In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured authors are Maya Schenwar and Kim Wilson. Schenwar is the editor-in-chief of Truthout. Wilson is an artist, educator, writer, and organizer. She is the co-founder, cohost, and producer of Beyond Prisons, a podcast on incarceration and prison abolition. Their co-edited book is We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition. We interviewed Dr. Kim Wilson about the book.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Kim Wilson: In light of the outcome of the American electoral politics quadrennial farce, and the undeniable intensification of suffering that is on its way, I think the work of parenting and caregiving, as it relates to revolutionary movements, becomes more urgent, and more necessary to ensuring our collective survival. My anger is long-standing, perpetual, well-documented, and doesn’t turn on the whims of votes, parties, or hollow promises for a “better tomorrow.” I write from a place of incandescent rage, even if I try to move through the world with a gentleness that often feels like a betrayal of my experience. The contributors to We Grow the World Together: Parenting Toward Abolition have taught me a great deal about how to carry contradictions as we struggle collectively to address the problems that we’re all facing. If there is a consistent throughline that runs throughout the book it is that parenting justice holds radical potential.
The book doesn’t try to sell readers on the idea that parenting and caregiving are easy or fun – although many of the authors write critically about delighting and finding joy in the experience. Additionally, the authors invite us to complicate our thinking about what it means to be in community, and to consider different ways that we might approach how to build community in order to survive death-making and death-loving systems. The book includes essays that explore the intersections of parenting and genocide, caregiving and intergenerational trauma, and one that uses the work of Claudia Jones as a touchstone for thinking about how to mobilize against right-wing parents’ movement.
What is revealed through each of these offerings is that parenting justice is a collective political project that is rooted in the ideology of liberation, and that at its core is interdependent, internationalist, decolonial, and anti-capitalist. The volume addresses issues of reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, war, borders, housing, education, incarceration, and so much more. The collection of voices considers a world in which policing and surveillance of families and communities are obsolete. The contributors to the volume include educators, organizers, incarcerated people, writers, social workers, and healers. They write from a deeply personal place, and offer insight and analysis of the systemic problems that frustrate and undermine the work of parenting and caregiving.
Thinking about how the book can help us understand the current moment, it is clear that there is no parenting justice without a free Palestine! When we talk about care and liberation, we don’t just mean for some people while we disregard the gross suffering of those we’ve othered.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
One of the things that I’ve learned throughout this process is to embrace the idea of failure as part of a revolutionary praxis. This has led to a shift in my thinking around parenting and caregiving as central; rather than tangential - to radically transformative change.
An embodied parenting praxis includes the willingness to try, to not fear failure, and to commit to learning from our mistakes. As organizers many of us engage in communal study, and through political education we study revolutions in order to learn about their failures, as much as to understand what worked. Parenting and caregiving are sites where we can envision the possibility of radical change, and in my view, this aligns with our political, philosophical, and ideological commitments to transform the world through action.
The book offers many different access points to think about what it means to do this work from our various locations, with the tools, and resources that we have available to us. The collection encourages us to skill up, experiment, and play. We center parenting and caregiving because these are the life-saving and life-sustaining activities that are necessary for all of the work that we do as organizers, and this work is often devalued, invisibilized, taken-for-granted, gendered, and generally unpaid, and that has to change!
The essays provide a thoughtful intervention into the broader conversation about what it means to live and struggle against fascist conditions. The conditions under which we are forced to live, love, and labor under are antithetical to nurturing, to being present, to loving, and to life. Yet, we have to find ways to keep showing up for each other, to move closer to one another, and to cultivate loving and liberatory relationships. We do this work imperfectly, and we do it knowing that in spite of giving it our best effort that it may not always be enough, but we try, and we keep trying.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
Parenting and caregiving were never meant to be individually-focused activities, but through settler-colonialism and the ethos of hyper individualism our understanding of collective care has been eroded.
This is work that requires close bonds with trusted people who can support us and who take seriously the responsibility of caring for children, elders, and each other. It also requires that we think beyond our homes and immediate relationships to imagine that we are each other’s responsibility. I say this recognizing that our capacity under capitalism limits us in so many ways, and that we don’t all have the same resources which may allow us the time, space, and grace needed to attend to others the way that we would like. Finding ways to cultivate broad chosen kinship networks where the work is collectively distributed offers another possibility for lasting change. We have to start by showing up over and over again, and we cannot dispose of each other.
Which intellectuals and/or intellectual movements most inspire your work?
There are so many people that I consider my intellectual mentors, but I’ll share a few that have left an indelible mark on my heart and in my brain, and without whom I would be so lost. First and foremost, are my own children, and incarcerated people, who I feel most accountable to. Additionally, many of the contributors to this book, such as Dorothy Roberts, Beth Richie, Alejandro Villalpando and Susana Parras, Dylan Rodriguez, Sarah Tyson, and Mariame Kaba to name just a few, have helped me sharpen my theoretical lenses and approximate a version of myself that I aspire to be.
I’ve long turned to the work of Audre Lorde, bell hooks, June Jordan, W.E.B. DuBois, and Paolo Freire to nurture and nourish me when I’ve been at my worst, and they’ve given me ways to think about how I want to show up as a parent, as an educator, and as an organizer. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Sarah Ahmed, Mimi Kim, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and the many artists, poets, collectives and formations that have generously taught me so much about what it means to build collective power, how to leverage communal knowledge, and develop political clarity. I’m grateful for their wisdom and continue to practice imperfectly!
Which two books published in the last five years would you recommend to BAR readers? How do you envision engaging these titles in your future work?
One of the books that I’ve had on my TBR list for a while now is Kerala: Another Possible World, by T.M. Thomas Isaac. This book describes the policy choices that the state of Kerala has undertaken, ranging from implementing a redistributive economic model to the social and political changes necessary for addressing climate violence and gender justice in a world that is captivated by neoliberal policies.
My training as a policy analyst continues to pull me to think more deliberately about the connections between grassroots organizing and transnational political projects. I’m not sure what the future holds for my work, but I would like to connect with comrades who are thinking along the same lines so that we can continue to build and expand internationalist solidarity networks.
My other recommendation is the YA animated series, “Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts,” that a dear friend and comrade shared with me at the beginning of the pandemic. The series has an abolitionist arc and follows the adventures of its protagonist, a teen girl named Kipo, as she is forced to flee her home to search for her family. I watched the series with my six-year old niece when it was released, and have rewatched it several times since. I love the idea of using comics, animated series, children’s books, etc. to explore issues such as forced displacement, conflict resolution, power, friendship, and love. Mariame Kaba has long taught us that we can learn a great deal by reading and seriously engaging with children’s and YA literature because they open up worlds of possibilities to us and give us language to explain really big and complex things in an accessible way.
Roberto Sirvent is the editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
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