Long Ties
Photo credit: AP
In 2009 while I was attending The New School, I tried out for the play Any One of Us: Words From Prison by Eve Ensler, now known as V. I remember sorting through the monologues at the audition. I didn’t know anything about the play but as soon as I read one of the monologues, I knew it was the piece I had to try out with. It was the only one in which I could hear something beyond unrelenting pain. I got the part.
It turned out to be a monologue written by Kathy Boudin, a founding member of the Weather Underground, which engaged in bombings of government buildings to express opposition to U.S. foreign policy and racism. In its time, the Weather Underground was hunted down as a terrorist organization acting against the US and lauded as a group of freedom fighters who upheld that young workers could be a revolutionary force to overthrow capitalism, if not by themselves then by transmitting radical ideas to the working class.
In 1981, she was arrested and ultimately sent to prison for a series of bombings, followed by robbery and murder. During her 22 years inside prison, she participated in a decade-long writing group with Eve Ensler and 15 women at Bedford Hill’s Correctional Facility. It is the patient, difficult work of these women taking ownership for their crimes and examining what led them there which evolved into Any One of Us.
It’s not often that you meet people who make their mark on history. In this case, one performance led to over a decade of contributing to community-led movements. Kathy Boudin was out of prison by 2009, and she came and spoke to us before the show and attended one of the three performances in our run.
I remember when speaking to her afterwards, she looked stunned. She said, in a bit of a mutter, that she didn’t recognize the words I had spoken on stage as her own. I was for a moment, so abashed standing there, knowing that I had done my best to evoke the emotions on the stage the piece brought up in me. But that is not the same thing as to know what it was to have participated in the killing — the murder — of other human beings. To have chosen violence as a form of extreme dissent over and over again, and to live for a decade as a fugitive and to end up in prison under a 20-to-life sentence. And then to do the hard work of undoing that in oneself as Kathy did. How would she be able to recognize her own words in my voice?
Two years later, I had graduated and was now working at a digital agency in the Flatiron District when we were notified that we won a contract to produce a roll-out strategy for One Billion Rising, a global campaign founded by V to end rape and sexual violence against women. Again, I had the opportunity to meet and work with V and the One Billion Rising Team, a tight-knit group of dedicated women working in ways that brought human rights, feminism, and freedom of expression together in a global movement.
This work led me to a company called Openbox where I was honored to meet and work with Digital Democracy and the founders and members of Haitian grassroots group KOFAVIV, a supportive network of gender-based violence survivors. I was to meet V again, along with Gloria Steinem and other remarkable women who fought hard to uphold the rights of women everywhere during my ten years in New York.
But by 2019, I had moved to Los Angeles, and I found myself in a new position. I had joined an effort to launch a progressive voter guide for the state of California — one which would not only inform voters about candidates and ballot propositions, but would recommend the candidate who struck the strongest balance between progressive and electable — with baseline criteria like trustworthiness also taken into account.
We ended up making a recommendation in favor of a young attorney named Chesa Boudin to be elected as the 29th District Attorney of San Francisco—a race he won. This was Kathy Boudin’s son with another member of the Weather Underground, and heir to the progressive legacy of his parents albeit one who overcame extreme circumstances to choose peaceful change through governance.
The position of District Attorney has the ability to make systemic change to the prison system, and George Gascón, predecessor to Boudin, not only forged a strong legacy of progressive decarceration in San Francisco, he then moved back down to Los Angeles and won the position there that same year to do the same. I didn’t meet either of these changemakers, but I carefully wrote or edited recommendations and endorsements on their behalf.
During this frenzied year of working out a recommendation system, doing the research, and writing the profiles, we also held a fundraiser. The great Angela Davis was the featured speaker at the event, a “get” that even our Executive Director couldn’t quite believe happened. Angela Davis, who was a member of the Black Panther movement, and who herself was called a “dangerous terrorist” by Nixon. Who didn’t murder anyone and who was put on trial for defending others who were also innocent.
Chesa Boudin was recalled from office two years in, a not-unusual result for a first-time elected official, let alone a district attorney attempting to make progressive change in one of the largest and most contested districts in the state. I was proud to have supported his win and hope he will run again.
Kathy Boudin passed away on May 1, 2022 from cancer. I had no idea. This was not quite one year after my mother passed away from the same disease. My own mother, Usha Welaratna, who wrote the book Beyond the Killing Fields: Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in America about the Cambodian Genocide, who wrote about inter-ethnic gang conflict in Southern California and who, like Eve, visited prison when she was hired by San Jose’s District Attorney at the time to provide expert witness testimony in the case of a young Cambodian man who had committed murder. Cancer is a disease that doesn’t care who chooses the path of violence and who chooses the path of non-violence.
Most recently, I ran into Laura Thies, our director for Any One of Us at The New School, in the Frankfurt airport during a layover last summer. We had a very brief catch-up, talking about families, her life directing for German television, and the pandemic. This is where my recounting ends. I have no more meetings, only memories, for the moment.
I am proud to have played a minute role in the lives of the great poet V, Kathy Boudin, her son Chesa Boudin, and all the other progressive leaders who ran for office in 2020. But I’ll always be proudest of being my mother’s daughter. One hopes the arc of the universe bends towards justice and does not pause in its movement. But sometimes, we have to in order to honor those who came before us.
