Today on The Laura Flanders Show, writer and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
discusses poetry, capitalism, and the difference between disability rights and disability justice.
All that and a few words from me on Roads Less Traveled.
Welcome to our program.
Hi, I'm Laura Flanders.
Safety.
Every law enforcement officer and every politician will tell you that they're for it.
And yet for many police aren't the answer, they're a problem in the community
and today's policy makers are only making things worse.
If what we're doing isn't making many of us safer, what might?
Our next guest has gone on a search.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha describes herself
as a queer, disabled, writer, performer, poet, healer and teacher,
inspired by poets, June Jordan, Suheir Hammad,
and what she calls the whole women of color pantheon.
She is the author of several books of poetry including
Consensual Genocide and the Lambda Award winning, Love Cake.
She has a new book of poetry, Body Map, and a memoir, Dirty River, out this year.
She also performs with the group Mangos With Chili. She's an editor, too, of the book
The Revolution Starts as Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities,
a book that grapples with the difficult ideas of addressing violence without police.
We also discovered that we shared a meal together a few years ago in Toronto.
Many years ago. I'm happy to see you again, Leah. Thanks for coming in.
Thanks so much for having me.
Let's talk a little bit about this notion of safety and we'll come back to other things.
What does it mean to you?
I think that there are a million survivors of violence out there.
I think that most people have survived some form of abuse or violence.
I think that as feminists, we've been talking about that at least since the '70s and beyond.
And I think that in the criminal legal system
-which I don't call the criminal justice system, because it doesn't bring it-
no one ever asks survivors of violence what they need
to have safety, justice, and healing in their lives.
We're told as survivors of violence that,
"Yay! Second wave white liberal feminism works,
so we get to call the cops and send our abusers to prison."
I don't know a single survivor who's ever called the police to get justice.
And of the ones that I've read about, I don't know a single one who said,
"Yeah my experience in the criminal legal system was great and I got what I needed."
We're basically being used to create more prisons and to build mass incarceration.
Explain what you mean by that.
I think that like a lot of feminists of color,
I understand why a lot of feminists in the '70s and '80s pushed for things
like the criminalization of domestic violence and child and sexual abuse.
But what black and brown feminists know
is that bringing more police into our communities never keeps us safe.
My good friend Ejeris Dixon, who worked for many years at Audre Lorde Project,
talks about how what we're calling transformative justice is nothing new.
She's like, "My father is a black man from Louisiana.
Growing up, the police were the clan and still are"; and he's like,
"That's not who we called when there was intimate partner abuse in our communities."
That hasn't changed.
Is that where the artist and poet and imagination comes in of what else might we do?
What else have other communities done?
Mm-hmm. [laughs] One thing that I'm really grateful for
... so I'm about to be 40 which means I came up as an activist and an organizer in the '90s
and I still... back then I would run into, you know, in whatever movement spaces we were a part of,
a little bit of the "oh, cultural works, this very feminized unimportant thing."
I still remember trying to organize a Free Mumia [Abu Jamal] rally in 1996,
and there was some old white Bolshevik guy who was like...
we wanted to have... we were young people of color, and we were like...
"We want to have MC's and hip-hop artists and poets,"
and he was like, "That's not how you do a proper rally. You sell the paper!"
and we were like, "you're racist and irrelevant."
I think that cultural work still is minimized
but I think that it goes beyond just being the entertainment at the rally.
I think it is just what you said about ...
Diane di Prima once said that, "The only war that matters is the war of the imagination."
And I think that it's very easy
when we are surviving and not surviving multiple forms of violence all of the time
to focus on the power that we don't have.
One thing that the Allied Media Conference
-which is a grassroots media conference I work with-
stresses in how we organize is that we focus on where we're powerful not where we're powerless.
I think the imagination is one place that we're powerful,
and I think that we don't have the state, we don't have the prisons,
we don't have the cops, thank God.
What we do have is the wild, queer, feminists of color, decolonial imagination.
And what difference does your disability make and the disability rights movement make?
I heard you begin to talk about it, but I think it's important.
Right. We actually use the term disability justice because the disability rights movement,
while it's incredibly important and I'm grateful for the work those organizers did,
has been predominately a white dominated single-issue movement.
