Helena Silvestre (São Paulo)
Sometimes I think that any Black man, like me,
Just wants his own piece of land in the hills.
No bling, barefoot, swimming in the stream,
no hunger, picking fruit from the tree. Bro, that’s what I think and that too is my dream,
but in São Paulo God is a hundred- dollar bill.
Racionais MC’s (2002): “Vida loka, parte 2”, on the album Nada como un
día después de otro día.
Guide to our journey
This text is born out of a powerful and vibrant alliance that has been developing across the world between women thinkers and activists. These women are from different territories in which violence and violations take place against women and bodies which dissent from the norm. These violences take on forms which are sometimes comparable, and sometimes very dissimilar. However all are imbued with specific characteristics that accumulate as historical, social, political and subjective layers in the development of peoples. Through this text, I seek to provide a contribution to the search for answers to a number of questions. What would justice be, if it were conceived from multiple feminist perspectives? How would it be created and manifest? What is the role of self-defence in this? What can be done in the struggle against violence and violations suffered by women and queer people? How can this be achieved without increasing the oppression imposed upon us? How can it be achieved whilst breaking the cycle of giving away ever more power over our bodies and territories to the same people who violate and are violent toward them?
It is not my intention to provide a precise response to these questions, a single answer devoid of contradictions. Such a task would not only be impossible, but also rather arrogant. What underlies this writing, on the contrary, is the honest desire to share reflections on the historical processes that impact us, the contradictions that inhabit our struggles, and the possibilities that would seem ill-advised or impossible within the narrow limits for the imagination drawn by the prevailing paradigms that inform the current hegemonic production of ideas.
From the starting point of situated research, I will examine certain assumptions that (in my opinion) require scrutiny. These assumptions have their origin in the process of colonisation of the place where I live and work, the place where I develop my thinking: Brazil. I will then present some reflections on the interplay between racism and misogyny in our societal and subjective development, something which has given rise to the establishment of institutions and structures – with the state playing a central role. I will raise the issue of the hierarchical structuring of life that has grown from their origins and persists into the present.
After preparing the ground by challenging certain truths that underpin some of our conceptions of justice, we will be ready to explore what exactly this thing we call justice is. We will also look at how this way of managing conflicts in collective life was used before the emergence of the state as the dominant social institution. In this text, I recover ancient practices of conflict regulation where communal force is amplified and sophisticated, rather than weakened through a delegation of power to structures we cannot control. I also share ideas about what kind of justice we are capable of forging, through feminist approaches, by analysing everyday experiences in urban land housing occupations, or squats, and in favelas, where, despite being territorially dispersed, we act together as self-organised militant units.
The colonisation of our everyday lives
It is impossible to truly understand this colonial invention called Brazil without firstly examining its underpinning foundations. Those foundations are racism and colonisation. There are numerous tiresome debates about which came first: the chicken or the egg, sexism or racism? In real life, both patriarchy (as we know it) and racism came to these lands simultaneously; inseparable, by boat. They descended from their heinous Portuguese caravels, at the captaincy of those who sought to be annihilators of worlds.
Here, in these lands which have been misnamed Brazil, they found a constellation of nearly a thousand different peoples 2 living side by side who (unlike other pre-colonial Latin American societies) were not organised into imperial structures, but maintained parallel, coexisting societies with different forms of organisation, traditions, languages and customs. The Western gaze defined these, our forms of life, as the most primitive of the primitive. They attributed this way of existing to natural abundance and underdeveloped technology. They – in their limited skills of perception – found no trace of power, politics or social organisation. For years, these peoples helped and fed the Portuguese, who arrived on the coast filthy and starving, teaching them what food was within a vast jungle of which the invaders knew nothing.
To this constellation of peoples was added another, made up of more than four million people belonging to many African peoples, mostly abducted from Nigeria, Dahomey, Côte d’Ivoire, Congo, Angola and Mozambique. They carried with them, in their battered and bruised bodies, memories of different forms of social organisation built up in their places of origin and destroyed by Western violence.
It is not for nothing that what we call the Brazilian state was the last country in the world to abolish slavery. Ever since its creation its apparatus has been geared to the organisation of plunder, the annihilation of pre-colonial forms of social management, epistemicide, enslavement, pillage and the regulation of all non-white lives. This regulation was constructed according to a notion of racialisation 3 that drew a deeply profound line of separation between a small group of humans and the rest, the millions of ‘sub-humans’. For the former, the state guaranteed the monopoly of violence. The first policing force landed in these lands in 1532, accompanying the Portuguese Martim Afonso de Sousa, sent to expel the French and establish rules of occupation throughout the territory.
