♪ >> hello. thanks for joining us. welcome to another wonderful session at the southern festival of books. i want to thank the festival sponsor including that metro national arts commission, and grum contigroup, kennedy arts commission vanguard university. you're watching today on facebook live or in youtube and you have questions for the authors during the session you will need to switch over to the app which you can download in the app store on your device you're using or you can go to their web site which is humgn.org/s. fc and there's a chat where you can ask questions for authors at the end of today's session. we want to mention our beloved bookseller for the southern festival of books and your purchases the books being debuted this weekend at the festival to help keep this festival free. you will be able to find a link at their on line store in the chat where you can purchase the book we are talking about today are any of the other books this weekend. i know your reading list is probably growing long by this point. the festival is free. it's nonprofit organization. if you are enjoying the festival and you want to make it donation you can do that at our web site and there should be a link in the chat to the donation page as well. today we are here with michael mcray and jo berry talking about michael's latest book "i am not your enemy." michael is an author educator and facilitator who uses the power of personal stories to heal harm may be needing and create connections. he holds a degree in conflict resolution is completing his certification in public narrative from the harvard public school. joining us from nashville where he lives with his family. hi michael. >> hey christie good to see you. >> i'm also joined by jo berry is one of the people whose stories collected in my books. she is an international speaker who works to resolve conflict around the world. she's the founder of the charity building bridges to peace which advocates of unbounded empathy is the biggest weapon would have to end conflict by seeing the humanity and others. jo is a restorative justice facilitator at tedx beaker and visiting fellow at the university of nottingham and is currently writing her own book and she's joining us from england. hi jo. >> hi, wonderful to be here. >> mica life. you can leave -- read a little from your book and give folks who are just tuning in a little information about what it is. >> it's a real delight to be here. want to apologize in advance for the background sounds. i have two dogs and a 5-month-old baby and down downstairs so you never know what's going to come up. this book for me is a book about the surge for stories that might save us. i wanted to write a book that chronicled my travels through places of deep division israel-palestine northern ireland south africa and places when we hear their names we think of division. i wanted the stories that i chronicled to do two things specifically. one, two help us see something in a way that we otherwise might not see it and also to tell the truth about the world. i think part of the truth about the world is that the world is broken and breaking and full full of buried monday in burdens and tortures and terrorists and these things are true and i think they are very alive for a lot of us right now. i know in my country where innocent panic and fear about a lot of things right now. another part of this truth is the world is full of beauty and unexpected friendships of the ordinary people doing extraordinary things like jo berry did who we will hear from sam. it wanted to feature these stories to remind us there's more to the world than simply pain in the world. i will read a very brief thing from the instructions it gives you a sense of where the book goes and what it's about. the people and stories in this book can help us. they can show is not just where to look at how to look. they oriented toward hope. in these pages we hear from a the palestinian peacebuilder about the dangers of dialogue that doesn't make freedom. we hear from a committee center director on what to do when trauma is stuck in routine rather than stuck in memory. the soldier teaches us to name what is wanted rather than the north of pain and a mother who lost her son shows us how to refuse vengeance. we made the lover of shakespeare who created a haven for beauty for those on the margins and we encounter people who craft wake stations of refuge for those in need of shelter. we hear how a woman made space in her life for the man who murdered her father. we learned reconciliation may mean little if it doesn't address the surrounding systems of inequality could come at community theater director here of life under oppression and the journey to let go of hatred that plagues us like poison. and from to bury fathers we are invited to imagine how we might meet devastating loss with grief and action. theirs are the stories that might save us, save us from believing that violence must be met with violence save us from believing that are prolonging would be complete only when we take away someone else's. save us from the prejudice that excess predators, save us from the myth of single stories, save us from thinking the more guns and more walls and more armies can save us. they are the stories that might save us from our fear. one of the stories that i thought could save us is the story of joe barry. i first heard about joe -- jo berry for a documentary called beyond right and wrong which featured a lot of stories across the world and jo's was one of them. i remember reading in my