Disability justice as a term was coined by people of color with disabilities who were revolutionaries,
especially Patricia Berne and Leroy Moore of Sins Invalid
who got really sick of being marginalized as disabled revolutionary people of color
within both white disability rights and non-disabled people of color movements,
and I would just say everything. [laughs]
Cara Page, who is a beloved, beloved person, who is the ED of Audre Lorde Project right now,
she was part of a group called Kindred, which still exists,
which is black and brown queer southern healers, and they came together because she was like,
"Organizers are literally dying in the South because of chronic illness and ableism
and the relentless pace of our movements that is ableist."
So I would say that the first thing that's true for our movements
is that sustainability is a huge issue for us.
There's so much that non-disabled activists can learn from disabled people
and that's kind of one of the beginning places.
I think a lot of non-disabled activists, or people who don't identify as disabled yet,
are used to thinking of disability only in terms of, "Oh we need to get a ramp."
And that's really important but it's a really huge cognitive leap for non-disabled folks
to become aware that disabled folks have our histories and cultures of resistance.
We have crip science.
We have incredible organizing skills that non-disabled people need to learn from.
I can organize from bed. I can organize on the internet. I can organize on crip time.
I can do a lot of miraculous things that are not on a 16 meeting a week relentless schedule.
I can do that on no money and I am not alone.
I am one of millions of disabled folks who are resisting,
and I would say a whole lot of other things about eugenics and the value of our bodies
and how the struggle around those issues are immensely connected with anti-prison organizing.
Just to begin with.
And I would just add one other thing. It has to do with fun.
Oh, yeah, right?
I had a disability justice activist talk the other day about aging
and said to her not-disabled, they didn't think, colleagues,
"You want to learn how to work your body as it ages,
as if you're lucky it will acquire disabilities, learn from us."
Oh I need to say this. My friend Naima Lowe said recently,
she's like you know,
"The thing that non-disabled folks have to learn from us
is that we've already survived some of the worst things that can happen;
and I don't just mean what ableism sees as the individual tragedy of our bodies,
I mean surviving ableism and capitalism, and we know how to do it.
And we are thriving and we are surviving and we're not always surviving but we are."
So yeah, exactly.
When that, y'know, break-neck speed burn-out able-bodied activist
gets cancer or diabetes or, you know, gets an amputation and is like, "Oh my God, my life's over!"
we're there to be like it actually really isn't,
but you need to change the way your life is and the way movements are
so we can actually be part of that radical imagination.
[Laura] And we can have fun. [Leah] And we can have fun.
[Laura] Talk about fun. [Leah] What do you want to know?
[Laura] What you're into. [Leah laughs]
[Laura] I'm watching you and I'm thinking
you're talking about some of the most intense, hardcore stuff and yet you're clearly relishing it.
[Leah] I'm not dead. [Laura laughs]
I was like many survivors who make it to 40.
I was not supposed to ... I'm going to quote somebody who's going to make you cry.
I mean June Jordan, right? The revolutionary queer black poet.
Cancer survivor and, y'know, cancer not-survivor said right after 9/11,
"Some of us did not die. I guess it was our fate to live, so what are we going to do about it?"
I was talking with one of my chosen family members who is also a hardcore survivor who's 42
who painted this cane and they were like, "We made it. Now what do we do with it?"
We survived and we have all that knowledge.
I'm thankful every day and not in some weird bourgie Christian way.
I'm just like, I get to be alive.
[laughs] I get to have made it through some of the roughest stuff,
and that's not to say that there's not going to be disasters that keep coming.
I have a poem in the book called The Worst Thing in the World,
which is the truth is, it will keep happening.
You know, we're about to run out of water in California in a year. Octavia Butler was right.
What one thing that we also have power over
is our capacity for joy and pleasure
and that's something that queer and trans folks have always held onto,
is, y'know, we don't have to be homonormative. We actually don't have to.
We have so much that's about sex and joy and pleasure and the powers of decadence on no money.
You have great examples of how people do confront violence without recourse to the police in your book.
[Leah] Thank you.
The group UBUNTU stands out in my mind. The word meaning born to belonging.
[Leah] I am because we are.
I am because we are.
Talk about how they work and why you thought it was important to put them in the book.
UBUNTU is one of the most amazing groups that I've ever run into ...
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who is a queer black feminist troublemaker genius ...
[Laura] Who's been on this program.
Good! I feel blessed every time I'm in Alexis's presence.
I ran into UBUNTU's work when I was stealing time from my day job at the eviction hotline.
