on transformation

on transforming the world and ourselves <3

Mary Retta

CW: brief mention of cannibalism

I.

For most of my life I thought I was a bad writer. Today I no longer think this, but I’m often plagued by a different fear: that even if what I write is technically “good,” I’m not saying anything useful or new. In the last year, I’ve written countless articles attempting to respond to some of our country’s most urgent social and political crises: stories arguing for defunding the police, prison abolition, better protection for young people, making education free. Despite the work that I and many, many other journalists and organizers have done in recent years to argue for a new social order, social and economic conditions in this country and across the globe have remained maddeningly steadfast. In fact, while researching for these essays, I’m often struck by how many abolitionists from the Civil Rights era were fighting for the exact same things I write about today.

Lately, writing has occupied a complicated place in my mind and psyche. It is a strange thing for something that I on the one hand believe to be my dearest passion and salvation to also feel futile, desperately hopeless. Though I know that writing is what keeps me both employed and sane, I’ve often wondered whether my words have tangibly made a difference or if they will ever contribute to meaningful progress. Should my words be transforming something bigger than myself? Could they?

II.

Many in the West use the words “change” and “transform” interchangeably, but there are actually important distinctions. The dictionary definition of “change” is “to replace with another.” But transformation is something more substantial. Comprised of the terms “trans,” meaning “across” or “beyond,” and “form,” which is a body, shape, or structure, the word “transform” denotes taking a person or system that already exists and pushing it beyond its current limitations into something better, or with greater potential.

The history of the United States is littered with instances of change, while transformation is almost completely absent. We see this often in contemporary liberal discussions of police and prison “reform.”[1] While anti-capitalists have long argued for the complete abolition of police and the prison industrial complex, a radical measure that would completely transform the political, economic, and social order of our country, the ruling political class has time and time again responded with measures that might appear like progress, but ultimately reify our existing racial hierarchy and economic disparities. (Policing itself was also originally a “reform” of slavery in the US; in the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery, an addendum reads “except as punishment for a crime.”) In America, change is often bloody, and catalyzed by death. The modern United States was created when Europeans descended on Native lands, changing a peaceful and beautiful society into one of poverty and death through physical and sexual violence, as well as institutionalized biological warfare through the intentional distribution of small pox blankets. These practices carried on throughout the 1800s, when Americans interrupted the social and political structure of nearly every African country through the immeasurably violent implementation of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Not only were millions of Africans bought, sold, killed, and sexually violated in order to bolster the US economy and social order, some historical accounts note that many slave owners regularly ate their slaves as both an assertion of power and a form of grotesque entertainment. Built into the foundation of the United States and many Western countries is the intrinsic belief that change can only occur through the murder, elimination, and literal consumption of other bodies and cultures.

In America, newness is always the ultimate goal; but new can only happen after death of the old. The West is obsessed with modernity at the expense of cultivating tradition, making transformation impossible and change a stubborn norm.

III.

While transformation requires action, change is characterized by conversation. In a 2020 essay for Jezebel, the writer Alex V Green coined the term “the Having Conversations Industrial Complex” (HCIC), which they described as “a loose assemblage of professional speakers, non-profit organizations, astroturfed activists, diversity consultants, academic advisory boards, panelists, and politicians who are paid to generate a ‘conversation’ that doesn’t need to show tangible results.” A prime example of this complex would be media attention paid to Derek Chauvin’s murder trial, wherein the world waited with baited breath for a year to receive a verdict for a crime that we all watched on video. Despite its many failures, the popularity of the HCIC in the United States’ political machinery is unsurprising given that the white world is only capable of understanding and responding to death: conversations about social justice only happen in the mainstream in reaction to dead bodies, where they are informed by literature written by dead thinkers, and lead to thousands of dead-end conversations. The Western world is never proactive, only reactive to failure or loss. Political solutions like abolition anger and mystify the US government because such frameworks are not predicated on dead-end solutions like conversation but are instead committed to affirming and sustaining life. “There is no need for conversation,” Green argues. “Only justice.”

Though transformation can utilize literary or oratory tactics, it certainly does not have to. In fact, transformations occur naturally and silently all around us every day: Several million years ago, natural evolutionary processes turned the body of an ape into the very first human. The human body continues to change year to year, through puberty, through age and time. Animals can undergo several physical transformations in their lifetime: when snakes tire of their skin, they simply shed it; when insects outgrow their adolescent body, they quickly emerge as a butterfly. In each of these instances, something that already existed renewed itself without violence, without being killed or consumed. The beauty and simplicity of nature’s transformations has inspired a whole field called “biomimicry,” which, according to scholar Janine M. Benyus, attempts to “respectfully imitate” natural processes of reproduction—lettuce regrowing itself from scraps,  skin cells regenerating—in order to create healthier and more sustainable food systems, relationships, and overall ways of life. In her 1997 book Biomimicry, Benyus writes: “Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Biomimicry Revolution introduces an era based not on what we can extract from nature, but on what we can learn from her.”