Thus the state began to take shape as the only valid form of social organisation, the only legitimised apparatus for the exercise of violence. It was later conceived by Hegel as an ethical totality, outside of which everything else is unethical. The state is established from the outset as an indispensable instrument for mercantilism and colonial extractivism. That is to say, it is an instrument for stealing resources, for stealing vital energy through labour, for stealing time, history, and the past. In short, it is put to use to steal the very human condition from the subjects it plunders.
Race, gender and class. Contradiction in the belly of the colonising beast.
Those subjugated were not human in the eyes of the colonisers, but they were human in their own eyes. They may have been seen as soulless, but they gave their spirit to resistance in the innumerable Black, indigenous and Afro-indigenous revolts. These are not called revolutions simply because they were not recognisable as such to white thinking.
As peoples, we have been defeated many times, almost as many times as there have been attempts at liberation, disproportionately repressed by genocide, which has affected old and young alike. But the defeat was never final. Our languages survived, let us not forget, despite prohibitions, in the candomblé terreiros.4 The defeat was never definitive. Even now, 374 indigenous languages are spoken here, with all their respective ways of thinking that they codify, and with the epistemologies that accompany them. The defeat was never definitive and, though we were expelled – uprooted – from our places, we continue to rebuild communities in the favelas.
In the period following the abolition of slavery, once the insurgent power of the subjugated was recognised, the systematic development of raciality as a device was set in motion. The science to underpinned it was produced. The legal framework was established, one that guaranteed subhumans a legal existence, while at the same time attacking their actual existence. Finally, the biopower was organised, pathologising difference by establishing a single form as the standard.
The favela stands against this device of raciality (updated into modernity). It carries ancient wisdoms. They may be disconnected from their cosmologies, but they are to be found in orphaned epistemological intersections on which the traces of the most useful philosophies for survival have been engraved. Although their origins, or where they sat in the lineages of previous revolt cannot be pinpointed, they are inscribed in its workings. In this context, the meaning of what it is to be a woman is compressed between the encounter of various vestiges of ancestry on the one hand, and the normalising pressure of the sexist and racial apparatus on the other.
Although social recognition is still reserved for white men and, more rarely, for racialised men, it is women who sustain the favela community, its mechanisms of self-defence, and the oral transmission of the underlying knowledge and ethical elements. I would like to point out here that no feminism that is not fundamentally anti-racist is viable in the territories of the favelas. This is because, before recognising our existence as women (in much broader terms than what the West understands by this word), it is necessary to recognise our existence as humans, subject and subjected to the device of raciality.
The challenge for feminisms to define the meaning of the term “justice” is also embedded in this. White thought uses laws to make the state the automatic repository of the exercise of justice. However, in the historical experience of racialised bodies, the state is the main agent of injustice.
Justice. The fundamental basis of the law is a lie.
Article 5 of the Brazilian Constitution states: “All persons are equal before the law, without any distinction whatsoever”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Firstly, we are not equal, but quite the opposite. Difference is perhaps one of the main characteristics of all living beings. These differences, recognised as such, have coexisted in this territory for centuries. Secondly, we were never equal before the law either, since the article represents a pact between whites with property, power and titles. The regulation was then imposed on the racialised masses, who were expropriated of their territories, knowledge and mechanisms for organising life. For its part, Article 1 of the same constitution states: “All power emanates from the people, who exercise it through their elected representatives or directly as provided by this Constitution”. Thus, power comes from the people, as long as it is exercised in the forms recognised by the white-owner pact. But not outside of that. Outside of that, there is nothing. In the face of nothingness, which can be best presented as violence and the constant violation of all lives pulled together under the notion of the other, we fight.
Our struggles will also be different: those who have not been expelled from their territory and their way of life struggle to remain and maintain one or the other. This is the approach of the struggles of indigenous peoples, quilombolas, 5 fishing communities, and other groups. But those who were born into a situation of exile and found themselves without a place and without a past (like the people of the favelas) can be pushed to fight for everything that has been and continues to be denied them, with the aggravating factor of not knowing their own origins and the possibilities that exist beyond the prevailing order which denies them.
I myself have participated in these struggles. As an inhabitant of a favela, I was denied the city – the citizenship that goes with it – and I (even without understanding it) fought for the right to the city. But it is a struggle that turns you inside out. To explain: I disavowed the notion of the city, seeing it as a plunderer of the favelas’ life force, while I demanded the right to citizenship. I had not yet realised that a struggle fought without a clear understanding of the regulatory parameters ends up eating its own tail. I had not yet realised that the demand for recognition of certain areas ran the risk of being appropriated; that this would take place within a process that would subject more parts of our lives to the regulation of an alien power. This power would be handed over to state hands far removed from the everyday life of the community and invariably incapable of understanding it.