study about one way to talk about the islands is the destruction narrative and this is really true in the story of jo peggy was the daughter of a member of the british parliament and had a story that was unfolding in the way you might expect another ways you might not expect but then the bomb went off in october of 1984 that killed her father now bomb was planted by a man named patrick mckee who was a member of the ira which is a paramilitary group in ireland fighting the british for it her story was about a person who was pushed to the edges herself and had to find a new way to be with herself and in with her story to reconstruct her story in a way she didn't expect you'd have two. it wasn't just the drama and the trauma. it was what she did with her pain and how she spent years cultivating within herself the capacity not just to sit with patrick mcgee one day which he did in the year 2000 but to be able to listen to him with curiosity and openness and empathy. her story is one of meeting patrick in 2000 now for the last 20 years they have spoken together over 400 times about how it is that we can live with the people that we find difficult to live with, how it is that we can cultivate and imagination of the world where there is no other and where we can look into the eyes of the person they killed our loved ones and to be able to say to them i'm not your enemy. i'm so thrilled that jo was able to join us today to be able to talk about her story. >> michael you mentioned is just a moment ago but the stories that have collected in this book spoken mostly for us on international conflicts in palestine south african northern ireland rather than conflict in our home country of united states. was that intentional and how did you decide on that as the scope for your book? >> a was really intentional. one of the thing that happens for people as we get stuck in our own stories and we develop patterned ways of thinking about her our story because we live with them all the time. there are things about her story that we can't see that we don't notice anymore and we are blind to. sometimes we have to encounter similar dynamics of our stories but in other places than in literature they called it the familiarization. i love the russian word for it which means other world isolation which means we have to take your stories but put them in other worlds so that disruption is what is expected and helps us see with new clarity and wisdom to truth and reality about our stories that are around us. instead of just telling stories of division in the united states that we become biased in the way we might take of those i wanted to go to other places where we know their places of division but we may not know the story fully and let those stories play out, stories that are very similar to stories of our past and present in stories of what's coming for us so we could actually deal with the ones so that's what i hope this book would be able to accomplish. >> correct the book michael in your story specifically to use the language of dehumanization and re-humanization would you explain what those two things look like and how they are related. >> jo please why don't you answer. >> my father was killed by the ira and there was no way i could understand why they wanted to use violence. at that moment i felt like you had an enemy and i didn't want an enemy like that. two days later i decided i was going to understand why someone would join the ira and why would someone stop at a hotel and kill someone. it was important for me to hear a story and this was a way to find that out. it's very hard to hear because at the time i was the enemy. i was anguished so i came from the other side. it's quite a dangerous place to go. i wanted to meet patrick to see his humanity, to hear his story. i didn't go for an apology. it just went to look into his eyes because that was going to re-humanized something inside of myself. something that was taken away from me. i have met other men in the ir and i'm quite sure that one conversation would be enough and i would get what i wanted and then i would go and i knew everything i needed to know. but something happened in patrick himself went on a journey. he came to that meeting saying what he had done was a military battle that he had justified and he demonized the people in the hotel. he demonized my father. he didn't see human beings there and that is the nature of conflict. when he met me he began to realize that he was a human being. my dad came back into the conversation and we had this moment where he said -- apathy is how he spoke about it. now i do call him my friend being in palestine and israel. they change the story completely and that doesn't go away. >> michael did you want to share anything? >> i would just say yes i think one of the first casualties in conflicts is nuance so whether that's an interpersonal conflict or a macroconflict we begin to laugh. we lose all nuanced or arguments in ways that taking about the other. people become one thing and we reduce people or ideas to kind of the monolith, something single. that's the process of dehumanization because people are complex that even if we don't want to believe that they or we are all complex. in conflict you specifically dehumanize people because once we dehumanize people through the single stories about them it becomes easier to do the harm that we need to do. they are actually in the book and there's a scale of terry in danger identified that comes that talks about how in conflict we can move from really important and innocuous