This rejection of extraction is not only politically crucial today in light of growing austerity politics, but has been scientifically sound for centuries. In 1785, the French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier coined The Law of Conservation, which simply states that “matter can neither be created nor destroyed.” In light of our current political and economic crises, this law takes on a new meaning: if we exist within the constraints of a dying planet and growing economic austerity, our ideal social and political conditions cannot be created or destroyed—we must transform them.

IV.

I often say that I’ve changed a lot in the last year, but upon further reflection I’m not so sure that’s true. My politics have sharpened, yes. My knowledge expanded, my tastes refined. On my bad days I fear I’ve become a worse version of myself: one who has forgotten how to socialize, consumed only by anxieties for my future. But on other days I’m convinced that this year—the failure, the grief, the stillness, the quiet—has transformed me into the version of myself that I was meant to become.[2]

Imagination constitutes the difference between transformation and change.[3] In her seminal text, Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis writes that we must not only free all incarcerated people and destroy all physical jails, but we also must relinquish any desire to replace the prison system with a different or even “better” system of punishment. Instead, we must envision a justice system that is more functional, and ultimately more humane—which would require the transformation of society itself. “How can we imagine a society in which race and class are not primary determinants of punishment?” asks Davis. “Or one in which punishment itself is no longer the central concern in the making of justice?” These imagination projects are on the one hand societal,[4] but they also must happen on the individual level. Civil Rights activist Grace Lee Boggs once said: “Transform yourself to transform the world.” Here, Boggs recognized that, in order to commit to a society without prisons, racial hierarchy, or institutionalized greed, we must not only envision a new world order but also determine who we are in this new world. Who would you be without bullshit labor, without a steady fear of punishment, without a government that wants you dead? Without the constant assault of capitalism, who would you become?

I think even after all this personal and political transformation, I would still be a writer. But in my dreams, I am not a writer who contributes to the Having Conversations Industrial Complex; I am one who moves people towards transformative justice.[5] Though I often used to stress that my writing did not introduce new ideas, I see now that this anxiety was born out of a Western understanding of change and modernity, one that believed that the old must be killed to produce something worthwhile, that was predicated on the false notions of linear growth and time. The writers whose work has helped and transformed me most over the last year—that of Fariha Roisin, Eloghosa Osunde, and so many others—were also not necessarily saying anything new. Rather, these writers build upon the work of other Black revolutionary women from the last several centuries, transforming their stories and ideas into language that resonates with the masses today, and addresses our current social and political crises. This is the literary canon that I hope to be a part of.

The renowned novelist Toni Cade Bamabara once said that the role of the writer is to make the revolution seem irresistible. These words provide me with purpose, and also with hope: that my words might have the power to transform myself, transform another, and maybe, in some small way, even the world.

Thank you so much for reading! If this story spoke to you, please consider sharing with a friend or two. If you have the means and would like to support me, feel free to do so through Venmo (@Mary-Retta) or Paypal (maryretta33@gmail.com). If you’d like to see more of my work, you should subscribe to this newsletter or follow me on Twitter (@mary__retta.) Be well and more soon!

xoxo

mary <3

1. Notably, while “transform” means to improve, “re-form” literally means to remake the same thing over again in a different format; hence why 1800 “reforms” to slavery became modern day policing and the prison industrial complex, which ultimately serve the same purpose as the slave trade once did.

2. Fariha Roisin wrote on this in a recent essay, “On Ramadan.” She writes: “I reminded myself that I never know what anyone is going through and that the only thing I can do is to move with love. To forgive and move forward with that made me realize that moving with love actually means moving with love all the time, not sometimes, or when it’s convenient, but always. It’s so convenient to remember that we are always transforming into wholeness.”

3. Mariame Kaba also addresses this link in her book, “We Do This Til We Free Us.” She writes: “What does transformation look like? Our vision is one of unrestrained imagination.” 

4. This is something Arundhati Roy speaks of in her incredible April 2020 essay, “The Pandemic is A Portal.” She writes: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

5. Mariame Kaba defines transformative justice as “a community process developed by anti-violence activists of color who wanted to create responses to violence that do what criminal justice systems fail to do: build support and more safety for the person harmed, figure out how the broader context was set up for this harm to happen, and how that context can be changed so that this harm is less likely to happen again. It is not grounded in punitive justice, and it actually requires us to challenge our punitive impulses, while prioritizing healing, repair, and accountability.”

---