The mechanics are as follows. They don’t recognise my humanity and I want them to recognise it. I don’t realise that, if there is no change in the prevailing paradigm, being recognised could lead me to become a part of that group of humans who have the power to destroy the humanity of the other. In reality, I never wanted to be part of that group. Furthermore, in the case of the right to citizenship, I realised that “citizenship” was perhaps not exactly what I wanted for myself and my people. I began to understand as I listened to talk about the origins of the city in “the Greek polis”; as they explained to me the meaning of the “political agora”, of this and that. I understood the colonial origin of these models. I also understood just how far removed they were from the complexity of the pre-colonial forms developed in this land which was misnamed Brazil, forms that can only be understood by examining the past.
Since, at present, the law is based on lies, legitimate struggles for legally and administratively guaranteed rights walk a tightrope, balancing against the centripetal forces that pull everything towards the prevailing logic of the commodity (in the case of the market) or towards the prevailing logic of the law (in the case of the state).
The law is the sole socially validated arrangement for regulating the state, which in turn is the only socially recognised regulator for managing collective life. As such, the contradictions inherent to the law, the state and its logics are placed by the law on individuals engaged in these struggles, who in turn become separated from the contradictions people are facing.
I will try to illustrate these ideas with another specific example, which is distinct from struggles for citizenship.
In Brazil, a country marked by racism, universities have always been white, elitist spaces. This is not only because of the colonising structure of scientific thought they propagate. Nor is it simply because they do not recognise sciences which do not conform to the established norm to be of equal value. It is also because of their make-up in terms of professors, researchers and student body. The entrance examination, the test that defines who will or will not be allowed to enter higher education as a student on the basis of the best marks, is a decisive instrument in this respect. Through this method, the children of the economic elite and the middle classes who have studied in private schools all their lives achieve the best positions. A test which seems upon first examination to be fair and equal for all, serves to ensure that inequality persists.
Faced with this reality, the Black movement and later the indigenous movement fought for quotas in public universities, succeeding in changing the colour of the student body. However, when white people began to cheat in the entrance exams by using artificial tanning and other tricks to gain access to highly competitive degree courses such as medicine, the movements protested against this absurdity. As a result of their struggles, institutional structures called hetero-identification commissions were created. These are in charge of verifying whether those who gain access to quota places are really Afro- descendants, indigenous or Afro-indigenous.
It is contradictory to celebrate this change as the result of legitimate struggles and protests. It takes the power to say who does or does not belong out of the hands of the black, indigenous and Afro-indigenous community. This power is then transferred to the state, a state that has been racist since its establishment in these lands. One more part of life, until recently outside the remit of state regulation, is incorporated into its regulatory mechanics. More power slips out of our hands. More power is transferred to the state machinery.
Acts of resistance that are not sufficiently aware of and anchored in this understanding – that have not clearly established or do not constantly remind themselves of the limitations of any proposals not set apart from the totalising logic of the state-market (the two sides of the same coin) – will find themselves more vulnerable to absorbing the external contradiction. They will be exposed to the operation that Raquel Gutiérrez described so well in a recent interview.
There is a Uruguayan colleague who has an expression that I really like: “See how they create ways in which cries of protest, acts of rebellion are translated into administrative prose.” Well, that is a field of interest to me. Because here is an action of political appropriation that is based on semantic appropriation, on buying your words, stealing your words, emptying your words of meaning. […] What does social control mean when you see sharks in the leadership who negotiate advantages and positions in order to establish some kind of surveillance or control of public affairs. … That is why it is so important to update language, to broaden languages, to take into account other words, to understand that language is a battleground.6
It is against this background that many struggles are taking place and it is also in this context that new visions are being sketched out of what justice – in the face of all this – could be.
What kind of justice do we want? What kind of justice do we need? What kind of justice are we capable of creating?
When we are victims of violent and unjust acts, we get flooded with feelings of revolt, rage and indignation. These are sparks that ignite our thirst for justice, our quest for justice. For sections of the population whose lives are affected by oppression and exploitation, the desire grows to fight for what we have been denied, for the justice we have been repeatedly and systematically denied. Caught between hatred and the precariousness of our lives, we can barely take a moment to breathe and reflect on what justice we really want or need. Hatred without a clear object is driven into the clamour for law-based justice and penal populism propagated by the media and the apparatuses of ideological reproduction. This results in popular demands being warped, dragged into the logic of the market-state.
Desire which is limited by what has been denied us in this society highlights the colonised condition of our desire, which is almost completely blocked from going beyond the miserable prospects discernible in a country built on the foundations of epistemicide and the erasure of the past. Thus, impoverished workers in the favelas often support measures to expand the genocide for which they themselves have been targeted. Poverty increases, violence increases, the rich armour themselves in gated communities with private security and the poor, smartphone in hand, are assaulted by other poor people. Outraged, they call for more police, stricter laws and the lowering of the age of criminal responsibility, without realising that these laws legitimise the expansion of the violence that plagues their lives and the communities in which they live.
