by Hari Ziyad
Afterward, three hundred campfire barricades were erected across Cherán for security purposes, including one in each of the city’s four neighborhoods. They became known collectively as the fogatas and doubled as nightly meeting places for the town to discuss governance. According to international watchdog against state repression El Enemigo Común, “Each fogata would send proposals and a representative to neighborhood assemblies and then to community assemblies. The fogata element of the communal government in Cherán was the only new element” to be added to its historical stateless form of governance.
BBC reporter Linda Pressly writes that Michoacán, the state in which the Purépecha community of Cherán resides, has one of the highest rates of violent crime in the country. But this violence, of course, is facilitated by centuries of colonialism and exploitation, which cannot be removed from the state government the people of Cherán rebelled against. And in the town’s previous year, as Pressly writes with palpable surprise, without state police and the politicians who use them to punish their opposition, there have been no recorded murders, kidnappings, or disappearances. These acts would still be referred to the attorney general if they were to occur, but the town deals with other transgressions—which have mostly been alcohol related since the uprising—primarily through alternatives such as fines and service.
I don’t want to romanticize Cherán, where I have not been and whose people I do not know. These exact strategies cannot possibly work for every community, and certainly anti-Blackness would throw another wrench into any plans for a Black community liberated from police and prisons. Even some other Mexican towns that have tried to follow Cherán’s revolutionary model have failed. But the city is just one example among many others showing that what we are told is impossible is not.
No one would be surprised by this story if we did not operate under colonized understandings and carceral thinking. A police state has never been inevitable. Of course it is possible to trust each other more than we trust our oppressors. Across the globe, there are histories of Indigenous communities without police and prisons, and if I have realized anything through therapy and ancestor communication, it’s that our past is never gone forever.
Repairing the fracture caused by carceral dissonance and becoming whole with our childhoods requires abolition because it means trusting ourselves to be more than mindless monsters who would violate each other as soon as police are no longer there to keep us in our place.
Abolition doesn’t propose that once prisons are gone, all society’s ills will disappear. It proposes that illness is meant to be treated in the first place, not locked away. It proposes that we commit to finding ways to treat our ills now, together, no matter how impossible or dangerous or childish the world might make it seem.
“It’s just impossible,” my sister Ganga said when she called me a few years ago to talk about her on-again-off-again husband, Śiva. At the time, they were off.
“I’ve been trying to make it work, but I think we would both be healthier apart. I don’t think he’s ready to heal.”
“I mean, are any of us?” I asked, not completely serious. I love Śiva and was sorry to see things end up this way. But I had witnessed the fraying of their relationship enough times to know beforehand that this was coming, and each time it came closer to finality. And each time I knew Ganga was right.
“He’s just so emotionally immature. I want to believe I can work with him, but I can’t,” she said. “And now he refuses to send my belongings to school, so I was going to go pick them up. Will you come with me?”
Ganga couched the request in her need for someone to drive the U-Haul because she had to drive her SUV, but I interpreted that to mean she was also worried. I knew from Mata what an expert at hiding their worry looks like, and Ganga is the most like our mother of all of us. Maybe she was also looking for alternatives to a situation with impossible answers. Maybe she didn’t feel completely comfortable to confront Śiva on her own. Maybe she didn’t want Śiva harmed by potential police violence if she turned to them for help instead, even if he would not take responsibility for his own harms against her yet.
Ganga said Śiva had never been physically violent with her, and he doesn’t seem to me like that type of person, but they never do. Her ex-boyfriend Andrew didn’t seem like that type of person either, but he was. I once said to her that I wished she would have told me about Andrew when that happened, that I would have killed him, even though I was still a teenager at the time. That I was sad and angry at everything that got in the way of us having the type of relationship where she could tell me those things. I was doing that thing I sometimes still do where I make a woman’s problems all about how I should be able to save them. The offer to accompany her was, I guess, her way of offering healing into that relationship, of reclaiming it for a new future. If you want to be there for me, here is your chance. And so, even though I had lost my glasses and couldn’t really see well enough to drive, I told her yes. Of course I will go. We will get your belongings. I will be there for you.
When we got to the door, my heart was pounding. Śiva is a big man. I hadn’t gotten into a fight in years, and though I didn’t think it would come to that, I didn’t even want to consider the possibility of breaking that streak with someone I loved, and still do. A part of me wanted to just have Ganga call the police and have them deal with it. That would have been easier. So much easier.
When you find yourself facing real conflict, what it means to want alternatives to police and prisons comes into clearer, more damning focus, even if you are missing your glasses. When you’re up against someone who is not ready to heal, coming to them with an approach based on healing is not always easy. Getting involved in these situations can cause oneself physical harm or exacerbate the situation for the more vulnerable party later. But it is these moments, where there is no easy answer, that matter most. It is in moments of crisis that Korryn Gaines’s words really come into play.
