Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Justice Movement
Edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarisinha
AK Press, 2020; 347 pages; $26.95
Reviewed by Natasha Sanders-Kay
If, like me, you are haunted by the times you’ve called 911 because you genuinely didn’t know what else to do, this book is for you. Its power and utility cannot be understated: This. Thing. Is. Gold.
While there’s been growing understanding in recent years about the “why” of transformative justice, the “how” has remained elusive for those of us who don’t know where to look. The editors of Beyond Survival, long-time organizers Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, have lovingly culled case studies, toolkits, essays, excerpts, interviews, guides, diagrams, work- sheets, and workshop materials from dozens of activists and organizers, collectives and coalitions, pilot studies and projects, to fill this void. The result is a rich reservoir of resources reflecting decades of life-saving labour by everyday people who not only believe, but actively demonstrate in daily practice that transformative justice (TJ) is possible, that there are ways to interrupt violence and crisis without relying on the violence of police, prisons, and the criminal “justice” system, or even punishment per se. These people are women and femmes, LGBTQ2+ and BIPOC, disabled and low-income, sex workers and prison abolitionists, migrants, survivors, and others marginalized by all sorts of intersecting isms; they are people who’ve cultivated creative and myriad ways of preventing, intervening in, and healing from violence in their communities, out of necessity, out of survival, and outside the systems that are trying to kill them.
Beyond Survival shares an array of stories and strategies around what this can look like, from defense and intervention training to intentional accountability processes, from murder investigations to safe spaces and crisis lines — all created by and for the communities in which they serve. Read this book and learn how one incest survivor intervened in her father’s abuse of her half-sister. Read tips from Kai Cheng Thom on “What to Do When You’ve been Abusive.” Learn about initiatives like the Audre Lorde project’s Safe OUTside the System (SOS) Collective, which created a network of “Safe Spaces” in Brooklyn for people fleeing violence, including local businesses trained to counter homophobia and transphobia; and you won’t want to miss excerpts from the same collective’s comprehensive Safer Party Toolkit. Read these and more
Complexity and nuance are emphasized throughout this book; the authors stress that what works in one situation won’t necessarily work in another, and that there’s nothing simple or easy about any of this, especially when those who harm are part of our community networks, people who exist in our families, social circles, workplaces, resource systems, and movements. Tensions are teased out between binaries like survivor/perpetrator (we’ve all harmed and been harmed at some point), love/hate (many of us love our abusers), keep/banish (banning is not always possible, useful, or desirable), and success/failure of a TJ process (every process teaches us something). We are cautioned away from judgement and rigidity and nudged toward humility, learning, and compassion — toward ways we can make accountability a gift.
Refrains throughout this anthology: TJ is hard. TJ takes time. TJ’s exhausting. TJ is messy. Contributors are blunt about challenges like burnout and boundaries, but it’s refreshing to see progressive responses to these realities, like allowing for breaks in lengthy processes, and offering a variety of roles with room for stepping back when needed. part Four includes a lot of reflection from “TJ old heads” about lessons from the past and thoughts for the future, eager to engage readers in the work. As Shira Hassan of Young Women’s Empowerment project and Just practice puts it: “All any one of us who started trying to do TJ was ever talking about was the reality of our lives.
And like, transformative justice has to embrace all the intersections of who we are in a real way, and that’s why we need so many people to try shit. I just want people to try shit. Just try something. Write down what worked. Write down what didn’t work. And let’s just keep moving on. Let’s just keep going and collecting it.”
Another refrain: TJ is worth it.