Interview with Marina Cantacuzino – founder and director of The Forgiveness Project (theforgivenessproject.com).
JF: Why did you start the Forgiveness Project
MC: My background is in journalism and Forgiveness Project was a response to the rhetoric of retaliation and revenge that was being spoken by politicians and in the media at the time when the Iraq invasion was imminent, very early 2003.
I felt compelled to collect the stories about forgiveness and reconciliation as a counter narrative. Originally it was for a magazine article. I collected stories and a photographer friend made portraits. I interviewed victims of atrocity, of political violence and abuse and collected stories of perpetrators too because I felt it was important to understand why people harmed others in order to try to prevent it happening and provide a key to understanding violence, especially with former violent extremists.. That then became an exhibition called the ‘F word’ – funded by Anita Roddick. I thought my life would go back to journalism after the exhibition, but nothing I had ever written about before grabbed the attention like these stories did; it was partly the timing, the narrative of hope in a very bleak time.
Then the subject didn’t leave me alone and a few months afterwards, I started the Forgiveness Project. 11 years later I am still working in the field of conflict resolution, restorative justice, story collecting, healing narratives, trying to put out new and different ideas about how to respond to pain, hurt and violence.
The early stories tended to be very extreme and strong, because I am a journalist and I wanted to grab people’s attention and probably shock people. 10 – 11 years down the line I am more interested in the smaller stories that impact all of us all the time. That is what will be my focus going forward, dealing with our own inner grievances and resentments, family fall-outs and relationship problems. If we can help people by modelling restorative approaches through personal stories then that is very valuable. These big stories do shine a light on our own inner grievances and often do give people a new perspective, but sometimes they are just too big.
JF: Has forgiveness been an issue for you in your own life?
MC: I haven’t got a big forgiveness story, definitely not. I think this is helpful because I have had to carry and hold a lot of trauma through running this organisation. There must be a reason why I am so interested, but I haven’t found it yet, other than I was a bit of peace maker from a young age. I don’t understand why people need to lock horns or banish people from their lives, why warring factions can’t talk to each other. Also I had a lot of bereavement in my early life – my brother and two cousins died of a genetic disease when they were young. That led me into journalism - I wanted to share stories with people who didn’t have a voice; and maybe I am quite comfortable around pain.
JF: Is forgiveness always the best way to overcome an injustice or move on from loss due to crime or atrocity?
MC: No. I would never say always to anything. There are cases where forgiveness is not helpful, or applicable. Those cases would, I think, be in the midst of an ongoing violent situation – warring siblings or what is happening right now in Syria when people are hell-bent on survival. I see forgiveness as part of the repairing process, maybe years down the line. It is very useful to heal broken relationships, hearts and communities. It is a personal thing, it is about human relationships. It is about responding to being personally hurt by someone else. You could say you have been personally hurt by an administration – but I think it becomes a senseless dialogue. Who are you forgiving? Who was responsible?
Having said that I think it is a choice and we should respect anyone who chooses to forgive. When Eva Kor chose to forgive the Nazis, people got quite angry about it, even though she was a survivor of Auschwitz and tortured as a child and so is a direct victim. She says "I forgive the Nazis, not because they deserve it, but because I deserve it." People got cross because they think she is speaking on their behalf. It is her method of healing.
Forgiveness can divide families; it can feel like a betrayal if you are forgiving someone who has harmed a family member, or killed them. It can be a very isolating position, it isn’t always about building relationships. It is about letting go of hatred and it makes people feel better and that is why they do it.
JF: Have you seen a pattern emerging from encounters between victims and perpetrators?
MC: A survivor or relative of a victim of crime should only ever meet the perpetrator once they [the latter] has taken responsibility for their action and is showing remorse. It takes a lot to get to this point. But once this is the case and the victim and perpetrator come together there is a humanising pattern.
Until they meet, the victim may see the perpetrator as a monster, frightening, “the other”, but that changes once they meet. Acknowledgement and accountability can be more healing than punishment for a victim. What they want to hear is “I did it” and to have that witnessed. Punishment can be helpful but it is not always possible. In Sierra Leone or Rwanda there were too many perpetrators and in the end many had to be released, despite receiving short sentences that seemed completely inadequate to the crime.
Research out of US on the restorative justice system showed that when a victim and perpetrator meet and you talk specifically about forgiveness as the desired outcome of the meeting, people feel unsafe. But if you create the right conditions for people to speak freely to each other then forgiveness can happen; in other words the less you talk about forgiveness the more likely it will occur. Mark Umbright, an academic at the university of Minnesota sees forgiveness as an energy and he describes how he has felt the energy of forgiveness more in a restorative justice meeting than in any church or faith community he has ever been into.