Showing up for my sisters has always been difficult, which is probably why Ganga and I didn’t have the kind of relationship where she could tell me everything before I started to get back in touch with my childhood, and therefore my courage. It’s also probably why I could tell Śiva didn’t expect to see me there. When he did, his voice softened. He addressed me calmly, aimed all his aggression at Ganga, his wife, the most vulnerable. He protested to her when I went in to take what she said she needed. No physical altercation ever occurred, but I felt the exhaustion of showing up for my sister in my body all the same.
The police would later tell Ganga that, because she and Śiva were married, the law said that she could not take anything from their home. The law said nothing she owned was hers. This was the solution she was supposed to turn to.
A few months ago, a friend experienced a mental health crisis and announced their intentions for suicide on Facebook. Charleena Lyles had recently been killed by Seattle police after having her own mental breakdown, and I knew bringing police into this situation would be inviting the very entity that had just demonstrated the propensity to worsen all my friend’s problems. I immediately threw on a coat and called a car to get to my friend’s apartment as soon as possible. But still I turned hesitantly to my fiancé, feeling in my anxious body the same exhaustion I’d felt at Ganga’s house, and asked, “Should we call the police?”
What do Black people who want to commit to abolition do when we have a crisis and cannot put out the fire on our own? What do we do when we are under threat? Violated? Attacked? Living through a global health pandemic? When our loved ones are killed? The state presents us with one answer on purpose. The state makes police and prisons seem inevitable on purpose. Without the state enforcing laws to keep our lives in order, no one would ever be safe, we are told.
But I have never been safe.
Ganga and her belongings were never safe. My friend was never safe. The only options the state gives are meant to create the illusion of safety. Are meant to make sure we can go on li
ving without a connection to our childhoods, and call that living. If the police don’t immediately kill our loved ones in a crisis, they are here only to make sure that our loved ones can go on living without wanting to.
“Let’s just get there first,” Timothy said as I shook with the possibility of my friend suffering, a caring reminder of what was at stake. “We’re only ten minutes away,” he reasoned, giving off a calm that resembled my mother and that I did not envy but needed nonetheless.
Sure enough, when we got to our friend’s apartment, the police had just broken down the door. As someone who has experienced my own home being smashed into, I can imagine that this was its own compounding trauma. But our friend was still conscious and would be okay—as okay as anyone can be when they decide not to be here anymore and others decide otherwise for them and call that love. I still don’t know the answer to the question my friend and colleague Amber Butts poses in an essay for RaceBaitr: “Are the ones we love able to choose death, or is our relationship with them about ownership, possession, and obligation? If it is, we are not allowed living or dying as our full selves.”46
I’m not sure whether refusing to call the police in that specific instance, or even wanting to stop my friend from taking their own life in the first place, was a more legitimate love, but I’m sure that building a world that my friend wants to live in is. And I’m sure that this world, with all its prisons, both physical and otherwise and made of our own carceral ideologies, is not that one.
I’m sure that I have work to do to create the new world my friend deserved. That I deserved as a child. That Susan Blockson and Eric and Auntie Cheryl and Mother Bhūmi deserved. I’m sure that I can try harder to heal from my own abusive ways that contribute to making this world so punitive. I’m sure that I can try harder to ensure that all my responses to crises, both my own and those of others, are based in healing, which would require them not to involve an abusive police force, even when it’s scary or dangerous or exhausting.
I can better prepare for another situation like my friend’s crisis by laying out in advance the conditions for whom to call and when. I can better help others prepare for other crises, like by assisting my sister and friends who might need help in buying weapons for self-defense, and by committing to learning skills myself so that none of us have to rely on the state’s claim to defend us. I can do a better job at being ready to challenge anyone who might abuse others in my presence, including myself. I can do a better job of not turning every challenge into a power play of punishment. I can let my neighbors know that in the middle of a public health crisis, they can rely on me to pick up groceries when they aren’t able to do so themselves. I can do a better job of letting my loved ones know that I will always be there if they need me, and I can do a better job at actually showing up.
I know better is possible because when I was a child and looked in Mother Bhūmi’s face at her worst, I still saw my grandmother. I know better is possible because it wasn’t until later that I started seeing the face of my own grandma as nothing more than a nightmare. I know better is possible because I saw Mata searching for better, and I am still her son. I am still her son after all we’ve been through.
There is no void that prisons and punishment leave behind that is imperative to fill. Prisons and punishment are the void. Over centuries they have ripped my family away from each other. Anything else that I ask for, everything else that I ask for, is at least a step closer to our childhoods. Anything other than prisons and punishment brings me at least a little closer back to a sense of wholeness.
“It makes me want to cry remembering that day,” Margarita Elvira Romero, one of the women who conspired against the Cherán loggers, told Pressly about the day of the uprising. “It was like a horror movie—but it was the best thing we could have done.”
