A Week of Mourning for our Movement
The Chicago Torture Justice Center invites you to join us in a week for collective mourning beginning Labor Day and the days that follow. We will be officially closed during this time to allow our bodies to feel and process recent losses in our community. We want to honor the lives and deaths of all our loved ones by holding space to bear witness to their memory, nurture connection, and tend to our heavy hearts and bodies. We invite our staff, fellow survivors, and community members into this week of mourning in whatever way feels best for you. Grief has many faces and forms, and tending to grief can look a lot of different ways too. Where do you feel it in your body? What would movement toward care and release feel like, for you?
Our week of mourning is one way that CTJC seeks its larger mission: to support survivors of torture and police violence in life and death. Recently, we have been surrounded by the latter. We have lost Anthony Porter, an integral member of our survivor community who was key to both the abolition of the Illinois death penalty and the origins of the Center. We have lost Irving King, a beloved and active participant in our programming and survivor of police torture. We have lost Malik Alim, a family member to our staff, and a long time comrade in our work for justice who spearheaded the successful Pretrial Fairness Act (PFA). Malik pushed PFA to make Illinois the first state in the country to abolish cash bail, worked with the Chicago Community Bond Fund and was co-director of the Let Us Breathe Collective.
We have lost so many other loved ones who are not named here, each of whom was significant to our community and close to our hearts. We have not had the time as an organization to mourn our dead before news of another loss breaks. Each time, our community and individual trauma is compounded by the knowledge that, in addition to accidents and natural causes, these deaths are all too often direct or indirect results of anti-Black state and systemic violence.
As Malkia Devich-Cyril recently wrote: “As we seek to breathe a new world into being, being an effective changemaker demands the right and power to feel our losses rather than escape them.” At the Chicago Torture Justice Center, we live out this belief through our framework of politicized healing. Politicized healing means recognizing that our politics are healing and our healing is political. Through living this framework, we heal ourselves and our communities, dismantle destructive systems that perpetuate trauma and disappear our loved ones, and create new possibilities.
Consider how you can join us in grieving and in healing. We will be holding space together Tuesday, Sept. 7 through Friday, Sept. 10 at the #BreathingRoom Gardens & Farm from 4pm to 6pm for those who wish to be with or around community during this time. The garden is located at 1434 W 51st St, Chicago and the entrance to the garden is off Bishop Street. More details to come on offerings that will be available, and additional offerings are welcome. Please reach out to us at info@chicagotorturejustice.org with any questions or to make an offering for the community space.