This interview was conducted in 2018 by a Northwestern University student who was
using it as source material to create a performance piece. Allen Sindler's "Heal CTA"
premiered at Chicago's 2018 PEACEBOOK festival and was recently accepted for the
2019 "Mother Moon" festival in NYC. I am honored to have been part of her healing
art. It was also healing for me to reflect on my own journey and theorize
from a place of pain.
Note: I made some minors edits to the original transcript but kept it as close to the
original as possible.
Dr. Sekile Nzinga-Johnson Interview
INNER PEACE
Inner peace, for me, is really not a destination but a process and a practice, it is something
you claw at everyday. The reason I say claw, is because life is really hard. You have to fight
to stay alive. You have to fight to decide to stay here. For me, one of the ways I fight is trying
to figure out what is joy filled in my life. Not foregrounding my pain, not backgrounding my
pain, but just letting the pain live right there and out loud. I’ve also been really really fortunate
to have my life since those traumatic events be very joy filled. For me, that’s what has been
my inner peace.
I know that I’m lucky because for someone else, they might have had another round of trauma.
It’s difficult for me now, so I can’t imagine what it would be like if I got hit with something else.
I live often in a state of terror because I have a daughter, and I say to myself “please don’t let
anything happen to my daughter,” but knowing there’s a high chance that it could because of the
world that we live in. So, I live in this state of terror, praying, because that would undo me.
I’ve put myself together well enough to make it, but if another round hit me, then my fragile
notion of inner peace would surely be dismantled.
That's what I mean when I say we have to claw at life and fight at life. I don't know if it’s peace
so much as it is struggle to stay here. I’ve had some really shitty things happen to me, but I’m
still here. Right? And I want to live. And if I want to live, then I got to find some other stuff to help
me stay sane in all of it. I really don’t know, but I can’t necessarily say that it’s a peaceful place
so much as a place of acceptance and contentment. But I also think that space of inner
peace is really hard to get to when you’re hit over and over again by violence. So maybe it’s
not sexual violence but the violence of poverty, the violence of racism, violence of homophobia.
There are so many forms of violence, and we tend to forefront one or the other, but so many
people are being hit by so many forms of violence that it’s hard to reach this notion of inner peace.
There’s a line from this movie called Sankofa and there’s a woman, an African woman who was
enslaved and her name was Nunu. There was, I think this line she would say, “this is just the flesh,
you can’t touch my spirit, my spirit is in Africa.” So when she, well I won’t spoil the thing, but I
remember that really stuck with me. That distinction between what happened to my flesh and
what happened to my spirit. And I don’t practice any religion but I think about that, and I use that
metaphor in my life.
When I think about being a professor and what it was like for me struggling to get tenure and all,
navigating this often hostile climate as a black woman, I would think about what happened to me
in my childhood. What I was going through and I would put it in perspective. Like actually this is
not real, this is the Matrix--fiction, a fabricated world! This is not pain, that was pain. Like this feels
painful because it’s horrible and people are ridiculous and assholes for no reason but this is not
real right? That was real pain. So I use it, I use the pain to ground me, too. All this other stuff is
smaller than that.
I think people can find inner peace by tapping into this spirit and also thinking about taking things
into perspective. Those are kind of like strategies that I use, but I think inner peace is a practice.
Like you literally have to practice it, remembering the joy, because sometimes the pain is so big
and so multifaceted that it can make you forget. And that’s why it makes sense for some people
to have spiritual practices to kind of remind them, like “what do I have to be grateful for?” And I
guess the challenge for me in saying what I’m saying to you now is, that some people say you
should only focus on that. “Well look you’re still alive! Look you didn’t die” So sometimes people
use spirituality and religion to minimize people’s pain. I don’t want you to think that’s what I’m
saying. I think your pain gets to sit right where it needs to sit, and no one can tell you where
you’re supposed to put it because it hurts. Anyone who is like “I wish you could talk about it
and move on,” No. It takes a lot of work to put that pain in perspective, especially if it’s happening
multiple times. And for most women it’s happened more than once in their lives. And so they hold
all that guilt because they think well I did something. So inner peace is very you know um,
hard to get at. It is an active practice, it is not a destination. And I don’t blame anyone who hasn't
begun their journey yet because there’s a lot of shit that folks are working through to hold onto it,
you know? Yea.
HEALING
Sexual trauma can look different for different people. Everyone has a different experience, and no
two people’s healing looks the same, but I think that healing, in general, from trauma, sexual or
other forms of violence is cyclical and enduring. I don't think that we ever quite heal, I think that
you can be feeling very well for a decade, and there can be a moment that takes you back to the
moment of victimization. And so part of it is knowing, and being aware of what your experience
has done to you psychologically and physically. Having the support to be able to heal and to be
authentic about what is troubling you and being able to name your pain and to friends and to
family and to the world, to not be shamed for your experience and to know that that support is
ongoing.