Abolition in practice sometimes feels like a colonizer’s idea of a horror movie, especially in the midst of a pandemic, and it matters that this is what Romero told Pressly and how Pressly translated it. Truly healing from this monstrous violence means acknowledging the monsters everywhere, which includes those in ourselves. And I’d be a damn liar if I said that didn’t make me want to cry sometimes. I’d be a damn liar if I said it isn’t hard when I see Mother Bhūmi’s face in my mother. In the mirror. In Eric and Śiva, too. But the carceral state wants us to be afraid of these difficult feelings for a reason. We owe it to ourselves to refuse how they condition fear and horror. We owe it to our children. I owe it to myself.
Because those walks with Mother Bhūmi around the block are still the best things I could have ever done. Because I couldn’t have done them without beginning to understand again that alternatives to this carceral world exist. Without beginning to understand again the kind of love I used to know. I used to wish every day since she died that I could have gone on one last walk around the block with my grandma. I wished and wished that my childhood self could have seen her the way I came to know her when I started facing my nightmares, convinced that the childhood version of me had run out of time. But where he had run was never the end of the story.
EPILOGUE
A PRAYER FOR MY GRANDMOTHER
Hari-Gaura,
There was one walk I took with Mother Bhūmi where she barely spoke a word the entire time. This had never happened before, at least not the whole way through. Even during the strolls where I zoned out as she prattled on—and this was most of them—Grandma hardly skipped two beats of her monologues, requiring less that I show I was listening than that I allow her room to speak, just like Daddy.
Not this time. This time, I helped our grandmother slide her small feet into her beaded flats, held her arm gently as she glided down the front steps from the foyer of the Beechwood house, and waited for her lecture to begin as I assisted her to the sidewalk, but it never did.
“Is something wrong?” I asked, zipping up my jacket in the brisk wind and double-checking to make sure hers was fastened, too.
“No,” she replied calmly, tightening her head wrap before it came loose.
I waited impatiently as we slowly made our way to the first cross street, and then to the main street, Taylor Road, where we took a right turn, and then to the next corner, where we turned right again to circle back home, but an elaboration never came. Mother Bhūmi looked fine enough. Much sturdier physically than the final time we would go on one of our walks. In fact, there would come a few years yet until that fateful day.
But on that day, the silence worried me more than her trembling voice ever could. I couldn’t seem to find any suitable resting place for my hands, so I improvised something of an odd dance with my arms as my palms leaked sweat. My jaw clenched and unclenched just for the sake of the noise the pressure created in my head, killing my teeth in the process. I wasn’t used to having to sit in the silence with our grandmother, and purely in order to keep the comfort of familiarity, I would welcome even a loud and dying thing before something quietly alive.
I’ll never know for sure what was going through Grandma’s mind then, but this time it wasn’t room to speak that she was asking for. I believe now that she was reminding me that some things don’t have to make noise to be present, and that it’s important to listen to those things, too.
I think Mother Bhūmi was showing me that, like you, I might not one day hear her—I may not even see her—but that wouldn’t mean she wasn’t always there. That wouldn’t mean she wasn’t always okay. That wouldn’t mean I couldn’t always be okay in my relationship to her, even though so much had gone unsaid. I think now that she was preparing me to face the anxiety of the social isolation wreaked by this global pandemic. I think she was preparing me how to love and receive love when people don’t or can’t always show up the way I’m used to them showing up. How to love when I can’t show up the way that the other person and I are used to.
“Is this working for you?” my therapist asked at the end of our last session. “Are you able to recognize when your Inner Child is communicating with yo
u outside of this room, and to care for them?”
“I think I am getting better at it,” I reply. “But that’s for Hari-Gaura to say, isn’t it?”
My therapist just smiled and checked for the time. “Well, you look to be managing, and I’m proud of you. But we have to end here.”
I don’t know if I will always recognize you, but I notice you with me so much more now. A few days ago, as our father barreled on about attempts at his emasculation, I could feel you here. I could hear you asking me to reject my complacency in the familiarity of this monologue for your sake. And I finally worked up a courage I hadn’t really found before to actually challenge him to be accountable. And when I asked, as lovingly as I could, why he and Mata never warned their children of the known child predators in the Hare Kṛṣṇa community—a question you deserved someone demand an answer to—he interrupted his defensiveness to offer a sincere apology, albeit a very brief one.
“Son,” he said with a weighty sigh, “I should have protected you better. I really should have protected you better.”
And Mata still vigorously holds on to the belief that these same communities are the best protection one can offer their children, even with their child predators and without addressing their entrenched misafropedia. Sometimes I think this still means she can’t always see the violence against children that occurs in the name of her faith. But it was through knowing that you were here, needing me to, that I managed to overcome my fear of rejection to ask her to read this book and to address what I’d learned about the horrors in the history of New Vṛindaban. And she did.