JF: Do you think of the Forgiveness Project as a campaigning organisation?
MC: Not really, no. We deal with advocacy and we try and change a narrative and reframe the debate about forgiveness, which is barnacled with aeons of piety. We try to take it out of the straight jacket of religion; to secularise and make it much less exclusive.
What would we be campaigning for? That people share their stories? To seek non-violent ways of dealing with harm? There are quite a few campaigning organisations in the US saying that forgiveness is the only way, and if you can’t forgive you will be depleted in some way. I think that’s dangerous because I hate the idea of making it an obligation. I see the Forgiveness Project as a place of enquiry and discussion, changing ways of thinking and behaviour but in a subtle way – which makes it difficult to campaign, to promote it in that way.
JF: But you have had impact on criminal justice system in this country through your work in prisons.
MC: It has definitely had impact on those who have been exposed to it and it is definitely part of the Restorative Justice policy and it helps change behaviour. The Forensic Psychological Services at Middlesex University have done a good evaluation of our work that shows that it is effective and has an impact. But I wouldn’t claim to have been able to change ministers’ minds. We are living in a very dangerous time with the criminal justice system being privatised and rehabilitation isn’t much of a focus, receiving very few resources.
Many of the storytellers have their own campaigning groups - youth justice, FGM, Israel/Palestine -and this is part of the forgiveness journey. People seem to need to put meaning back into their lives in order to heal and often this is by campaigning to prevent people suffering the same way they have. Meaning making doesn’t necessary align with forgiveness, because you don’t have to forgive in order to campaign and try and make the world a better place. It is a way of starting to function again, to feel part of society rather than remaining isolated and locked in the story of the past. Forgiveness is about unlocking which is why it is an energy – a kind of liberation. One survivor described it as the gift in the wound.
JF: What is the most rewarding part of your work?
MC: The impact of not only sharing stories, but enabling people to tell their stories and working with victims and perpetrators together using a very restorative model. In prisons our programme is delivered by both a victim of crime and an ex-offender - it could be a mother who has lost her child working with someone who has killed – (but not the same crime), it really inspires people to change their own lives. The constant feedback inspires me: someone wrote in the feedback book from the first exhibition “now I wish I could be photographed next to the man who attacked me”. I was amazed what an impact these simple stories have had; an email from a journalist in Somalia said that every evening on his programme at 6pm he reads a story out to try and build peace in his community; a fire station in Seattle saying “thank you for the stories we use them in our diversity work”; a doctor in Southampton University he uses the website to each his students medicine (I’d be intrigued to know how they use the stories).
We are not trying to force anyone to do anything – the stories are all authentic and they show the journey; they show the rage and the pain, and that forgiveness isn’t a quick fix, that you can find yourself back hating and in pain all over again. They present new and different ideas of dealing with harm and hurt; they help people resolve what is going on for themselves. These narratives which we tell in all forms - as films, online, live (which is always the best) - impact so profoundly on people’s responses to revenge and retaliation and shifts perspectives towards making a more peaceful society.
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The Forgiveness Project is the partner organisation for Belarus Free Theatre’s Staging a Revolution performance of Discover Love on Friday November 6th 2015. After the performance, Marina Cantacuzino and Irina Krasovskaya, whose story is told in the play, will lead a conversation with the audience about forgiveness.
Discover Love (2008) is a stirringly powerful original drama, researched over nine years, based on the true story of Irina Krasovskaya and her husband Anatoly, a businessman who supported the Belarus opposition movement. One fateful evening in 1999, Anatoly called to say that he would be coming home late. Irina never saw her husband again. His car was later discovered, but his body has never been found; he simply “disappeared”.
Belarus Free Theatre’s Staging a Revolution: I’m with the Banned festival 2015
The Belarus Free Theatre have spent the past decade excavating taboos on the world stage alongside launching transnational campaigns in defence of freedom of speech and artistic expression.
Pioneering a unique model of performance-inspired campaigning tackling social and political taboos, from mental health and torture, sex and inequality, BFT now present Staging a Revolution a festival of ideas that will put ten taboos centre-stage to invigorate and inspire UK audiences to see themselves as positive change-makers.
Following each performance, a curated panel of experts, including artists, campaigners, journalists and activists will discuss an area related to each taboo topic and generate fresh ideas around taking up action. It is an approach drawn directly from BFT’s work in Minsk where the space for free exchange of ideas and open debate is as valuable as the space in which to see independent theatre.
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