WEBVTT 00:00:05.104 --> 00:00:10.885 Today on The Laura Flanders Show, writer and activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha 00:00:10.885 --> 00:00:17.219 discusses poetry, capitalism, and the difference between disability rights and disability justice. 00:00:17.219 --> 00:00:21.091 All that and a few words from me on Roads Less Traveled. 00:00:21.091 --> 00:00:22.705 Welcome to our program. 00:00:45.060 --> 00:00:46.514 Hi, I'm Laura Flanders. 00:00:46.514 --> 00:00:47.787 Safety. 00:00:47.787 --> 00:00:51.904 Every law enforcement officer and every politician will tell you that they're for it. 00:00:51.904 --> 00:00:55.984 And yet for many police aren't the answer, they're a problem in the community 00:00:55.984 --> 00:00:59.148 and today's policy makers are only making things worse. 00:00:59.148 --> 00:01:03.365 If what we're doing isn't making many of us safer, what might? 00:01:03.365 --> 00:01:05.597 Our next guest has gone on a search. 00:01:05.597 --> 00:01:09.621 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha describes herself 00:01:09.621 --> 00:01:14.952 as a queer, disabled, writer, performer, poet, healer and teacher, 00:01:14.952 --> 00:01:17.628 inspired by poets, June Jordan, Suheir Hammad, 00:01:17.628 --> 00:01:20.647 and what she calls the whole women of color pantheon. 00:01:20.647 --> 00:01:23.458 She is the author of several books of poetry including 00:01:23.458 --> 00:01:28.048 Consensual Genocide and the Lambda Award winning, Love Cake. 00:01:28.048 --> 00:01:33.460 She has a new book of poetry, Body Map, and a memoir, Dirty River, out this year. 00:01:33.460 --> 00:01:38.426 She also performs with the group Mangos With Chili. She's an editor, too, of the book 00:01:38.426 --> 00:01:45.167 The Revolution Starts as Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities, 00:01:45.167 --> 00:01:51.406 a book that grapples with the difficult ideas of addressing violence without police. 00:01:51.406 --> 00:01:55.456 We also discovered that we shared a meal together a few years ago in Toronto. 00:01:55.456 --> 00:01:58.413 Many years ago. I'm happy to see you again, Leah. Thanks for coming in. 00:01:58.413 --> 00:01:59.976 Thanks so much for having me. 00:01:59.976 --> 00:02:04.460 Let's talk a little bit about this notion of safety and we'll come back to other things. 00:02:05.794 --> 00:02:07.281 What does it mean to you? 00:02:07.281 --> 00:02:11.913 I think that there are a million survivors of violence out there. 00:02:11.913 --> 00:02:15.160 I think that most people have survived some form of abuse or violence. 00:02:15.160 --> 00:02:19.135 I think that as feminists, we've been talking about that at least since the '70s and beyond. 00:02:19.135 --> 00:02:21.873 And I think that in the criminal legal system 00:02:21.873 --> 00:02:24.965 -which I don't call the criminal justice system, because it doesn't bring it- 00:02:24.965 --> 00:02:27.968 no one ever asks survivors of violence what they need 00:02:27.968 --> 00:02:31.273 to have safety, justice, and healing in their lives. 00:02:31.273 --> 00:02:33.550 We're told as survivors of violence that, 00:02:33.550 --> 00:02:36.946 "Yay! Second wave white liberal feminism works, 00:02:36.946 --> 00:02:39.874 so we get to call the cops and send our abusers to prison." 00:02:39.874 --> 00:02:44.051 I don't know a single survivor who's ever called the police to get justice. 00:02:44.051 --> 00:02:47.459 And of the ones that I've read about, I don't know a single one who said, 00:02:47.459 --> 00:02:51.159 "Yeah my experience in the criminal legal system was great and I got what I needed." 00:02:51.159 --> 00:02:57.135 We're basically being used to create more prisons and to build mass incarceration. 00:02:57.135 --> 00:02:58.633 Explain what you mean by that. 00:02:58.633 --> 00:03:01.303 I think that like a lot of feminists of color, 00:03:01.303 --> 00:03:04.878 I understand why a lot of feminists in the '70s and '80s pushed for things 00:03:04.878 --> 00:03:08.217 like the criminalization of domestic violence and child and sexual abuse. 