Poet Nikki Giovanni on the concept of achieving Justice

During an interview with Krista Tippett, host of the radio program “On Being”, poet Nikki Giovanni made a profound observation about the nature of pursuing justice in the face of injustice:

Giovanni: The third line in the poem [I am working on now] says, you know, “We cannot be unraped.” And I was interested because, you know, we’ve had a lot of, you know, campus rape, and then we found out that some of it isn’t quite, ah, quite accurate. But no matter what it is, we cannot ‘unrape’. And, I’m not sure, I’m having this argument with myself, I don’t know where this is going to go by the way, but I’m not sure that ‘justice’, can come from any of that. Only, only thing that come from that is revenge. And, revenge is a bad idea, I mean the Greeks learned that [long] ago.

Tippett: That justice can come from, that justice can come from any of what? Of ...?

Giovanni: That, that there’s no ju --- if you, right now, came in here and beat the living crap out of me, there is no ‘justice’; there’s no justice, I had the living crap beaten out of me. I can sue you, I can do something to try to satisfy myself, but that’s not going to be --- there’s no justice. Unless I would, tie you up and beat the living crap out of you --- and nobody wants to do that --- that’s what I’m saying. I can get revenge, but I can’t, there’s no justice. And so I’m beginning to wonder, should we change this, this, this dialogue we have. I saw the president the other day, of the United States, saying, you know, to to the the ah community the the, whoever it is that, that’s been blowing up people, you know, 'we’re going to get you’. That’s, that’s not justice. And, and, I’m sorry to say it like that --- I’m not namby-pamby --- but we’re going to have to find a way to talk to each other, and I think that, that’s what’s important.

(17 March 2016; 1:02:55 into the unedited version of the interview, available here.)

Her thoughts on justice resonate at so many levels of modern life, whether the personal wrongs we may individually face, the national discourse on race and the police, or the international efforts to respond to ISIS.  When we talking about achieving justice in response to some sort of violence --- some injustice --- what do we really mean, what do we actually wish to achieve?

One can understand Giovanni noting that "I'm having this argument with myself, [and] I don't know where this is going to go," because comments such as hers will almost unavoidably generate knee-jerk, facile retorts: 'What, shall we just let the rapist go then?  Shall we just let ISIS behead people?'  By reaching for the extremes of a literal interpretation, one need not bother to consider the deeper meaning of her words.

But clearly she does not intend to say that we should simply turn the other cheek in the face of such violence, as she reinforces with her "I'm not namby-pamby" comment toward the end of the quote above.  Instead, I would argue, her point is that we must understand what we are asking for when we ask for justice, what we accomplish --- and fail to accomplish --- in pursuing justice through a violent response.

We may need to resort to violence in some cases, whether it be incarceration (through the outcome of the judicial system), or military confrontation (against a terrorist group).  But, Giovanni seems to argue, we need to recognize that these responses do not truly achieve justice, and in reality most closely resemble revenge.  And, perhaps, if we recognize that in the end such means also represent a kind of violence, and that violence breeds violence, then maybe we will take the first steps to understanding that to truly end injustice --- for the long-term --- we have to, as she says above, "find a way to talk to each other" to stop the injustice from occurring in the first place.