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.