statements like we are different and we believe differently so we moved down the scale over time in conflict until we finally get to this point which is pure demonic and wind we are in that place that's when people place bombs and shoot each other. part of the reconciliation process and part of the peacebuilding process is how we come back to humanity and not just any other but within ourselves as well. when we commit those acts of violence we destroy part of humanity along with it. >> i can have empathy with all the different sides and with patrick a. reached a point where would i have made the same decision that he made? i think of the ring starts whenever i start again i'm writing you are wrong. i'm hurting and they want to blame someone make someone responsible. that is humanization that can grow and grow and grow. can i feel outraged and pain and grief without making anyone else wrong? that's hard emotional work. >> you talk in the book in the story you relate to michael wanted to be met in ireland about the emotional work that you did on yourself before you first met with patrick. michael describes this process as building a firm foundation on either side of the shore before you can build a bridge between yourself and your so-called enemy. can you talk about what that process of emotional healing looked like for you and why you believed it was an integral part of your peacemaking journey? >> is great to reflect that's what it was at the time. now i am trained and i do a lot of restored of processing. it will forever bring two people together but there was no peace work the made in at that time even though i tried nobody wanted to be part of the peace process. i have done my own inner work and i always say i was just about ready for it. how can you be ready meeting the guy who killed your father? i knew as i said from day to that i didn't want to use my pain to blame anyone. i'd didn't want to use my pain to hurt anyone. i didn't want to go through revenge. all those years i was longing to be with my emotions and by the time i met patrick mcgee during that year did lots of releasing of emotions and crying. i didn't use my emotions to make patrick moore wrong and they it didn't use them to want to hurt him. i was watching my thoughts because i did find a more difficult to follow. >> there were times when i wanted to blame him and say he's the reason that this is happening but that would have gotten me back in the cycle of violence and revenge and i wanted and that cycle of violence and revenge. i had a whole lot of conversations inside myself. it was very hard to be there so is listening to myself while listening to patrick. >> michael you write about what he called the inappropriate conversation which is a term for reconciliation when it's experienced as a way to overlook pain or ignore problems or deny patterns of injustice. what corrective would you offer to anyone who thinks of reconciliation in this way? >> i think i'd say we have got to dream bigger. the language of inappropriate conversation came from page to the book in the very first chapter. i'd written to palestinian woman a professor who was in the west bank and said that like to talk to you about the peace process of reconciliation between israelis and palestinians in hear your thoughts. she wrote that one line that said this is an inappropriate conversation. we are being occupied so we are going to talk we are going to talk about justice so did set up a tension between the idea of justice and reconciliation what does this mean. a theme that emerged throughout the whole trip that i was on throughout the country was that reconciliation becomes a real problem when we think of it only in terms of if we could just get along or we can just sit down and have a conversation everything would be fine and that's the end to the imagination. it becomes an inappropriate conversation when we don't see that process, the process of trust in learning to read humanize each other we don't see that as a carrier toward a more free and just society. and it can be part of the problem. they think what i encouraged people to do is to see justice and reconciliation as an intimate partnership together because if we deal with things of reconciliation we might talk about doping test and dialogue and the humanity of each other the quality of our relationship but that's never going to be sustainable if we continue to have systems and structures and institutions and prophecies that are benefiting some of us but not all of us and putting some of those above the others that are creating imbalances in power. reconciliation is a process of learning to live together well for those who might be difficult to live with. justice is a way. we cannot live well together when they are massive and balances in power so for reconciliation doesn't have an imagination the importance of dealing with those they can create more harm than good. >> can i add something to that? i would have met patrick for the second him if he wasn't open to hearing the impact of his actions on me and that was really very important. i had to make sure that they could hear the impact of the behavior otherwise it would do more harm. quite often people find that very hard and it's really painful for someone who has been through trauma if the person would take any responsibility without hearing the impact of their actions and that has to be a huge ingredient of the conversation. >> that makes me wonder something that i talk about that i was reading and your story in particular in this book. what steps