The more support we have early on, the more likely we are to be stabilized. The less likely we are
to have support, to be believed, to be affirmed and to name our pain, I think the longer that
healing process takes to begin, and to take root. I’m a survivor of sexual trauma, and it is a
process. I describe it as an ongoing process. There is no end point. I will be living with this pain for
the rest of my life, and so for me, and for others, I think it looks like trying to figure out how to live
and hold both your pain and joy in life. How to hold them at the same time. I think that is part of
the healing process, finding ways to hold both pain and joy and to continue to claw at life and to
live. Doing this though, you are going to need to be wrapped in resources informal and formal.
Informal is your family and friends and formal may be therapeutic, or faith based forms of support,
or it may be your hobbies, or exercise. All these things have to be with an eye on healing. Nothing
detrimental to your experience. But you could enter those spaces for healing and experience
secondary forms of trauma. So those spaces have to be safe, and take up your quest in the
healing process.
So I’ll give you an example of someone who might have survived a rape and might go to the
hospital to report the rape. And they're interrogated,” where were you?” “Why did you go there?”
All these questions that begin to target you as the person, you who made a poor choice. What
we call victim blaming. And somehow all of it has gotten away from the person who victimized
you, to “what were the conditions surrounding the victimization and what role you played.” And
so that is a secondary form of trauma. Because now you’re made to feel guilty or question your
role in all of this. That is an additional traumatic event. The same thing happens when you go to
the police. There’s often this notion that the police are this safe space, but that may not be true.
Many women and femmes are victimized at the hands of law enforcement--sex workers, trans
women, working class women, femmes/women of color, and femmes/women who are
incarcerated are more likely to be victimized again when they come into contact with law
enforcement. These are compounding forms of sexual trauma. Maybe they’ve already experienced
some form of sexual trauma in their life and then they come contact with this organization that is
supposed to be supporting them or even rehabilitating them, and it becomes a site for more
violence. Maybe you go to your minister looking for support, but that becomes a vulnerable space for
many people who have been victimized. So, trust in that person who is in power, also becomes a
vulnerable space to be in. So, I think we don’t really talk about that. There are so many forms of
secondary violence and complex trauma that happens when we are told to go to these spaces
that are supposed to be helpful.
SUPPORT
I feel that we need to be heard, I think we need to be validated, our experiences need to be
validated. I think we need to know that our communities are safe and affirming and welcoming.
I think that communities need to hold people who have victimized others accountable. I think that
whatever accountability looks like it has to evoke their humanity and not compromise it.
If you put someone who’s victimized someone in a more inhuman setting, we can’t
necessarily say that that’s going to make that person a better person at the end of the
accountability process. I would want that person to become a better person. To somehow
be able to recover and to be able to think through the harm they have caused to the person
they have victimized, to themselves, and to their community and to think through “how do I
become a whole person after this?” I also think that person who is a perpetrator is also a
victim, because they have now compromised their humanity. I think that the person who has
been primarily victimized needs to be prioritized and protected and needs to be empowered to
know that they can move forward. We are stronger than we think we are. And how do we
remember to hold pain and acknowledge that still there is opportunity for joy. But it’s really hard,
depending on how violent the attack was and depending on how much you trusted the person
who attacked you. The conditions make it really hard.
I feel like that person needs to be loved, protected, and affirmed, listened to but we have to be
really patient with survivors. Because we want people to get over it, we want people to snap out
of it, but you can’t! It has shaken you to your core, whatever that thing is that happened to you.
And you need time to put yourself back together. If you were told that it didn’t happen to you,
if you were told or received societal messages that said it was your fault, it can take a really long
time. If you haven’t been given the resources and you have to show up at work or school the next
day, if it happened to you at work or school--because we’re assuming that these things are only
happening in dark alleys and parking lots. No, it’s happening at home, most people who have
been sexually victimized are being victimized by their partners, or people they know. Married
women are victimized by their partners, girls are victimized by their boyfriends, right? Children
are victimized by adults that are supposedly protecting them, teachers, priests, coaches, parents,
aunts, uncles, older siblings. Then you get to college and it happens on a date or after a party.
So I think that there’s also an assumption that its only happening once in someone’s life, or that
we should get over it when it’s really persistent and chronic. And so if the attacks against our
humanity are persistent and chronic then I think the affirmation in support of our humanity
has to be persistent, consistent and loving.