They came together after the Duke University rape -I hesitate to call it a trial-
but where several white male Duke University Lacrosse players
sexually assaulted black female sex workers who they'd hired to dance for them at a party.
I always talk about that story when I'm asked to talk about transformative justice
because that is an example where, you know,
I mean, just the forces of anti-black racism, whorephobia,
you know it's a perfect storm of everything awful.
It would be really easy to feel like there's nothing we can do,
and UBUNTU came together and they said,
"We can't control the courts but we can do a national day of truth-telling march
past the house where the assault happened holding signs saying,
"Someone I love is a sex worker," and, "I believe survivors,"
and do a dance routine to Audre Lorde's A Litany for Survival
in front of the house where the assault happened.
They just grew to do incredible anti-violence work in Durham, North Carolina and beyond.
Just speaking to that,
this example that is in the interview that we did with Alexis that pops out at me is that,
you know they had multiple examples of just, they were like,
"Yeah, we were just walking down the street one day and we ran into this young woman
who'd just been assaulted by her partner and we just said, hey, what do you need? Come with us.
We took her into our home. We made her tea. We talked about our experiences.
We called her family and her faith leader."
And when I asked Alexis, "So that's something a lot of feminists wish they could do,
but when something like that happens, we freeze, so what made that possible?"
Cycling back to what you said about relationships,
she was like, "90% of our work doesn't look like traditional activist work.
It's doing childcare. It's hanging out.
It's building with each other so we're not a clique, we're an actual community,
and we know that we can call on each other during the times of deepest crisis and we can respond."
That's why I think we need to do relationship work
and that's work that's looked down on because it's feminized
and it's not seen as like big, beating the chest, I'm leading the rally, work.
It's just what women and feminized people have always done.
I always say we have a big fight around the shredding of the social safety net
but what we don't talk often enough about is not the net but the fabric.
We need to re-stitch the social fabric.
Which I think is what you're talking about when somebody opens their doors.
So much to talk about.
Mentors. I'd love to hear about more of your mentors.
What you've learned from different people.
Then this word transformative justice.
This idea that you're in a transformative justice moment. What do you mean?
[laughs] You want me to start with that?
[Laura] Yeah.
Yeah. We're in a transformative ...
I mean we've been in a transformative justice moment all of our lives.
I think that right now it was really intense being at the Color of Violence 4 Conference,
which happened this past weekend,
and feeling, really feeling, how I feel like I've been in movement with the folks who were there,
the black and brown women who were there, for 15 years,
and for so many of us we started, y'know, going back to that ...
the early Incite documents of like,
so the police don't work for us as black and brown folks.
When they're called, they arrest us, they beat us, the deport us.
It's never safe to be a black sex worker who calls the cops when your partner is beating you up.
It's never safe. It's never going to add to that.
What do we do instead?
And to go on these, what Alyssa Vera calls,
"marvelous journeys and stories that are still being written."
I think that we're in an incredible moment right now
with Black Lives Matter as a black feminist-led movement and created movement.
It is incredible for me to look at Rolling Stone Magazine, to look at that article that says that,
"Policing's a dirty job and it turns out no one has to do it. Here's 10 alternatives."
To feel that all over North America, people are saying,
"Actually calling the cops always ends up with someone getting killed,
so what are we actually do instead? Because our lives are on the line all the time."
I've felt complicated about transformative justice and I'm someone who's helped organize it.
Revolution Starts at Home came out in 2011 and I was very optimistic and I thought,
"Oh and you know we just had the US social forum and in 3 years we'll just abolish the police.
It'll be great."
And it turns out that this project of replacing the state with community based alternatives
is thrilling, maddening, exhausting, you don't know what's going to happen around the corner.
It's very hard to work ... it's the most triggering work you can do.
To speak to especially people in our communities who we love who cause harm,
and to be able to be in the place where we say,
"I love you. I do not want you to be locked up for the next 40 years.
What you did is absolutely not alright and we're not going to let you keep doing it."
We have not been trained to do this and it takes developing a lot of emotional muscles to do it.
I believe that we are doing it and it's also not a straight shot.
Your life is so not the straight shot.
[Leah laughs]
You are performing. You are organizing. You have 2 books coming out this year.
You've written a memoir already.
A. How do you find the time? And B. Is it a little early for a memoir?
No. [laughs] I know. I mean, my niece Luna Merbruja, formerly known as Askari González,
who's an incredible 22 year-old transgender Latina organizer
who co-organized the first trans-women of color national gathering ever last year.