00:03:08.217 --> 00:03:10.742 But what black and brown feminists know 00:03:10.742 --> 00:03:14.155 is that bringing more police into our communities never keeps us safe. 00:03:14.155 --> 00:03:18.500 My good friend Ejeris Dixon, who worked for many years at Audre Lorde Project, 00:03:18.500 --> 00:03:22.491 talks about how what we're calling transformative justice is nothing new. 00:03:22.491 --> 00:03:25.127 She's like, "My father is a black man from Louisiana. 00:03:25.127 --> 00:03:29.327 Growing up, the police were the clan and still are"; and he's like, 00:03:29.327 --> 00:03:32.491 "That's not who we called when there was intimate partner abuse in our communities." 00:03:32.491 --> 00:03:34.511 That hasn't changed. 00:03:34.511 --> 00:03:40.706 Is that where the artist and poet and imagination comes in of what else might we do? 00:03:40.706 --> 00:03:42.566 What else have other communities done? 00:03:42.566 --> 00:03:44.154 Mm-hmm. [laughs] One thing that I'm really grateful for 00:03:44.154 --> 00:03:50.455 ... so I'm about to be 40 which means I came up as an activist and an organizer in the '90s 00:03:50.455 --> 00:03:55.289 and I still... back then I would run into, you know, in whatever movement spaces we were a part of, 00:03:55.289 --> 00:04:00.103 a little bit of the "oh, cultural works, this very feminized unimportant thing." 00:04:00.103 --> 00:04:03.936 I still remember trying to organize a Free Mumia [Abu Jamal] rally in 1996, 00:04:03.936 --> 00:04:06.450 and there was some old white Bolshevik guy who was like... 00:04:06.450 --> 00:04:08.962 we wanted to have... we were young people of color, and we were like... 00:04:08.962 --> 00:04:10.704 "We want to have MC's and hip-hop artists and poets," 00:04:10.704 --> 00:04:14.397 and he was like, "That's not how you do a proper rally. You sell the paper!" 00:04:14.397 --> 00:04:17.415 and we were like, "you're racist and irrelevant." 00:04:17.415 --> 00:04:20.048 I think that cultural work still is minimized 00:04:20.048 --> 00:04:24.225 but I think that it goes beyond just being the entertainment at the rally. 00:04:24.225 --> 00:04:26.067 I think it is just what you said about ... 00:04:26.067 --> 00:04:31.470 Diane di Prima once said that, "The only war that matters is the war of the imagination." 00:04:31.470 --> 00:04:33.947 And I think that it's very easy 00:04:33.947 --> 00:04:38.525 when we are surviving and not surviving multiple forms of violence all of the time 00:04:38.525 --> 00:04:40.778 to focus on the power that we don't have. 00:04:40.778 --> 00:04:43.406 One thing that the Allied Media Conference 00:04:43.406 --> 00:04:45.820 -which is a grassroots media conference I work with- 00:04:45.820 --> 00:04:50.850 stresses in how we organize is that we focus on where we're powerful not where we're powerless. 00:04:50.850 --> 00:04:53.701 I think the imagination is one place that we're powerful, 00:04:53.701 --> 00:04:57.422 and I think that we don't have the state, we don't have the prisons, 00:04:57.422 --> 00:04:59.051 we don't have the cops, thank God. 00:04:59.051 --> 00:05:03.691 What we do have is the wild, queer, feminists of color, decolonial imagination. 00:05:03.691 --> 00:05:08.058 And what difference does your disability make and the disability rights movement make? 00:05:08.058 --> 00:05:11.105 I heard you begin to talk about it, but I think it's important. 00:05:11.105 --> 00:05:14.939 Right. We actually use the term disability justice because the disability rights movement, 00:05:14.939 --> 00:05:19.724 while it's incredibly important and I'm grateful for the work those organizers did, 00:05:19.724 --> 00:05:22.994 has been predominately a white dominated single-issue movement. 