can be taken towards peace if one side is still actively harming or just wishing harm to the other? as a possible to begin that process of both sides don't possess the qualities that you identified as being necessary for reconciliation which our empathy, trust, curiosity respect self-awareness of autonomy and commitment prey can you make peace if you are the only ones willing to have peace? >> i am quite lucky in a way that i have a name of someone who killed my dad. a lot of people around the world don't know. in some ways it's never going to happen, that reconciliation but i think what we can do is look at her own pain in her own trauma. we can still heal. often i see people around the world what they do is they turn their pain into some kind of action, something that brings something close and that's one way of healing. i've forked a lot with people in terrorism in this country and unfortunately we have got a lot. we know not about -- and we really need to make sure everybody has access if they've been through abuse or injustice or any kind of -- they have accessed to support and the right kind of therapy. certainly we don't need to stay connected to the person who has hurt us forever. i feel that the double pane or hurt. that person is still in our head. we need to get a way to turn it around and we need to love and we need the right kind of therapy. >> there's a hopeful thing that trauma is not transformed is transferred so went trauma is experienced the love energy is not created or destroyed its only transferred. if we don't find a way to turn that energy into something that can help us we will dish it out to the next verse and that we meet. i think jo is right. what we have to do is one make sure we remove ourselves from the harm and find a way to stop the harm from happening or get out so that's important to look after her own safety and well-being. but one of the limits of peacemaking and reconciliation is you can't reconcile with someone who's unwilling to reconcile with you. it's a two-way street and this is how marriage ends. one person may really wanted and the other dozens of the marriage is over. you can forgive someone who doesn't want your forgiveness and he doesn't want to reconcile. that is possible but you can't reconcile with somebody and develop the relationship of mutuality if they are not also willing national politics you might hear people talk about you and have a partner for peace. in order for there to be a sustainable peace you need a partner. it's all about building partnerships so without the willingness from the other side your willingness will only get you so far and that's where he have to do what "i am not your enemy" is talking about cultivate that strong foundation so hopefully once the other is made ready over there you can meet across the bridge. the longer that we make other people the reason why we are hurting and why her life is difficult that delays their own recovery. we are not responsible for the injustice that happens to us or maybe not but we are responsible for the things we can do. we owned them we can be creative and the one thing that will take away her humanity if we put it out there and go it's all your problem. it's so easy to do as well. >> whom i going to blame? they are just those moments where i still want to -- someone so that's why it's such difficult work to change that blame. >> a lot of what we are talking about right now especially because the nature of your stories jo relates to is you said somebody whose name you know, somebody whose face you know somebody who makes it easier to humanize him as a person because he's an individual person who you now have a relationship with. how is that process of making peace to heal an emotional or spiritual injury and someone who has personally wanted you different than making peace to heal wounds that are systemic or cultural or national. are those of that two separate processes or are they related? >> michael are you going first or should i? >> go right ahead. >> that such a reinforcing question. i'd like to make this quite simple and see what i can do. i'm working a lot with young people and my country who are demonized and they are 16 and 17. a lot of muslims aren't dehumanized. i work with these amazing girls who everyday experience racism and i can't change the people who are racist towards them. i can't change the institutions but what i can do is be a person for them to share with me their daily experiences and empower them as changemakers. it's kind of heartbreaking but also moving and i take that responsibility hugely. i'm going back and i probably like you i never know what's happening as i travel but i hope to go than a couple of weeks and i want them to share with me what it's been like for them in the areas where there seems to be more hatred and hate crimes. that's something i can do. if i had more power and i'm very grassroots by the i can challenge the more and maybe might look would be able to do that. i don't know but as a white person i've seen what my people are doing to impact those who aren't white so i know i've tried to use that in the best way that i can. >> i think within the national collective nations that are made up of people in my mind it's not divorced at the idea of what would do on a macro level and what to do on a micro level because the macrois made of my gross. a lot of the things that are needed for people are to pursue this idea of reconciliation or peacebuilding and healing is they need answers. they need an acknowledgment for the pain that's been caused