Indignation at the injustice suffered is drawn into the unjust logic of legal-administrative regulation. No alternative approaches to justice are proposed, not even by the left, which, in fact, maintains a discourse of public security as one of its primary electoral talking
points. Their discourse differs from the right in no more than nuances, while keeping the underlying logic intact.
Attributing blame to the large number of people, those among the poorest of the poor, who struggle for a little security could not be further from my intention. I understand and recognise the barriers that make it difficult for them to draw conclusions from their lived experience. But neither can I sympathise with the progressive, privileged, educated sections of society who, despite having access to so many tools of critical thinking, continue to join the chorus calling for justice in punitive terms. These calls for an unjust, white, proprietary and colonial justice are made without any examination of their limits in the face of populism. Rather than combating the conservative elements of common sense, they reinforce them, and empower insurgent elements.
Neither do I in any way seek to place blame on women who have been victims of brutal male violence and seek some kind of justice, some kind of security in life, and even some kind of reparation for the harm they have suffered. I understand the predatory conditions in which we survive; the same conditions that exert a significant influence on our thinking. But I cannot condone segments of the feminist movements that persist in advocating solutions that extend the power of the state over our bodies and legitimise the state as the only possible executor of the management of collective life and its conflicts. They hand over the power to define what constitutes injustice, violence, victimhood, and aggressor status, and the subsequent implications of these definitions in the legal- administrative apparatus.
Therefore, in conceptualising the justice we aspire to – from a perspective that recognises the foundational injustice of the juridical-administrative apparatus, colonisation with its device of raciality, and state-market logic – it is essential to broaden our horizons and deepen our perception of the justice required.
Combing history against the grain, or: The future is ancestral
In order to conceptualise, propose and develop other possibilities of justice, one of the most important things we can do is to go back in time and review the forms of justice – ones not rooted in the colonial enterprise – that have been practised by different peoples throughout the ages. This leads us to revisit the past, scrutinise the pre-colonial narratives and epistemologies of peoples who were colonised, or who no longer exist. This is not an exercise in idealising or romanticising the past, nor an attempt to exalt a mythical, perfect, contradiction-free paradise lost. It is rather an attempt to train our minds to conceptualise alternatives that diverge from Western colonising logic. It is about feeding our political imagination.
Beatriz Nascimento, a Black intellectual born in northeastern Brazil, was a key historian and activist in the Black movement. Murdered in 1992, the Black women’s movement ensured that her memory was preserved, and her work makes a valuable contribution to this process.
So [history] has not only been silenced, but it is even worse, because, in the part where it has not been silenced, very important facts are neglected and Black history is greatly distorted, dealing basically with slavery and leaving aside other ways in which Black people lived in Brazil, such as the whole process of emancipation that took place during the four centuries of slavery and, in particular, everything that happened around the quilombo. To undertake a critical study of Black history and, at the same time, to give Black people a perspective of what their true history was, we have to start from the history of the Black people as a free people. As a free group that set up a free society, even if slaves formed part of that society. Basically, the quilombo are men who consciously seek to organise a society for themselves in which they can live in accordance with their Afro-Brazilian historical past, with their habits, their customs, their culture, their way of life.7
We cannot recognise the many possibilities of justice or covenants capable of managing collective life and its conflicts, because we are not aware of the many worlds that existed in the past, or some that still exist today.
It would be very difficult to speak of a single indigenous justice system, as the word indigenous refers to an enormous multiplicity of peoples with different customs, languages and forms of organisation. If we detach ourselves from this idea, what we will see are different means of dealing with the actions of individuals who alter or impact the harmony and balance of the community. In the midst of such diversity, perhaps we can identify some common features which could be reinstated.
The first point that appears to be of fundamental importance is community self- organisation and self-government. As I have already mentioned, the original peoples who inhabited the territory later to be called Brazil were numerous, and did not establish any form of imperial structure that put one people and their customs above the others. Thus, each people formed its own myths, history and way of life. A beautiful work by anthropologist Pierre Clastres presents a series of studies on this subject.8
In this context, individual actions that negatively affected the lives of others or the community were dealt with, one might say, from the bottom up, starting with the smallest group of people who were directly involved and then, when necessary, being brought to the attention of the wider community.
