“What does liberation look and feel like?”
This is the question that initially revealed to me how little we actually know about liberation. It also raised a very serious other question: In all my years of knowing that all forms of oppression were wrong and studying the world through a critical lens, why wasn’t this question one I’d heard posed by many people a thousand times before?
Posed so succinctly, it reframes everything.
Yes, we have to accurately know the problems in order to challenge and change the conditions that create them. This is the way of critique. This is necessary for dismantling anything. But part of me felt like I had been misled, or at least that something crucial had been overlooked and omitted by primarily uncovering the machinations of oppressive systems on every interconnected level.
Shouldn’t we also know where we want to go, what we are striving for, what we could otherwise be building and creating?
I know that through all of my own learning, I did encounter ideas and language around liberation in the work of others, at least implicitly, indirectly, or by way of the animating spirit that informed whatever piece I was engaging with at the time, even if it wasn’t named as such. This is most obviously true regarding the arts and contributions from Black thinkers and writers who have articulated matters of liberation for centuries. I assume whatever degree of exposure I had over the years of listening, watching, reading, learning, observing, and absorbing cultural messages sedimented enough to be largely responsible for my ability to eventually ask and engage with the question on my own.
But I wish I could recall a specific moment when someone directly asked me to go beyond the oppressive norms, values, and assumptions of our current conditions, even my ingrained habits of thinking, and really connect with what it — life, culture, relationships with others and ourselves, everything we humans collectively choose to do — could be like. Maybe I wish someone (me?) had taken the question (or myself and my own agency?) more seriously and arrived at these reflections much sooner.
Some advice I’ve been internalizing lately around how to write is to address the younger you and share what you needed to know. (Or, said another way, it sounds like one of my common motivating phrases: Share what you learn.)
I gather there’s something healing and cathartic about the process itself of addressing wants of your previous self from a place of greater knowing, but also, most likely, there is someone else who would be helpfully supported by the words you needed if they were gifted them now, too.
So, we write, as Gloria Anzaldúa said, “to become more intimate with myself and you.”
ARTICULATING VISIONS
Articulating liberation is necessary. It’s a strategy. A practice. This has to be intentional. We have to know what we are doing. Even if we are going somewhere that, collectively, on the scale with which we desire it, we’ve probably never fully been.
Fortunately, there are more and more people speaking, writing, and sharing about collective liberation from this place of describing what it is, which, if you find them, is an incredible way to feel affirmed with an increased sense of belonging to a movement. When we have shared language, we can articulate that we do, in fact, have shared dreams.
To be fair, Robin D. G. Kelley wrote Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination over twenty-years ago. Unfortunately, I didn’t know this (not exactly, not fully) and finally read Freedom Dreams only last year.
Just last month, I read Prentis Hemphill’s "What It Takes To Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World.” Chapter One, “Visions,” was like humming along to a song I somehow remembered hearing in a past life. Familiar, but I had never encountered these exact words before. Nevertheless, it resonated. I knew Prentis and me could harmonize.
I felt similarly a couple of years ago when I read Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, and especially Hayes’s introduction, “Remaking the World.” Ironically, in a section I underlined, Hayes writes, “I return to [Diane] di Prima’s work, to ground myself and to remind myself that organizing is the work of dreaming new worlds into being. As Robin D. G. Kelley writes in Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, ‘In the poetics of struggle and lived experience, in the utterances of ordinary folk, in the cultural products of social movements, in the reflections of activists, we discover the many different cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born.’”
(Okay, so there is evidence that I did, in fact, encounter Freedom Dreams in some way before. Perhaps, I hope, on some subconscious level, this prior exposure nudged me to read it when it later came back into my life and my conscious awareness. Such is the serendipitous way of hermeneutics and learning, if we are paying attention. A plotting, repetitious process that somehow always feels still more new, yet again, and again.)
Nevertheless, I confidently assume that not enough people who genuinely want to deepen their own embodied relationship with liberation know about this book, or so many other incredible pieces of work, art, tradition, music, medicine, and story that echo with the same kinds of wisdom.
