Wonder – A Book That Transforms the World
Written by R.J. Paclacio
Review by Craig Wiesner / Reach And Teach

It’s okay, I know I’m weird-looking, take a look, I don’t bite. Hey, the truth is, if a wookie started going to school all of a sudden, I’d be curious, I’d probably stare a bit!

When he walked into the room, I couldn’t help myself. I stared, just for a moment. He looked so different from all the other kids in the auditorium. Then, a few teen girls sitting behind me started whispering to each other. “Oh My God… Look at him!” One of them said.

Juliane Okot Bitek knows the power of narrative. An award winning writer living in Vancouver, Canada, Okot Bitek is also an Acholi woman who calls Gulu in Northern Uganda home. Considering the civil war (1986- 2006) that plagued northern Ugandans, it’s no wonder much of Okot Bitek’s passionate writing focuses on social and political issues. In the last decade, through her poetry, essays, fiction, nonfiction and opinion pieces, Okot Bitek has fought both to make sense of, and to expose the tragedies of her homeland.

Okot Bitek comes to writing through an impressive lineage. Her late father is the famed Ugandan poet, essayist, novelist and academic, Okot p’Bitek, who was, shortly before his death in 1982, appointed as the first professor of Creative Writing at Makerere University in Kampala. Things weren’t always so rosy, however. As a result of her father’s work, Okot Bitek and her family spent the early years of her childhood in exile in Kenya. As a result of this history, Okot Bitek is no stranger to political strife and social unrest. Still, in spite of this, she describes the pleasure of growing up in a house full of books and lively debates between her parents and their literary and artistic friends. Some of Africa’s luminaries were regular houseguests: Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o and David Rubadiri were men she called uncle, and on a given day they might be filling the Okot Bitek household with their intellect, their opinions and their friendship.

Growing up in such an environment would make anyone sensitive to the importance of storytelling. As Okot Bitek says, “Stories are everything. Without a story, none of us exists.” But it’s not just the significance of narrative that is so dear to Okot Bitek, she is sensitive to the invisibility and the silence that shrouds those whose stories don’t get heard. This is evident in the work she has recently completed, which is provisionally titled Stories From the Dry Season. Collaborating with Dr. Erin Baines of the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia and Grace Acan, a women’s advocate and LRA survivor, Okot Bitek took on this work as a way to tell the stories of women from northern Uganda who were abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A) and who eventually returned to civilian life after long and terrible years of abuse and assault.

Andy Grosmaire talks about his daughter, Ann, who was killed by her fiancé, Conor. The Grosmaires asked for a restorative justice process to resolve the case, a highly unusual request from the parents of a murder victim. Credit: Mike Ewen (tallahassee.com).

Don’t miss this major New York Times Sunday magazine article on a significant story we covered first a year ago in Tikkun in The Day the Jail Walls Cracked: A Restorative Plea Deal by Sujatha Baliga. A 19-year-old man shot and killed his girlfriend, and the young woman’s parents forgave him, motivated by a deep Catholic belief in forgiveness, a sense that both their daughter and Jesus wanted them to forgive, and an understanding that the forgiveness would enable them to survive. In a conservative Florida district, the prosecutor had the courage to allow a full restorative circle to take place as part of the plea development process. This new article goes more deeply into the murder and the ways the families sought a different kind of justice.

I hope my comment on the article may bring some more people to read our entire Restorative Justice issue of a year ago, which is — in my humble opinion as the guest editor of that issue — one of the best things available on this growing movement that is pioneering non-punitive ways of responding to harm. I should say “re-pioneering” since many tribal societies have practiced some version of it for aeons before more civilized options became available.

If you don’t have a print or online subscription to Tikkun (it’s 56 cents a week, or $29 a year here and it would be a blessing to the magazine if you did subscribe), and can’t afford one now, there were a number of articles on restorative justice we published then that are free to all. Those articles answer a number of questions the NY Times readers are asking today.