One of the forms of social pressure and coercion used among some Guaraní in Brazil was gossip. News of someone’s misconduct was passed on, and they were publicly shamed. In cases where the behaviour was considered cowardly, for example, the reputation spread so widely that the person and their family invariably moved away. In other cases, wrongdoers were not greeted, no one spoke to them and their existence in the community became very difficult.9
In other peoples across Latin American, a variety of sanctions have been reported, such as the return of stolen objects; compensation; physical exercise; economic fines; payment of damages through community work; being doused in cold water; corporal punishment with nettles; community work; loss of community rights; and, in exceptional cases, expulsion from the community – considered one of the most serious sanctions.10
Among many Brazilian indigenous peoples, the opportunity for revenge is recognised as a component of justice. The individual or family of the person harmed by the misconduct of another is entitled to fight back. The person who has acted wrongfully bears the consequences of the imbalances created by their own actions.
The Tupinambá are one of the few peoples with a cosmological view that does not see humans as an animal above all others. In fact, as the jaguar eats humans, and not the other way around, the jaguar is considered to be the most evolved animal, at the top of the food chain. The jaguar is superior, and destiny for the Tupinambá is to become a jaguar, the ideal being. Within this cosmovision, the oldest woman in the family embodies the jaguar; she has evolved to become a jaguar and in the mythology it is the old woman who applies justice, taking legitimate revenge when someone in her family is hurt or killed. She takes revenge by biting, tearing off a piece of the aggressor.11
In these examples it is clear that justice does not come out of heteronomy. The power to do justice is not handed over to forces outside the community. It is within the community that there is legitimacy for justice to take place. It aims to restore the shaken community balance, to repair the damage caused, to recognise the victim of the act as an indispensable voice in deciding what practices can fulfil these objectives. The power of justice remains in the hands of the community. Those who produce the customs are the ones who ensure them and those who act when the customs are not respected.
In cases where the balance cannot be restored through interventions such as those mentioned above, councils of elders are convened and meetings are held in the presence of the parties and their respective families to listen and deliberate with the participation of all. In the case of the Guaraní, they can also resort to the Aty Guasu, the name given by the Guaraní kaiowá and ñandeva to large political meetings (an Aty Guasu also resembles a large gathering where they pray, sing and dance, discussing the problems they face for days and trying to reach solutions to them).
These meetings often last a long time and people spend hour upon and hour talking while others spend hours listening, all the while carrying out the daily tasks of eating, preparing food, educating children, sending messages, and so on. This shows that there is no self- organisation for community life without a lot of time spent in building it, in listening and interacting in the search for solutions to problems that may seem individual, but affect the lives of all. Since liberated justice has the prerequisite of community self-organisation, we cannot attempt to produce it without thorough listening and mutual engagement (based on the practical understanding of our interdependence – a constant necessity with alternative collective organisation).
This ancestral wisdom has left its traces in the dynamics of the favelas erected by communities that were expelled from their original territories. Pushed into the city, where they have no viable space to exercise their traditions, these people carry with them, intermingled with other logics, elements of ethics from their origin communities. As elements of historical continuity, something of life in the quilombos and in the villages endures in the favela logic. This is evident, for example, in the trajectory of the Mães de Maio movement, an urban collective of mothers and relatives of people killed by the police. One of its recent and powerful projects is a joined-up action called Escute as Mães de Maio (Listen to the Mothers of May).12 The traces embedded in life in the peripheries and favelas, traces of ancestral wisdom and forms of organisation for survival that go back a long way, bring us back to Beatriz Nascimento when she tells us:
If we understand the quilombo as the history of the Black people, we have to see it from the perspective of historical continuity. History is not going to end when the repression ends. If the quilombo is to be understood as a Black society, you can’t [believe] that suddenly, because they stop using armed repression against the quilombo (as they did in past centuries), the quilombo has disappeared. In other words, if Black men have been gathering in this kind of organisation since the 16TH CENTURY, they must still be gathering in this kind of organisation today. Further, in my research I have seen in police reports, especially in Rio de Janeiro, that there are areas of former quilombos that are still favelas today. Also in Bahia we found candomblé places that were quilombos.13
The knowledge which we have been able to derive from our ancestry – their techniques for the management of communal life – is fundamental to freeing our future from imprisonment.
What justice are we capable of forging?
The previous examples are not there to serve as models. Certainly, each of them has many contradictions, many problems, and are marked by the inordinate impact of colonisation. They no longer exist in the form in which they emerged, for they are inseparable from ways of life that have been profoundly altered by the processes of colonisation, urbanisation and environmental destruction. Or they only endure as vestiges of themselves, scattered in fragments interlaced with the most brutal precarity and violence. I have outlined them so that our political imagination can work with ideas that go beyond the punitive structure of the penal state and think about justice from the feminist perspective. Approaching the work in this way would build a fundamental contribution of feminisms to indigenous women in many places, who suffer violence that indigenous justice – reproducing the incorporated (or ancestrally modified) patriarchy – does not resolve. It would also involve a significant collaboration with Black women, who form the majority of the women beaten, raped, murdered, and imprisoned in Brazil.