What. a. shame.
LEARNING LIBERATION WITH WISDOM
I imagine these glowing keys just dwelling in the world among us, holding all their wisdom and power, waiting for more people to make contact with them, to absorb all of the wisdom and power and then unlock it in themselves, too. Those who know these vital keys and share them with others extend their power across our living networks. We risk the incredibly grave loss if we do not keep such influences alive through our own cultural bloodlines.
I’m not so staunch as to suggest we all need to read and learn from all of the same things, every single one. I know there are many paths that can take us to similar places. But we do need to commit to a lot of learning. From a place of responsibility, it is up to us to walk the path that finds us during our pursuit of searching for guiding insights and do so with conviction.
All of this is related to another one of my other frequent phrases, “Wisdom is truth with lineage.”
It reminds me that we learn from others, who learn from others, and we keep learning from them as we continue to learn more. In terms of developing and epistemology of intimacy, let it be noted that this is actually how we know.
Just for the sake of example, and to reconnect to the points about imagination and liberation, Kelly Hayes’s introduction is a reiteration of something she wrote in 2020, which starts with this:
A professor I was friendly with introduced me to di Prima’s poem “Rant” when I was a freshman in college. Its value didn’t register at first. But later, particular lines were echoing in my mind, late at night, while I was trying to write. Sometimes, I would close my eyes and repeat di Prima’s words as I tried to find my own. She said, “The war that matters is the war against the imagination / all other wars are subsumed to it.”
For nearly a decade, I have been approaching my work and how I share with others with leading questions that invite this practice of radical imagination. “What does a world without oppression look and feel like?” And then I turned the questions to liberation itself. “What does liberation look and feel like?”
(Spoiler: even the latter question has evolved into something more evocative and powerful over the past year. I won’t get into it right now. Explicating that is what this whole writing project is for!)
For now, let’s stay with the fact that it can be really difficult for a lot of people to describe, in detail, with a developed sense of familiarity, what liberation looks and feels like. If we really believe in liberation and aim to live in it, we have to really know what we are focusing on. Intimately. I actually believe we must know liberation even better than we have to know oppression, and as my last post suggested, that is a lot.
The fact that we are not so well-versed in either oppression or liberation is something we should pay very close attention to. It is politically and philosophically significant.
WAYS OF BEING
For years, I have initiated the process of getting to know liberation in this vein with a preliminary and wildly insufficient description of liberation as ways of being that are without, before, and beyond oppressive norms, values, assumptions, beliefs, and practices of unjust systems of power.
These ways of being are crucial, not just for the sake of vision because we have to know where we are headed, but also because knowing liberation as ways of being translates into shared goals and similar values, which allows for more aligned movement, more coordinated projects, closer bonds that grow tighter with each step we take in the same direction. This is actually how we find each other and go on from there.
Practically, when we have clarity around the ways of being that are beyond, before, and without oppressive norms, we can more readily identify the best of our possible choices and make decisions that help us stay the course. This, by the way, has to happen on an individual level. Collective liberation for all depends on each of us doing what we can, right where we are. When you and I can better see the choices we already make, you and I can begin to recognize additional choices that are in alignment with how we can diligently continue following our own path that moves us all toward collective liberation.
(Side note: I’m aware of the skepticism around placing so much responsibility on individual actions, like how systemic and structural changes are absolutely required for us to mitigate climate disaster and it’s not particularly effective to hyperfocus one person’s choice to not consume an extra plastic product, though that is something important, too. Even if it is a small something.
There is something here worth unpacking. Many of our leaders and thinkers before us have long acknowledged that transformation begins at the individual level. They are quotable for saying it. But maybe that is just it—transformation begins at the individual level, but that’s not where it ends. In fact, we have to graduate to collective movement, which would be the level that can effectively disrupt and restructure entire systems. Okay, got that out of my head…for now.)