One is by Jerry Elster, a man who also killed at age 19, though in very different circumstances, and spent 26 years in prison for the crime. In that time he himself was transformed: if anyone doubts that a teen killer can become a community leader and elder they should have the privilege of meeting Jerry today. In another free article, Hamish Sinclair writes about Manalive, the peer-led program he founded, which has had significant success in enabling men to unlearn the “male role belief system” with its focus on male authority and honor, and learn how to be vulnerable, intimate and equal partners with women and men. And we also learn that an entire country has been running its youth justice system on restorative principles for over twenty years. In short, violent men can be rehabilitated, and entire systems can be run on principles of restoring rather than punishing.

And nothing is more important than using restorative circles in school. If Conor and Ann had had a teacher like Rita Alfred, or a “fight room” at school like Dominic Barter’s, who knows what might have happened – they might have learned how to welcome their fights as a way of learning what both of them most needed, and how to meet those needs together and with the help of friends and elders.

This is a movement that is building, and this NYT article will help its momentum.

Forgive me if I seem egocentric here. My sister has lived in Connecticut most of her adult life, where her husband is a recently retired math professor at the University of Connecticut. Her home is in Storrs, where UConn has its main campus, in the northeastern corner of the state, at least a two-hour drive from the scene of the school massacre in Newtown, CT. She’s informed me that she met one of the victims once, because she was a family friend of a UConn colleague. This victim was the school psychologist, Mary Sherlach, 56 years of age.

I also recall that I had a similarly remote connection to one of the victims of the attack on Mumbai, India in 2008, again through my sister. Her oldest son had a colleague, an Indian-American, who was murdered by the Islamist terrorists because he was discovered to be a U.S. citizen.

What’s that notion of all of us being connected within just a few degrees of separation? Regardless, anyone with a modicum of human feeling will be moved by such terrible events.

I know, as discussed on this blog, that we need to wrestle with more profound cultural changes than passing some laws or regulations. But I dearly hope that this time, this horror provides enough momentum to outlaw assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips. We may not yet be able to win the battle to outlaw all handguns — pistols actually take many more lives than rapid-fire assault weapons — but we can make progress on that front as well.

Recently two seemingly unrelated events came together: I volunteered for Measure D to raise the minimum wage in San Jose to ten dollars an hour, and I watched another episode of the BBC’s excellent production of War and Peace.

War and Peace BBC

In the episode I watched, a wealthy family, the Rostovs, is crating up their numerous possessions, china, furniture, dresses, vases, and clocks, to flee Moscow in the face of Napoleon’s oncoming troops. They look out the window: a long line of wounded Russian soldiers is wending its exhausted way through the city – now abandoned by most of the rich. At first, the family watches, curious, as the soldiers drag and are dragged past their front door. Then the daughter, Natasha, a person of great spirit and integrity, asks what it could hurt to let the wounded be brought inside and laid on the floor; the family is leaving the city anyway for their country estate.

Just as the family is about to leave, an officer begs them to take a few of the wounded along. Natasha’s father okays replacing a few boxes with soldiers. But when his wife hears of this, she bursts into an impassioned plea: These goods are our children’s heritage! You’ve mismanaged our money, made bad business decisions, and now you’ll deprive them of this too?

Her husband, chastened, goes back on his decision. Natasha, however, explodes: These are only things! I don’t want them! How can you save things instead of human beings? She points down at the soldiers: These are human beings!

In the end, they make the miraculous decision to leave their goods and fill the carts with wounded soldiers. As it happens, lying among the wounded is someone they know, someone very important, but they only find that out after the decision is made.

