Home space/Coalition space in reparative work

Over the last couple of years, a piece written by Civil Rights Activist and singer, Bernice Johnson Reagon, has been circulating in parts of the land justice movement. Reagon’s piece is called Coalition Politics: Turning the Century in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, printed by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983.

In this blog, I want to draw out some of Reagon’s insights around the need for home spaces and coalition spaces in social movements, underline how the work of these spaces are different from each other, and can mutually support each other to build a movement that can create transformative/reparative change. I will do this through sharing a series of quotes - choosing the quotes was hard because the whole piece needs to be engaged with. But hopefully, this will give you a flavour.

Image: a photograph of the opening pages of Coalition Politics: Turning the Century

Home Space

Now every once in awhile there is a need for people to try to clean out corners and bar the doors and check everybody who comes in the door, and check what they carry in and say “Humph, inside this place the only thing we are going to deal with is X or Y or Z”. And so only the X’s or Y’s or Z’s get to come in. That place can then become a nurturing place or a very destructive place. Most of the time when people do that, they do it because the heat of trying to live in this society where being an X or Y or Z is very difficult, to say the least. - Bernice Johnson Reagon

Reagon introduces “home spaces” as places where folks who share an identity come together and have a place that is just for them . You can tell its a home space because there is usually a feeling of comfort, shared identity and experience, ease, a sense of starting on the same page, and of being nurtured and fed by this space. When people who do not identity as whatever group the home space is oriented around enter, discomfort usually emerges - then we move into coalition space, rather than home space. We want and need home spaces to get nurtured, to be resourced.

There is no chance that you can survive by staying inside the barred room…But that space while it lasts should be a nurturing space where you sift out what people are saying about you and decide who you really are. And you take the time to try to construct within yourself and within your community who you would be if you were running society. In fact, in that little barred room…you act out community. You pretend that that room is your world. It’s almost like a play, and in some cases you actually grow food, you learn to have clean water…you just try to do it all. - Bernice Johnson Reagon

Some home spaces become places of community where you grow food, get clean water, ‘you just try to do it all’. And in practicing community people inside these home spaces start figuring out who they / we are, what you / we want, how you / we would like thing to be. It can feel really amazing!

Of course the problem with this experiment is that there ain’t nobody in there but folk like you, which by implication means you wouldn’t know what to do if you were running it with all of the other people who are out there in the world. Now that’s nationalism. I mean it’s nurturing, but it is also nationalism. At a certain stage nationalism is crucial to a people if you are going to ever impact as a group in your own interest. Nationalism at another point becomes reactionary because it is totally inadequate for surviving in the world with many peoples. - Bernice Johnson Reagon

And, as Reagon says, it’s also a kind of nationalism - what does it mean only to build with folks like you / me? At some point, she says, this is crucial - we need to build with folks in a home space - it develops our strength, self-understanding, visions for what we want. But at a point it ‘becomes reactionary’ because the world isn’t made up of people just like me / you. So then the question becomes how to do we create the worlds we want with people different from us, people who make us deeply uncomfortable, who may not want us to survive. These are the questions of coalition space.

Coalition Space

Coalition work is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets. And it is some of the most dangerous work you can do. And you shouldn’t look for comfort. Some people come to a coalition and they rate the success of the coalition on whether or not they feel good when they get there. They’re not looking for a coalition; they’re looking for a home!

Reagon introduces coalition space as something that sounds pretty challenging - dangerous, where we ‘shouldn’t look for comfort’. When we come into coalition spaces looking for comfort that is a signal we might be looking for home. And it’s important to have a home space - to get fed and nourished.

You don’t get fed a lot in coalition. In a coalition you have to give, and it is different from your home. You can’t stay there all the time. You go into coalition for a few hours and then you go back and take your bottle wherever it is, and then you go back and coalesce some more. It’s very important not to confuse them - home and coalition. - Bernice Johnson Reagon

Coalition space is hard, it demands a lot from us. And Reagon is keen to stress that we do’t want to spend all our time there - we go in for a bit and then we come out and back to home space to get resources, to decompress, to remember who we are, to feel loved and supported. As she says.

That is the nature of coalition. You have to give it all. It is not to feed you; you have to feed it. And it’s a monster. It never gets enough. It always wants more. So you better be sure you got your home someplace for you to go to so that you will not become a martyr to the coalition. Coalition can kill you; however, it is not by nature fatal. - Bernice Johnson Reagon

You don’t do coalition work because it feels good, or because you like it. “The only reason you would consider trying to team up with somebody who could possibly kill you, is because that’s the only way you can figure you can stay alive” (Bernice Johnson Reagon). In the systems of oppression that have been constructed and perpetrated across history, there are some groups who face the threat of death / harm more than others and so perhaps it is a bigger ask for these people to come into coalition space than those in the mainstream, even while it is uncomfortable for everyone.

Back in 1983, she said:

The reason we are stumbling is that we are at the point where in order to take the next step we’ve got to do it with some folk we don’t care too much about…Everybody who is in this space at this time belongs here. And it’s a good thing you came…No matter how much of a coalition space this is, it ain’t nothing like the coalescing you’ve got to do tomorrow, and Tuesday and Wednesday, when you really get out there, back into the world: that is ours too. - Bernice Johnson Reagon

What might this mean for those of us trying to do reparative/transformational justice work in Britain today?

For me, these reflections on home space and coalition space raise a number of questions for those of us trying to do reparative / transformational justice work in Britain today, and perhaps those of us in the land justice space in particular:

• where are the home spaces - where the door can be barred and nurturing/resourcing can take place ?

• what home spaces don’t exist yet that need to be made?

• how do we come into coalition space in the movement and beyond it?

• what is needed to do coalition work from those asked to do it?

• can we resource intentionally in home spaces in order that we might enter coalition space?

• how can we all expand our capacity to sit with and stay with (even if just for a minute, or a few hours) the discomfort of coalition?