Abolition: In Defence of Translation with Lola Olufemi and Imani Robinson
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Abolition: In Defence of Translation is a series of presentations, organising workshops, conversations and performances reflecting on the many dimensions of abolition, curated and programmed by Lola Olufemi and Imani Robinson as part of Somerset House Studios. It runs in person & online between the 9th - 30th of September 2021.
Across a weekly programme of in person and online events throughout September, Abolition: In Defence of Translation looks to explore how people might, following the critical texts of prison abolitionist, create space for attendees to question their own beliefs about abolition provide some practical skills that can be use to intervene against carcerality.
Lola and Imani spoke to Our Community Editor Halima Jibril after the ‘In Defence of Translation’ presentation and discussion about what ‘In Defence of Translation’ really means, the hiddenness of prisons and how abolition is more than just abolishing prisons.
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What does 'In defence of translation' mean? Imani, you gave a great explanation of this in the panel discussion. Do you mind expanding on it?
Imani: I guess 'In Defence of Translation' does not necessarily have a definition or something we can fix it in. It is more so asking a question and making a statement that will allow for thinking and generative thinking amongst people who are generally outside of the U.S. or outside what we understand as abolition's home. So it is really kind of querying the ownership and belonging of that term and making a claim for talking about it in an internationalist way. So 'In Defence of Translation' is not so much a definition as it is a question, a statement, a galvanising term to say we should be talking about this, and we are allowed to be talking about these things. They have relevance and importance for our own contexts, and also I think the critical part is that there is work that we have to do to translate these concepts, and these ideas that mean something in our own language, that mean something in our own ways of life. So 'In Defence of Translation' is really against a bad translation, a watering down. The first conversation/ panel discussion really opened up many possibilities for what that term could mean, but it also threw up many different questions and disagreements and questions that we still do not have the answers for.
Lola: We are also trying to think about the fact carcerality looks different in different contexts. When we think about abolition as an idea, as a practice, as a theory, we are thinking about how it needs to be adaptable; it needs to shift and change and needs to be able to respond to carceral geographies wherever it may be. I think Imani really made it clear that we are not trying to be prescriptive. We are opening up a space for thinking, practical skills, and artistic reflection, which I am most proud of. We are trying to come at this idea of translation from many different dimensions, which makes it a lot richer.
Imani, before the presentations began, you posed two questions "What about the prison in your area?" and "What can the local tell us about the global?" Why do you guys think it is essential for us to think locally and within our own communities?
Lola: When we were coming up with this programme and writing the copy together, we were thinking about this idea of abolition as sort of an exported product in the U.K., there are all of these competing discourses that are based in a hierarchy of pain, so people say "the U.K. is not as bad as the U.S." or "European countries are not as bad as the U.S.", so we were trying to bypass that and come to a space where we could consider or think through what abolition offers us, but also what the history is of the places we exist in, what kind of echoes and memories and chains of violence do they also carry. So when we were coming up with the event, we were thinking about Holloway Prison, a prison close to me and has been the subject of much organising for the last couple of years. It is also tucked away and hidden by its own carceral landscape - people would not necessarily think about it as like the biggest women's prison in Europe at one point, so we wanted to really zoom in on the fact that the prison is not an abstract thing, the prison does exist in the places that we live in, and it is important that we know how it got there in order for us to know how to dismantle it. To think about the possibility of its abolition, we must know its history, who is inside, and why. The local can give us the tools to then theorise abolition globally, to make it this changeable and adaptable concept that can then go on to be useful in other contexts. So often, within theory and practice, the local and the global are pitted against each other, and I think it is much more generative to think about how they inform one another. Examining our own landscapes can help us examine landscapes completely different from ours, which is a significant point.
Imani: I also think this local and global relationship is much more material, real and tangible than we think. So when we think about carcerality in different places, it does not actually make sense to severe it at the border. Carcerality is implicated across borders, across nations and is fueled and pushed by this international and global racial capitalism that not only happens everywhere simultaneously but relies on the fact it is happening everywhere and tries to expand out as much as possible. So it is really important for us to look at other places and look at how carcerality looks in those other contexts and our own contexts. We need to look for carcerality wherever it is so that we can uproot it.
I find what you said about prisons being hidden fascinating Lola, because I recently saw my very first prison when I went to London this year. When I saw it, I was shocked and did not really understand why I reacted that way. I know prisons are real, and the actual effects they have on people's lives, but they really are hidden in plain sight, so in many ways, people do not comprehend them in real life. We mostly know them fictionally or through stories.
Lola: Yeah, I think that the tucked away-ness of prisons is very purposeful. That is how the state hides violence. It is the same with detention centres. I'm sure people don't know how many detention centres are in the U.K. or even where they are because they are purposefully in places you won't stumble across. You have to go and find them. That's part of the abolitionist project, finding this violence that is obscured from us and questioning what we can do about this absence of banishing people and inflicting pain on them.
Imani: Before they examine the prison or think about abolition, most people would say that they consent to the prison or would not say it but would just see it as part of our lives on earth. There is something in abolition that lets us think about what we will consent to, and actually, if you look at and confront the reality of prisons and carcerality, you can begin to say, "actually, I really don't consent to this at all," and start to build a very real and workable set of politics and way of responding to that. But it's difficult to do that if your idea of the prison is based on the media, this doesn't provide any real idea of what we are consenting to when it comes to the prison.
“It's less about us doing the work of connecting in the first instance and more so building critical awareness of our histories and our entanglements, particularly to do with colonialism and British colonialism.”
