harm us. Their bodies were used as representation for ways in which we can begin to attain restorative justice, first through the act of forgiveness. Forgiveness is not to be conflated with forgetting, or passive acceptance of malice, never to be mistaken for weakness, because it requires true strength to forgive those who have committed heinous acts against you.