As a feminist, something that seems to me to be fundamental, the starting point, is the realisation that the state is never a reliable ally in achieving justice. It is a structural part of existing injustices, and even the demands of the struggle it addresses are always translated into the juridical-administrative workings that trap movements and struggles in the contradictions of the juridical-administrative form. A harrowing example of this are the “mother protectors”, women in countries around the world who expose the abuse and violence exercised by the fathers of their children in court. They are subjected to “re- victimisation” when judges turn the complaints back on the accusers, taking away their children, whom they force to live with their abusive fathers.14
The first step on the road to justice is community self-organisation and the second, I believe, is the organisation of individual and community self-defence. This means breaking away from the state monopoly of justice, taking the legitimacy of judging the oppressed out of the hands of the oppressors, and trying to regain a small portion of power over our lives. It is not possible to organise self-defence without community self- organisation. The existence of organised collectivities that validate themselves as capable of achieving justice is the basic condition for self-defence to flourish.
Gladys Tzul Tzul, a Maya K’iche’ activist, sociologist and visual artist, once spoke to me (at a seminar in New York where we met)15 about her idea of societies that are not fully state-bound. She used this expression to make a comment on what I had just presented at one of the round-table discussions.16 This was because, in a certain way, she saw a quality in my description of favelas and urban squats that she felt could be found in several indigenous communities. Perhaps this is why experiments in community justice are much more evident in favelas and urban land occupations. In their fight for affordable housing, they bring together thousands of racialised and impoverished people in an ephemeral, self-convened territorial and political unit of necessity. These are territories in which the state is evidently little more than an agent of enemy interests: it exists almost exclusively through its armed, military, disciplinary and punitive functions.
This loose unity also exists in the favelas that struggle for basic rights, where the housed and homeless are crowded together and where illusions that the state can do something other than control and repress are mixed with a reality and daily experience that says otherwise.
In all the squats I have taken part in over the last fifteen years, the first assemblies had many functions, including defining and voting on the rules of coexistence. This ephemeral community, self-convened and brought together by necessity, has to recognise itself, legitimise itself, define the limits to be respected in the name of community equilibrium, and determine what to do when these limits are crossed.
One thing that we would do was vote that physical assault on women and children should be punishable by expulsion. It was a collective message to all the men in the camp, even if in practice it was all mediated by other pressures. Listening to the women victims sometimes led us to go back on what had been previously agreed, to make the woman’s request for her partner to stay public and, in specific cases, to listen to him too in an assembly, so that he would commit to change in front of the whole community. Many times this worked, many times it did not.
What to do in a situation where community self-defence is plagued by asymmetries of force and power? What to do when the aggressor is, for example, a drug trafficker? These questions led us to organise ourselves even more, to hold women’s assemblies to decide how we would report certain things in front of the general assembly. They also led us to seek alliances with male activists who would support us wholeheartedly and who were willing to have conversations that would convince others to accept decisions without taking retributive action. They even led us to study and explore the ethical codes between gangs and sometimes to resort to them in attempts to defend the collective decision. It is complex and rather precarious, but without the state as the executor of justice, possibilities had to be invented. None of them were without flaws.
Expelling someone may add another iteration to the many exclusions they have already suffered on the path to the act of violence. Or it may mean preserving their life in the face of a likely lynching. On other occasions, we use community work, requiring the person to carry out tasks in support of collective work mostly carried out by women in the kitchens or cleaning the squats. We have also made use of compulsory learning and other tools, all of which were limited and never error-free. These approaches were possible because we were an organised community when the events happened, and they only lasted as long as the organisation was maintained. They have taught all of us who participated in them a lot, because we were able to take back into our own hands, even if only temporarily, the responsibility to think and to practise justice.
Since 2018, my work has been focused more intensively on organising women in the periphery and favelas than on squats. I can say that word of mouth – gossip – remains an essential communication mechanism that informs a network of women, working in all kinds of collectivities, about who is and who is not an aggressor, a rapist, or a violent person. This information makes it possible for other women to be aware and a little more vigilant. It also allows the perpetrator to experience some of the consequences of his actions, when he is no longer welcome in certain spaces and friendship circles, or no longer receives help in getting work through referrals by women, and when his behaviour is questioned by the community.
When I started in 2018, it was much more difficult than it is today for us to try to solve problems by ourselves. I think the trial and error, and the experiments we have done have helped to demonstrate concepts to us that are difficult to understand in theoretical terms, especially because the system limits our imagination.