You guys already kind of touched upon my next question concerning global solidarity. One of the speakers Jun Pang spoke about abolition in relation to Hong Kong and the importance of transnational solidarity, but why is it so important to connect our struggles in this way?
Imani: I guess I would say that our struggles are already connected, and it's less about us doing the work of connecting in the first instance and more so building critical awareness of our histories and our entanglements, particularly to do with colonialism and British colonialism. It is essential to connect our struggles because that is the reality of the situation. The carceral institutions that are oppressing us are connected; the colonial and the carceral have always been overlapping in terms of how we got to where we are. So it's really a question of understanding the histories, the legacies of colonialism and oppression, and how we use that information to do abolition in the every day in a way that is attendant to all those histories.
Lola: I also think, the question of solidarity is always an interesting one in any political movement, and people get hung up on this idea that solidarity is not all-encompassing, which doesn't really make sense to me. Solidarity is a political principle that you develop out of necessity. At the very most basic level, you need as many people as possible to stop a prison or disrupt things at the point of access. So when I think of the necessity of transnational solidarity, I think about what Imani said about our struggles already being connected, but I think about the urgencies that we need to attend to at any given moment. They need all of us, right? They need as many of us as possible. So I think of solidarity as a principle that is rooted in this idea that is we need each other fundamentally - and there is no way for us to attend to the violence and the misery without actually being with each other and dealing with the fact that we are not perfect and we are going to harm each other, and we are going to get things wrong. So for me, I think about solidarity as a practical thing but also think about the histories that we belong to. We have very much always been rooted in transnational solidarity, we didn't allow the border to influence our thinking, and we were still finding ways to communicate with each other, and now that's easier than ever, but that also comes with increased surveillance and a bunch of other things. But I think by carrying on that principle from people's work, you are trying to extend and expand people's thinking through abolition as well.
Imani: I also think that when you're in solidarity with somebody, there's also this practice of allowing these people who have more expertise on their own contexts to lead you on how you should or can support them. I don't think we've actually named this yet - but for example, the abolition movement in the U.S. has been led by Black feminists, who are grounded in this collective understanding of how we make change. So I think that solidarity is a strategy, but it's also a way of being and understanding how power or how change happens in society.
Lola: Yes, it's not a relationship of benevolence - which I think is what so much of allyship is. I think there is a meaningful distinction between a practice of solidarity and this version of allyship that we have due to neoliberalism, which is like the figure of the ally who is taunted by their own complicity in systems and refuses to step back and understand that these problems are structural. I also think that it's really interesting when you talk to allies, because the relationship to these problems isn't their will or desire to end these problems but to relieve them of their own internal guilt and complexity. Audre Lorde tells us about the uselessness of guilt, and I think that this type of allyship is different from solidarity because anyone who is standing in solidarity notices that it is in their own benefit for these injustices to end - they do not want to be the recipients of protection from a kind of violence that's inflicted on someone else and in that way, you can see the difference.
Imani: And people need to understand that my freedom is tangled up with yours. So if you are unfree and I can see that, that is also my freedom that we are talking about. So there is a definite shift when somebody is like, "in order for me to get free, you also have to be free." That is very different from, "Hey, how can I support you with your struggles."
How do you want people to come away from your programme, thinking about abolition?
Imani: I kind of want people to come away with more complexity, depth and nuance than they did in 2020. I think it's really important to resist the watering down of what we've seen with the terms like 'intersectionality' and 'decolonisation'. We must go deeper into the usability of these terms and take on a kind of politics and practice. So for me, this programme is really important as it allows us to have deeper conversations than abolition 101, and it's not that we shouldn't go over the basic tenets of abolition; in fact, we should
keep coming back to that. However, I think there is scope for us to use what we've learned through all of the different buzzwords that come up and the different things that we have been thinking about collectively. We need to be able to get past this surface-level engagement and actually engage in a way that is difficult, that is confusing, that is enlightening, and that is generative of something new and something sustainable. It's really, really important that we begin to practice this kind of everyday thinking, dreaming and scheming rather than just dipping into them when we think we have the time and capacity. How do we actually imbue these ideas and ways of thinking into our everyday lives? That is what I'm excited for people to take away from this. It's not just that we should not have prisons anymore - it's all of these other things, too, that can be taken further.
Lola: I'm hoping that people get a shift in thinking. These ideas, thoughts and theories are not abstract things; they exist where they are. People need to prepare themselves to deal with these issues materially. It's too simplistic to say that there is a separation between theory and practice. Enlightening ways and being able to see the different routes is not as important as the action. The enlightening theoretical angles of things allow us to be moved effectively and allow something within us to change. So when it comes down to it, we can intervene in our own carceral landscapes. For me, it would be a solid thing if someone came to an anti-raids workshop and, after that, looked up their own rights or how to intervene when they saw a police officer harassing a Black person. The link between those two things are incredibly important, but I also think it's a link that happens through an emotional shift - as Imani said, the main thing isn't just that the prison should not exist; the main thing is that we have to rethink everything. We have to find new paradigms for thinking through things. We have to come up with new ideas and disagree with each other, to not understand each other and think in confusion - things that are often hard and difficult to reconcile. I'm really interested in shifting the emotional landscapes that are brought about through theoretical propositions and how those shifts are connected to the things that we do and the ways that we exist in the world, so those ways concerning carcerality become less passive and more active.
Words: Halima Jibril