Her memoir Trauma Queen came out 2 years ago, she's 23.
[Laura] She beat you to it.
I think she did. She did.
Dirty River took 13 years to write
and it makes me think a lot about the stakes for feminist of color writing.
Alexis, as you probably know, she was one of the first people to get access to June's archives.
June wrote, what 27 books over her life time? 30?
Alexis has spoken a lot about, "Yeah, I read the correspondence where June was like,
'I couldn't pay my phone bill that month.'
Or where she was fighting so hard with the publishers of poetry."
The people who wanted her to delete the subtitle "a revolutionary blueprint."
I feel immensely lucky to be a queer, disabled feminist of color writing,
and it's not, you know, it's not ... no one dinged me on the head with a star.
It's not automatic. It's taken a lot of collective labor.
It doesn't happen if our presses and media movements don't keep going.
And like a lot of queer working-class, feminists of color, disabled folks, fill in the blank,
we've really led real lives.
My memoir is about me running away from America when I was 21 to set a national boundary
between me and my parents and their love and their abuse and their internalized racism,
and walking straight into a movement moment in Toronto in the late 90's that was filled
with queer feminists of color and Desh Pardesh
which was a revolutionary cross class south Asian queer organizing center
and the biggest global diasporic Sri Lankan community in the world.
And, y'know, nothing like being in love
with a queer brown crazy boy who you're reading Franz Fanon with
who also hits you when he's triggered too;
and that's where my feminism and my organizing comes from.
And we need those road maps.
I partly wrote that book because ...
I mean I'm a book nerd and I have an incredible collection of small press literature
that's currently in a storage unit in Berkley.
The incest survivor and survivor narratives that are out there
are often very white, very from second-wave feminism, very single-issue,
and I wanted to document all of our true life adventure stories of actually how we survive,
in a very complicated way.
Now there's never a moment on this program where I don't use the word queer
and someone doesn't email me and say,
"How can you be insulting people. What, are you going to use the 'N' word next?"
What does queer mean to you?
Queer means everything that's not straight that's in the practice of moving always towards freedom.
So, Leah, you agreed generously to read something to us. What are you going to read?
I'm going to read a poem called Wrong is Not Yours,
after June Jordan, and it's from my new book Body Map.
"One day you are a 22 year-old with dread-locked half Desi hair
you decided to lock when you did double dip mescaline on New Year's Eve
after staring at pictures of sadhus from south India.
Years before Carol's Daughter in Target or Palmer Coconut Hair Milk or Kinky Curly,
and you have no idea what to do with all that curly, curly hair.
And you decide you want to change your name
from Albrecht to no more Albrecht.
You want your great grandmothers'.
You are a 22 year-old on a straight diet of nothing but Franz Fanon, Marlon Riggs, and Chrystos.
You are a Sri Lankan daughter of the Dutch East India company.
You want no more Albrecht.
No more rape in your pelvis.
No more, "Where'd you get that name?"
No more, "Are you adopted?" No more.
Even though your grandmothers whisper, "Keep a white name for the passport."
In fact, keep as many passports as possible.
You never know what boat you're going to have to get on.
Who you'll have to bullshit in an immigration office.
You'll never know where we'll have to run to.
Make home on. Sip your tea.
Cook your rice. Wait for death.
Looking at an ocean almost like your own.
But you, you want your great grandmothers' name who eats hot pepper.
Who walked out of Galicia with 13 children.
Your other great grandmother
whose name is a foot-note in a Lankan history books' cross-reference index,
you find researching your senior thesis on mixed race women in Sri Lanka.
Teachers, union organizers, and sluts, every one of us.
And you get something infinitely Google-able. And infinitely unpronounceable
except for Ukrainians and Lankans and Dravidians.
And even when Dennis Kucinich runs for president
and puts and Mp3 file on his website saying how to say his name
and you think it might be a good idea, too.
Your name is not wrong.
Wrong is not your name.
It is your own. Your own. Your own. Your own.
Your.
Own."
Listening to you read Leah, I hear references to home. You have the word tattooed on your chest.
[Leah] I do.
June Jordan also wrote a collection Moving Towards Home.
What does home mean to you?
Oh, you sucker punched me.
I think that, for those of us who are diasporic, home is always a question.
I think that part of the reason why I got "home" tattooed there
is that this body is the only thing that I'll ever own, and it's on loan.