I remember the first case of assault we dealt with as a favela women’s collective. It came to our attention that a young Black woman (whom I knew well) had given birth alone, in a hospital. This was because she was escaping from her aggressor, who had continued to assault her even during her pregnancy. We set up an urgent fundraising campaign among ourselves and collected a cradle, clothes, food and money to give to her. I was in charge of going to find and talk to her, as the news came through an acquaintance of mine who had met her at the hospital by chance. After listening to her, we took the decision to expose the situation to the groups the aggressor was involved in, implicating them as accomplices in the aggressions. Whether out of fear of what people would say or because of other pressures, the men in these groups talked to the aggressor and coerced him to leave altogether. Still feeling insecure, his partner decided to move out of their home temporarily and we supported her as much as we could to give her the basics she needed to get back on her feet. He was a Black man, also known to us, from a family we knew, and with the history of all Black men in the favelas, of being the target of state violence. In this case, our first move was to carry out small measures of reparation, so that she was in a better position to participate in defining what she wanted to do about all the violence she had suffered. Secondly, it should be noted that she actively participated in these decisions. Thirdly, because he was a very violent man, we involved the men in the collectivities to which he belonged. She did not want to involve the police or the white justice system, because she was a racialised woman. Taking the position not to trust the state is common among Black, indigenous or Afro-indigenous women. Her decisions were also influenced by the fact that he was the father of her daughter. This is not a model
- no model would ever suffice, as models are not capable of encompassing the particular reality of each violent situation – but it does reveal some of the ways in which our self- organisation allows us to experiment with self-defence processes as a way of practising justice from within our movements.
I remember the second case well. A colleague of ours from the neighbourhood was assaulted by her boyfriend, an educator at the same public school as her. The news reached us through the whatsapp group the day before our monthly assembly. She wanted to make a formal complaint and one of us accompanied her to the police station and to the medic. We defined the actions we would carry out at the meeting. We drafted a manifesto condemning the general situation of violence against women in our territory and it was taken up by the local media where we have active comrades. We drafted another collective letter that we sent to the school in question and to the regional education supervisor, with the aim of publicly involving the institutions. The aim was for them to
make sure her work was reorganised so as to protect her and to take responsibility for anything that might happen to her in the workplace. She asked for the help of a female lawyer for the complaint process and we found one through women’s solidarity networks
- networks that communicate with each other.
In this case, our sister had better living conditions, was not pressured by uncertainty about food or paying the rent, and she was a white woman. First, we carried out the few measures of redress that were available to us, accompanying her in everything and accepting her pain for the violence she had suffered. She was not alone and this translated into action. Secondly, she actively participated in the decisions that were in our hands, those of community justice. To date, no action has been taken by the state justice system, but the actions we have taken in the community have had an impact. We spread the word that as a group, we would take sticks and wait for him in front of the school if anything happened to her. This also seems to have had an effect. The attacker asked to be transferred from the school where he worked.
I have dealt with cases of sexual abuse, especially in squats, and they were always followed by community decisions of expulsion. The perpetrators often moved to another neighbourhood after the news spread, and were aware of the risk to their lives.
As I have insisted several times, none of these cases is free of contradictions or errors, but we had to think about the contradiction, analyse it, weigh up the parameters of consistency, and act, bringing discussions of justice and injustice into a realm where we had some control.
The greater the self-organisation among women, the greater the capacity to think collectively about the justice we want, need and are able to produce. The more self- organised the women, the greater the capacity to intervene with some success within the community collectives we belong to, be they other social movements, work or study spaces. The more self-organised racialised women are, the greater our capacity is to reconnect with ancestral and pre-colonial instruments of community justice that we can draw on, along with useful procedures, to equip a more comprehensive toolbox
The cases I discuss here are merely examples that express the small scale on which we operate along with its limits, which, we must acknowledge, are pertinent to this debate. But the discussion of what would be principles applied on a large scale leads me to other issues. In Brazil, the average salary of a judge in 2022 was more than 42,000 reais – more than 8,000 dollars,17 while the defendants that these magistrates try for crimes are mostly Black people, young people under thirty, with low levels of education. Among them, only 13% have committed offences against another person and 4% have committed sexual offences. Most of them are in prison for property and drug offences.18 This is also the profile of the eighteen people killed daily by the Brazilian police in 2022.19 It is clear from these data that any kind of scaling up would have numerous limitations.
However, recognising limitations does not prevent us from producing community-based self-defence or some form of justice. We are part of what we can build in this area, and we evolve from the experiences we ourselves nurture, just like our communities. These are processes of reclaiming our plundered past, of non-Western epistemologies and the possibility of experiencing the autonomous exercise of some power over our lives.
Notes
1 Original title: “Construir autodefesa é construir autogoverno. Recuperar o poder que nos roubaram”, translated into Spanish by María Francisca Roncero and into English by Jennie Gant.