of their own suffering. there's the need to build trust and build empathy and these all happen on macrolevels as well. there's a need to be held to cultivate curiosity and trust in the people that you are afraid of that you need him a large scale and knowledge mud of the pain that's been done. the announcement from the u.s. government up what's happened with the native american people. still very much alive because it hasn't been settled and outweigh. i think on large levels you see the importance of things like memorials and national commemorations to the knowledge not just hope to this is the pain you experience but to be able to acknowledge her own shame and the pain that we have perpetuated i think that's an important thing is as well to build on our own responsibilities whether as an individual or as a collective. >> i just want to mention to folks who are watching and listening that you can submit questions in the chat either on the app or on humanities tennessee web site. we have got just under 15 minutes left and i want to remind people to hand in their questions now. then i will continue with my questions. joe, you say in your story in michael's book, a story within a story that peace is about moving from where we have the enemy to actually seeing that there is no other and that seems like it in practice could be quite a long process and so i'm wondering for you personally how long was it after you first met patrick in 2000 until you begin to realize that as you said sometimes you travel to a location to see if he's the only person there you know he teaches you about crossword puzzles that he does and you realize the person is offering. how long was the time between seeing his face for the first time in realizing you have a strange friendship with this man who is responsible for your father stepped? >> i had a poem i had written for him called bridges can be built. i think it's one of the things they really helped him to use justification righteousness to being very vulnerable. it's everything i still believe. in the poem what it was about i acknowledge her suffering and understanding his own story because i knew before i met him when he was six or seven years old he didn't grow up saying i want to kill predicting a win is 15 he was following martin luther king. that was our fourth meeting but the friendship for quite a few years as i said in public he's my friend that was quite scary to me and i wasn't ready for that. i wasn't aware of my own siblings and the family and its been a balancing act to all wanted to make a stand for peace 30s been tricky to acknowledge their different parts. i don't know when that was and years later i said yes he is my friend. it's an unusual friendship and we have had the longest time were we haven't seen each other because of covid. i was going to have defense for the 20th anniversary of her last meeting. i wanted to market because it seems to me 20 years is such a long time and as someone said to me at first meeting it will be 20 years. it's terrifying that here we are. he got his book done first and he has had delays in publishing dates. i really want to get mine out. normally i see him every two or three months and we have had so many things and i miss the conversations that we have. they are not always easy. sometimes i say i need to take a break. still challenging and i have that right to walk away. >> just the fact that you can even say that you miss conversations with patrick is remarkable sentence to be able to either. christie do we have time for me to add something to that or do we have to move on? >> yes, please. >> you are talking about how long of a process that isn't it reminds me there's a series of peaceful and that it can take as long to get out of conflict is to get in it. it in my recovery circles they say you go to a vast 20 miles into the woods you have to go 20 miles back out so you don't spend 20 years learning of behavior and learning way of thinking and suddenly you are out. it's a very long process. i have found that helpful in the ways in a national way the people are saying can we just be done with race? we had the civil rights act and obama was present so as it's a thing of the past. if we just think about race is a conflict in the united states said started in 6019 with the rival the first kidnap african until the signing of the civil rights agreement. it was. in 45 years. something around that. we are all made if we were in the post-conflict stage we are 50 years into a very long journey. i want to remind people not to be so premature in my announcement. these things take a long time. we have been conditioned in ways that making about the other. we've been conditioned in the stories we associate with others and it takes a very long time to unlearn those and to begin telling the story with a new emotional reaction. there's a certain amount of patients that needed as we walked these long journeys. >> the question from somebody in the audience. they say your stories demonstrate the potential impact of empathy. have sympathy come to be so devalued between groups and individuals? >> yeah. it's a great question. president obama before he was president i can't remember when it was the talked about the -- deficit was more severe than they federal deficit in ban ki-moon talked about the empathy gap in the importance of that. i think there is this sort of general awareness and they see it on facebook a lot an instagram. we have no ability to empathize with each other and warne circ fears creep and so does the distance and the way we