I have been carrying a vivid memory with me for over 50 years. In it, my father is chasing me around the little circle of dining area, kitchen, corridor, and living room that existed in our apartment. In my memory, this has happened already, to me and to my older sister. I don’t know, in actuality, if it was a one-time event or recurring. As I am running away from him, I suddenly realize there is just no way I can manage to escape. He is bigger, and faster, and I am small, not as strong. Sooner or later he will catch up with me. I stop, crushed by the futility of the effort, and turn around to accept the inevitable slap in my face I know is coming. I stand in my small body facing him as he is coming my way. I close my eyes as tightly as I can, contracting the muscles around them, raise my face in his direction, and wait. The burning sensation of that slap is still imprinted on my cheek. More significant by far is the impossibility, to this day, of having a visceral understanding of how a grown man could look at his five year old daughter, see her stand the way I remember me standing, and still deliver the slap. What could possibly make it appear to be the right thing to do?

I have no awareness of what the “transgression” was that led to this event. I do know that making me submit to his will was a major project for my father. As it is for so many parents in relation to so many children.

Recently, the California State Assembly passed a bipartisan resolution called HR35 that pressures the UC to take harsh measures on anti-Semitism on campus. The bulk of the resolution targets groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the Boycott and Divestment Sanctions movement as the main perpetrators of anti-Semitism. Many have criticized HR35 for silencing what is actually free speech.

HR35 is based on a recently-released report on campus climate for Jewish students on the UC. The report similarly asks the UC to stifle groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and the BDS movement under the allegation that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. In Rebecca Pierce’s video, students and community member express their deep concerns with the report’s shoddy methodology and silencing of free speech:

For what many of us happens to be a subconscious pattern, at every single moment our bodies are set to move with an internal rhythm, a frequency of flow. It is so obvious, so integral, and so taken for granted that it is most likely not something we pay that much attention to. This rhythm is breath, and without this beat, there is no life in the bodies we reside in. The beautiful thing about this simple and subtle, often forgotten, internal movement is that when you pay it some attention, it can take on the force of powerful winds, of strong waves. It creates its own gravity and momentum, each movement taking on an exaggerated expression. Each inhale lifts your lungs and belly, inflating what now feels like elastic skin. Each exhale becomes a gratifying release and surrender, an emptying of something you never knew could ever be so full.

UC Santa Cruz Jewish and non-Jewish student protesters. Credit: Matt Borden.

Two months ago, UC President Marc Yudof’s Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture and Inclusion released a report on the experiences of Jewish students on UC campuses. Co-authored by Rick Barton, a council member of the Anti-Defamation League, and Alice Huffman of the California NAACP, the report marks the culmination of what many have come to see as an attack on free speech and academic freedom under the disguise of protecting Jewish students from criticism of Israel.The following letter is a response to the report from an organization of UC professors and other academics who are focused on maintaining free and open academic debate.

Please sign this petition if you would like to urge President Yudof to disregard the report.

Dear President Yudof,

We, the California Scholars for Academic Freedom** write to urge you not to adopt the recommendations of the Jewish Student Campus Climate Report. We find the report’s recommendations pose a clear threat to academic freedom at the University of California. First, the report is based on sloppy methodology and clear bias. A comparison with the Muslim and Arab Student Campus Climate Report is instructive. The latter explains exactly how many people they spoke with, how they were put in touch with them, and lists their names and affiliations. The Jewish Student Campus Climate Report merely implies that they spoke with a range of people but never specifies with whom and how they were chosen. In fact, the two people who conducted the Jewish Student Campus Climate Report appear to have spoken almost exclusively with those who would like to silence criticism of Israel on UC campuses.

Second, the Muslim and Arab Student Campus Climate Report explains in great detail the exact nature of the discrimination that Muslim and Arab students experience on UC campuses, while the Jewish Student Campus Climate Report quotes unnamed people as feeling upset about criticisms of Israel. In fact, the report focuses almost exclusively on criticism of Israel as a supposedly objective measure of anti-Semitism while giving short shrift to the broad range of Jewish student experiences on UC campuses. The Jewish Student Campus Climate Report, despite a brief one-sentence disclaimer, essentially equates criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, despite having to acknowledge that much of this criticism comes from Jewish faculty and students.