I grew up in Congo, Kinshasa. Well, in part. But the short years of my schooling and growing up in the country once called Zaire were some of the most memorable, most impactful, and most lasting years of my life. For one, Zaire (now called The Democratic Republic of Congo) 'took' my father: he died there while serving as a diplomat for the Federal Republic of Nigeria. My first experiences of violent unrest and becoming a refugee - momentarily displaced along with my entire family by disaffected army troops who looted our home during the 1991 'pillage' and set us to the streets - are tied to that country. In a sense, over the years since we escaped the country, Congo became for me a figure of loss, haunted pasts, and yearnings for paternal reconciliation. As such, it was with this deep sense of embroidered knowing that I connected with 'V' (formerly known as Eve Ensler, award-winning author of The Vagina Monologues) over matters of forgiveness, restitution, and safety in trauma-tinted times. Unexpectedly, our private co-navigation of these salient themes rushed headlong into the crescendo that is the heart of our public exploration: Congo.

In this conversation, V and I explore 'Congo' - not merely or singularly as a country in Central Africa and site of V's "City of Joy", but as a useful but porous/duplicitous metaphorical basket of heterogeneous concepts exploring contemporary politics today. In a time when things are heating up (quite literally), we examine some of the ideas convened to make sense of our moment. How do our concepts of trauma and violence matter today? What does it mean to be safe in times of exposure? Is there a sense of the utopian that might be recovered in these moments when our imaginations are speculatively infiltrated by the worlds we want to leave behind? In what sense might forgiveness reinforce an economy of troubling relations? Is there an iteration of forgiveness that is a political refusal to reinscribe the conditions that needed forgiving? Are there limits to saying sorry?

Join us for this public conversation on trauma, forgiveness, restoration, healing, safety, and a politics that goes beyond