try to reduce them. it's really uninteresting story and what is needed is a way of cultivating and imagination. there's likely a lot that i don't know. we could be them in the same circumstances. joe was saying who could think that i had grown up in belfast and have the same encounters with the british armies or the police that pat had. that's a remarkable thing to say in those who think that we are not always good at surrendering this idea of the moral high ground in this way we imagine we have it figured out in what we think is right and there's no other way to think about it. that way of thinking doesn't lead us to a place where we can live well with people we find difficult to live with. this process of empathy is the process of imagining, dethroning ourselves from the center of the world and letting someone else's story and their personhood takes center stage iv a bit. i will end their. >> i agree and the media is very quick to find out who has the moral high ground and the whole idea of the goodies and the baddies. people even say empathy is not helpful because they think empathy is our own people but i call it unfounded empathy. there is empathy and perhaps in everyone and my daughter was attending a lunch and she was in the -- in the sky started running towards her or they were drunk and they were age 40 in all white. these are new kind of far right group in england. i completely felt my moral righteousness. i was angry and how dare they. this is my daughter and i'm so proud and that's when i realized i need to get serious. what are their stories and i'm working towards finding a way to dialogue and not to have that moral high ground. this was where self-awareness has to be found to doesn't mean we can't challenge their behavior. yes we must challenge their behavior but not by making them less than human. >> that's crucial. michael i have one last quick question for you and i think you ever read you wanted to finish up with. someone else in the audience asked how many stories are included in your book? >> really 10 i guess. and 10 chapters and maybe one or two i tell a couple of stories but most chapters focus on a one-person story like jo. the trip that i took though interviewed around 70 people and i had all of these stories so that's the difficult part in the writing process deciding what gets in and what doesn't. nobody's going to read it five in a page book. their 10 stories in their. do you have something to say before i read this last section? >> sure. i was going to let people know that if you want to find out more about michael or jo you can find michael on line at @michael mcray on instagram and find jo at building peace.org and a link to purchase my book and other books is in the chat if you want to follow through the end of our session. >> the book is amazing. i know it's going to spread so much understanding and empathy and thank you michael for your amazing book. >> thank you jo and thank you for letting me tell your story and let her joe's book when it comes out as well. the book is an audible if you want to get an audio copy that is available as well. i thought i would just read something from the last page of the book produced in the final chapter right tell the story of two men. romney is an industry leader father whose daughter was killed by a palestinian suicide bomber in jerusalem and the palestinian man whose daughter was shot in the head on her way home from school. a few stories from her brand-new novel called the paradigm. incredible stories who use their nuclear power of their grief as a way to working towards some shared teacher together and to say we who pay the highest price possible are the ones who are in the best position to make peace. i want to read this last section. today romney is the leader of the family forum. both men lost what is unbearable to use. rami is a -- in the world of wars these two have every reason to hate each other. their grief could drive them toward vengeance but their day has come as a comes for us all. we are left with their grief and the decision what will we do with our paying? this question is where rami and saddam -- the bears are stories that might save us but like all the stories along the way rami and nasam tell me we have every reason to hate each other because enemies do exist here is real and the worst pain we can imagine may find us at any time. and their stories tell me we can find a way out, the beacon do better and courage can accompany fear and the worst pain we can imagine has the possibility of leaving us to a world beyond violence. thank you all very much for your time today and jo thank you and christie thanks for hosting this. >> thank you michael. >> thank you. >> this is where the action starts the day the churchill became prime minister. this was the thing he wanted most of all. he became prime minister in the house of commons where the consensus was neville chamberlain the prior prime minister was not up to the challenge of dealing with hitler in germany. that same day in 1940 was the day that hitler -- when hitler invaded the low countries. this is churchill's greatest day of his life. it was one of the darkest days in the history of the world. this did not don churchill. this was like added spice to the challenge the idea of being in charge of this great empire that such a dire time really kind of thrilled him. >> host: hi deborah. guess the hi. so nice to meet you. >> host: i enjoyed your book. i would like to start this interview by talking a little

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