Ask the Author: Alycee J. Lane
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Alycee J. Lane
Nonviolence Now! was not the book that I intended to write. What I intended to write was a book on the subject of African Americans and Buddhism – a topic inspired by my participation on the East Bay Meditation Center’s year-long Commit to Dharma (C2D) Buddhism study group, facilitated by Larry Yang. In particular, I was initially interested in the growing African American Buddhist community and how it was thinking through the relationship between African American histories/cultures and Buddhist practices.
At the same time that I was participating on C2D, I was also blogging regularly on political, social and cultural issues through the prism of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s writing and, more specifically, through his philosophy of nonviolence. I had taken up this project because my readings in Buddhism drew me to the issue of nonviolence and I had come to realize how little of King’s work I had actually read, let alone studied.
My practice, my study of King’s work and my blogging – and thus the idea for my book – really just came together on May 16, 2013, the 100th day of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners’ hunger strike. By asking myself the questions -- what can I do to help bring the terrible injustice of indefinite detention to an end? What am I doing or not doing to make Guantanamo possible? -- I found myself having to go deeper and to ask: what does it really mean to live nonviolence in thought, word, and deed, to embrace it – as King urged – because “of the sheer morality of its claim”?
I answered all of these questions by turning to the Birmingham Campaign’s commitment card, which King discussed and reproduced in Why We Can’t Wait and which I saw with new eyes. I saw that it was not merely a formality, a thing that volunteers would sign off on in order to get on with the “more relevant” business of nonviolent protest. It was, instead, a guide for becoming, at the level of everyday life, an alternative to our violent society as well as a purposeful actor against injustice and violence – wherever and however they manifest. It was a deep inquiry into how we live our lives and whether we contribute to the violence around us. It was a reminder that the business of creating a peaceful world, of making sure such travesties as Guantanamo never happen again, will never be complete unless and until we also do the arduous work of transforming the violence in our own minds, hearts and spirits.
And finally, the commitment card was for me a mirror through which I could see that my own personal, everyday investments in violence absolutely compromised my ability to make peace. I wrote Nonviolence Now! because I imagined that this is true for many of us. I wrote it because I wanted to urge us on to the unfinished business of practicing nonviolence as a way of life.
At the same time that I was participating on C2D, I was also blogging regularly on political, social and cultural issues through the prism of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s writing and, more specifically, through his philosophy of nonviolence. I had taken up this project because my readings in Buddhism drew me to the issue of nonviolence and I had come to realize how little of King’s work I had actually read, let alone studied.
My practice, my study of King’s work and my blogging – and thus the idea for my book – really just came together on May 16, 2013, the 100th day of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners’ hunger strike. By asking myself the questions -- what can I do to help bring the terrible injustice of indefinite detention to an end? What am I doing or not doing to make Guantanamo possible? -- I found myself having to go deeper and to ask: what does it really mean to live nonviolence in thought, word, and deed, to embrace it – as King urged – because “of the sheer morality of its claim”?
I answered all of these questions by turning to the Birmingham Campaign’s commitment card, which King discussed and reproduced in Why We Can’t Wait and which I saw with new eyes. I saw that it was not merely a formality, a thing that volunteers would sign off on in order to get on with the “more relevant” business of nonviolent protest. It was, instead, a guide for becoming, at the level of everyday life, an alternative to our violent society as well as a purposeful actor against injustice and violence – wherever and however they manifest. It was a deep inquiry into how we live our lives and whether we contribute to the violence around us. It was a reminder that the business of creating a peaceful world, of making sure such travesties as Guantanamo never happen again, will never be complete unless and until we also do the arduous work of transforming the violence in our own minds, hearts and spirits.
And finally, the commitment card was for me a mirror through which I could see that my own personal, everyday investments in violence absolutely compromised my ability to make peace. I wrote Nonviolence Now! because I imagined that this is true for many of us. I wrote it because I wanted to urge us on to the unfinished business of practicing nonviolence as a way of life.
Alycee J. Lane
I am currently working on a book about the five Buddhist lay precepts (refrain from killing/doing harm, refrain from taking what is not given, abstain from misconduct re: sense-pleasures, abstain from false speech, abstain from use of intoxicants) and am thinking about them from the perspective of African American history and culture, and as a challenge to identity politics.
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