2 See Povos indigenas no Brasil, https://pib.socioambiental.org/ (accessed 1 October 2023).
3 Sueli Carneiro (2023): Dispositivo de racialidade. A construção do outro como não ser como fundamento do ser, Zahar.
4 Editor’s note: Candomblé is one of the ‘Black Atlantic’ religions, born as a spirituality of resistance among enslaved Black people and their descendants in Brazil. The terreiro is a place where a community is organised and, when used with candomblé , it denotes a space connected to Black identity and memory.
5 Editor’s note: Quilombolas is a term that refers to people of African descent who live in the quilombos. Its meaning historically refers to the movements of emancipation and liberation from slavery that took place over several centuries in many countries across the Americas. However, in contemporary Brazil it designates the way in which people of African descent self-identify themselves; their rural, suburban and urban agriculture-based communities; the political and territorial movements behind their defence and integration; and the cultural manifestations that have strong ties with their African history.
6 Raquel Gutiérrez interviewed by Mijail Miranda Zapata (2023): “Cuando el poderoso habla tu lenguaje, desconfía”, in Muy Waso, 27 April, available at https://muywaso.com/raquel-gutierrez-cuando-el- poderoso-habla-tu-lenguaje-desconfia/.
7 Beatriz Nascimento (1977): “A história do Brasil é uma história escrita por mãos brancas”, excerpt from the documentary O negro, da senzala ao soul, directed by Gabriel Priolli and Delfino Araújo, São Paulo: TV Cultura. Excerpt available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LhM1MaPE9c. Full documentary available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AVPrXwxh1A (both links accessed on 11 July 2024).
8 Pierre Clastres (2020): La sociedad contra el Estado, Santiago de Chile: Hueders.
9 Almires Martins Machado and Rosalvo Ivarra Ortiz (2018): “O sistema jurídico guarani. História, memória e cosmología”, in Revista Jurídica Unigran, Dourados, MS, vol. 20, no. 40, July-December, pp. 61-79, available at https://www.unigran.br/dourados/revistas/juridica?trabalho=1250.
10 Jaime Rojas Castillo: Elementos comunes de los sistemas penales o sancionatorios indígenas, Asesoría Técnica Parlamentaria, Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile, available at https://obtienearchivo.bcn.cl/obtienearchivo?id=repositorio/10221/33685/2/Elementos_comunes_de_los_ sistemas_penales_o_sancionatorios_indigenas.pdf (accessed 11 July 2024).
11 See Alberto Mussa in the webinar HUMANITAS. A perspectiva tupinambá. Mitologia e pensamentos brasileiros, Rio de Janeiro: Museu da Justiça, Centro Cultural do Poder Judiciário, 21 July 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17qHk3v59po (accessed 11 July 2024).
12 Jeniffer Mendonça and Daniel Arroyo (2024): “”Escute as Mães de Maio”. Movimento lança documentário e cartilha pela luta contra violência policial”, in Ponte, 24 March, available at https://ponte.org/escute-as-maes-de-maio-movimento-lanca-doc-e-cartilha-pela-luta-contra-violencia- policial/ (accessed 11 July 2024).
13 Beatriz Nascimento: “A história do Brasil é uma história escrita por mãos brancas”, cit. in note 83, p. XX.
14 Patricia Reguero (2021): “Madres protectoras lanzan una campaña internacional contra la violencia institucional y vicaria”, in El Salto, 17 June, available at https://www.elsaltodiario.com/justicia/madres- protectoras-campana-internacional-violencia-institucional-vicaria. See also VV. AA. (2024): En la tela de araña. Las violencias contra la infancia y la lucha de las madres protectoras, Madrid: La Laboratoria.
15 Feminist Research Workshop. Methodologies and Practices of Experimentation, 30-31 March 2023, KJCC, New York University.
16 The full table can be viewed on the KJCC YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=faRdebL_1-8
17 “Com salarios de até 914 mil, metade dos juizes do Brasil ganha mais que os ministros do STF”, in Exame., 23 July 2023, available at https://exame.com/brasil/com-salarios-de-ate-r-914-mil-metade-dos- juizes-do-brasil-ganha-mais-que-os-ministros-do-stf/.
18 Carla Mereles (2017): “Perfil da populacao carceraria brasileira”, in Politize!, 1 March, available at https://www.politize.com.br/populacao-carceraria-brasileira/.
19 Dennis Pacheco and David Marques (2023): “A heterogeneidade territoriale da letalidade policial no Brasil”, in Fonte Segura. Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Pública 2023, no. 193, 26 July, available at https://fontesegura.forumseguranca.org.br/a-heterogeneidade-territorial-da-letalidade-policial-no-brasil/.