And I think that for those of us who have been forced from our homeland
through, y'know, the top 5 of colonialism: rape, genocide, war, imperialism, et cetera,
we carry home in our body's memories. In our cells. In our bones.
We make home wherever we are.
Whether it's a prison cell. Whether it's Brooklyn.
Whether it's wherever we go when we're gentrified out of Brooklyn.
And we make it in the imagination.
And we also get to envision where home's going to be that hasn't happened yet.
It doesn't just have to be loss.
It doesn't have to be the thing that we're imagining that we want to get back to.
When Palestine is free, it's going to be a different place than it was in '48.
Yeah. And we make it with each other.
Right. Exactly.
You can find out more about our guest Leah,
and June Jordan, the Poetry For The People founder and professor at UC Berkley at our website.
This is Airport Ode #1 from Body Map.
"the truth is, I ask for the opt out.
I ask for it every single time.
I would rather be patted down by a 60-ish white working class woman who looks just like my mom
who I will studiously ma'am and ask about her day,
than to sit sweating waiting for it to happen.
than to have beam of atoms shot through my body
and still get barked aside, patted down, tarot card, cock and coconut oil wanded.
Once on my way to a red-eye from a performance in a cocktail dress,
you were young and brown and queer
and you said damn, it'll be easy to search you, you're hardly wearing anything at all
you complemented my mukkuthi
and because I am a frequent queerartbrownlady flier,
you remember me from a week or two ago
this is where we are in 2012:
I chat friendly and deliberate with the sister who searches me
legs spread out in front of the other,
the back of the hand on sensitive areas your zipper line, your bra
casual spread eagle in public as everyone hops on shoes, puts laptops back
Not too long ago, every airport line a panic attack, every airport four hours sweating armpit rank,
every bus crossing the small room and barking guards who don't even pretend to be polite
who go through all your things and take you to the glass toilet
Every time they chirp or bark, "I'm going to pat your hair now" I go deep inside and all the way out
once, my girlfriend picked me up at the airport with a little tupperware of dinner
and fucked me in long term parking bent over the hood of her car
I was too nervous to come but I loved how she wanted to feed me,
how she wanted to fuck me back
in the middle of all these concrete cameras wands scanners fingerprints nexus red blinking eye
this place that hates us."
That was a poem from Leah's new book Body Map,
about which you can get more information and find out how to get a copy for yourself
at our website: GRITtv.org
It's hard to imagine an American poet
more celebrated than 4 time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost.
Whose most famous poem concludes
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by.
And that has made all the difference."
When the most celebrated poets' most well known lines praise difference,
why is it that we're so scared of it?
"Maybe we need more poets."
That's what John F. Kennedy said just weeks before his death,
at the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College.
It was soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War was raging on,
10 million Americans needed jobs, "America needed strength", said Kennedy.
"But strength takes many forms,
and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant."
His words.
"The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nations' greatness,"
the president continued,
"but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable.
For they determine whether we use power, or power uses us."
Music and poetry and the arts push us, said Kennedy.
"When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations.
When power narrows the area of man's concern,
poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence."
That was half a century ago.
Today we have entire months dedicated to something we call diversity,
including this one, June, LGBTQI Pride.
Except mostly, we don't celebrate diversity. We celebrate sameness.
We honor all the progress that we lesbian gay bisexual and trans Americans have made,
becoming accepted as normal by straight America.
Now I'm for everyone enjoying the same rights in these United States,
I support that ongoing project, for everybody.
But I would like to celebrate something else this June:
Roads Less Traveled.
Especially the roads less traveled that LGBT people have taken, and take daily.
The same old roads will take us to the same old places.
It's divergence, as the straight white poet once wrote,
that makes all the difference.
Tell me what you think.
Laura@GRITtv.org
And thanks for listening.
Today on the Laura Flanders show, from the archives,
an interview with author and law professor Dean Spade.
[Spade] One of the really interesting, um, contests, inside trans communities,
and more broadly in queer and trans politics,
is whether or not hate crimes laws actually work.
[Flanders] And an exclusive preview of
Spade's new film about pinkwashing.
[speaker] Israel is gay friendly when it serves its purposes...
[speaker]... every year, chemical pesticides kill no fewer than 3 million farmers.
Every day, workplace accidents kill no fewer than 10,000 workers.
Every minute, poverty kills no fewer than 15 children.
These crimes do not show up on the news,
they are, like wars, normal acts of cannibalism.