Understanding what liberation looks and feels like, through ways of being, helps us see where our priorities and possibilities meet in real time. From there, we can embody liberation. Liberation is no longer just a vision, but also a practice through which we literally can locate ourselves within a process of changing, becoming, creating, transforming. Manifesting. Embodying. Materializing. Realizing. It’s not a longed-for miracle or spontaneous rupture toward which we can only cast utopian wishes.
When we know what liberation looks and feels like, it gives us an outline for how to live so that liberation becomes the very way of our being.
Now, this is the practice. Describe liberation in positive terms. Give it definition. Flesh it out. Give it meaning and body, texture and dimension. Relate to liberation as something we can actually feel. Get to know liberation as something to which we can point. Something we can spot in a crowded landscape. Something we can be.
SO, WHAT DOES LIBERATION LOOK AND FEEL LIKE?
I suspect I’ve hesitated for years to write down a collection of my own answers to this question in one place, and as far as this writing project goes, for days (this is the third day of me writing on this post, to get to this exact spot. Right here.) because there will always be more to say, more to learn, more to articulate about liberation, especially if, when, and as we collectively strive to get more free, every day.
Probably also because I know my list of articulations is insufficient.
Personally, individually, even after all these years, it still feels like whatever I might say would be so basic, like when you describe someone you just met and lean on first impressions. Then, when you look back years later after becoming really good friends, you see the distance your knowing has traveled, for now you can appreciate so much more of their nuances and love their details. Who you met, way back when, was such a stranger.
Or, like when you spot a tree in the distance ahead of you on a mountain trail. As you keep going, you spot something glinting under its branches. Taking more steps, you see it is a rock reflecting the sunlight. As you get closer still, you notice the rock is filled with metallic-looking minerals. And when you pick up the rock, a lady bug lands on your shirt and that makes you smile.
Maybe liberation will be the ladybug one day.
Nevertheless, one has to start somewhere.
In the most simple terms, in a world without oppression, where we are all really free, liberation looks and feels exceptionally creative. We make art. We live in safe homes and are comfortable with each other. We move where and when we want out of contentment, curiosity, and in peace. We enjoy who we are and what we have. We labor in ways that support each other. We cook nourishing meals and eat together. We sleep well. We move with the pace of nature. We share generously of everything we know and believe. Children are precious and grow with the kind of energy that thrives from being surrounded by love from all directions. Elders are honored and respected as they give the very best of what their lives offered them. Wisdom flows like rivers. Time is supple. Days are slow. Rest is easy. Celebrations are ample. We are grounded in the reality of our lives with gratitude, wonder, and awe. We sing and dance. A lot. Our artifacts and symbols and creations are reflections of the goodness of our existence. Life has meaning. We live with purpose.
And so much more.
Let us continue to always say and express more about liberation.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of other ways I describe what life and ways of being that are without, before, and beyond oppressive ways of being would probably look and feel like:
Readily accessing what we need with comfort, pleasure, and ease
Experiencing a sense of wholeness, harmony, connectedness, balance, and safety within oneself, with others, and with the land that supports all life
Feeling uplifted and inspired by the beauty and quality of our external conditions, environments, and surroundings
Creatively engaging in the world with generative, abundant, and sustainable resources in ways that promote community, reciprocity, and care
Exercising one’s full freedom and agency for the benefit of self and all others
Using our diverse and unbridled talents, brilliance, gifts, intuitive insights, imaginations, dreams, and visions to make all facets of life even more joyful, rich, and meaningful
Collaboratively addressing the natural challenges of life with ingenuity, compassion, wisdom, and empathy
Knowing oneself through your place and location within a culture that lovingly connects you to others, near and far, in the past, present, and future, who hold you in mutual regard
Experiencing a sense of belonging that stems from meeting others with love, affection, and enthusiasm for being our most authentic, expressive, and honest selves (and having the ability and capacity to do this across all of our human experiences)
And so much more.
This is nowhere near the tomes of liberation we all deserve, the sort of knowing that lives in our bones.
But if these descriptions give anyone else even just a few bullet-points worth of a head start on their own articulations of liberation,
that’s worth the awkward tension of wishing we already had so much more to offer one another.