00:05:22.994 --> 00:05:27.979 Disability justice as a term was coined by people of color with disabilities who were revolutionaries, 00:05:27.979 --> 00:05:31.219 especially Patricia Berne and Leroy Moore of Sins Invalid 00:05:31.219 --> 00:05:35.803 who got really sick of being marginalized as disabled revolutionary people of color 00:05:35.803 --> 00:05:40.725 within both white disability rights and non-disabled people of color movements, 00:05:40.725 --> 00:05:44.105 and I would just say everything. [laughs] 00:05:44.105 --> 00:05:49.140 Cara Page, who is a beloved, beloved person, who is the ED of Audre Lorde Project right now, 00:05:49.140 --> 00:05:52.481 she was part of a group called Kindred, which still exists, 00:05:52.481 --> 00:05:55.881 which is black and brown queer southern healers, and they came together because she was like, 00:05:55.881 --> 00:06:01.827 "Organizers are literally dying in the South because of chronic illness and ableism 00:06:01.827 --> 00:06:05.133 and the relentless pace of our movements that is ableist." 00:06:05.133 --> 00:06:07.157 So I would say that the first thing that's true for our movements 00:06:07.157 --> 00:06:10.827 is that sustainability is a huge issue for us. 00:06:10.827 --> 00:06:14.338 There's so much that non-disabled activists can learn from disabled people 00:06:14.338 --> 00:06:16.530 and that's kind of one of the beginning places. 00:06:16.530 --> 00:06:20.685 I think a lot of non-disabled activists, or people who don't identify as disabled yet, 00:06:20.685 --> 00:06:24.786 are used to thinking of disability only in terms of, "Oh we need to get a ramp." 00:06:24.786 --> 00:06:29.559 And that's really important but it's a really huge cognitive leap for non-disabled folks 00:06:29.559 --> 00:06:33.635 to become aware that disabled folks have our histories and cultures of resistance. 00:06:33.635 --> 00:06:35.096 We have crip science. 00:06:35.096 --> 00:06:38.558 We have incredible organizing skills that non-disabled people need to learn from. 00:06:38.558 --> 00:06:43.566 I can organize from bed. I can organize on the internet. I can organize on crip time. 00:06:43.566 --> 00:06:48.887 I can do a lot of miraculous things that are not on a 16 meeting a week relentless schedule. 00:06:48.887 --> 00:06:51.645 I can do that on no money and I am not alone. 00:06:51.645 --> 00:06:53.934 I am one of millions of disabled folks who are resisting, 00:06:53.934 --> 00:06:58.540 and I would say a whole lot of other things about eugenics and the value of our bodies 00:06:58.540 --> 00:07:03.775 and how the struggle around those issues are immensely connected with anti-prison organizing. 00:07:03.775 --> 00:07:04.955 Just to begin with. 00:07:04.955 --> 00:07:07.585 And I would just add one other thing. It has to do with fun. 00:07:07.585 --> 00:07:08.677 Oh, yeah, right? 00:07:08.677 --> 00:07:12.557 I had a disability justice activist talk the other day about aging 00:07:12.557 --> 00:07:17.189 and said to her not-disabled, they didn't think, colleagues, 00:07:17.189 --> 00:07:24.371 "You want to learn how to work your body as it ages, 00:07:24.371 --> 00:07:29.161 as if you're lucky it will acquire disabilities, learn from us." 00:07:29.161 --> 00:07:32.304 Oh I need to say this. My friend Naima Lowe said recently, 00:07:32.304 --> 00:07:33.241 she's like you know, 00:07:33.241 --> 00:07:34.944 "The thing that non-disabled folks have to learn from us 00:07:34.944 --> 00:07:37.535 is that we've already survived some of the worst things that can happen; 00:07:37.535 --> 00:07:42.301 and I don't just mean what ableism sees as the individual tragedy of our bodies, 00:07:42.301 --> 00:07:45.454 I mean surviving ableism and capitalism, and we know how to do it. 00:07:45.454 --> 00:07:49.749 And we are thriving and we are surviving and we're not always surviving but we are." 00:07:49.749 --> 00:07:51.321 So yeah, exactly. 00:07:51.321 --> 00:07:55.513 When that, y'know, break-neck speed burn-out able-bodied activist 00:07:55.513 --> 00:08:00.206 gets cancer or diabetes or, you know, gets an amputation and is like, "Oh my God, my life's over!" 00:08:00.206 --> 00:08:01.887 we're there to be like it actually really isn't, 00:08:01.887 --> 00:08:04.744 but you need to change the way your life is and the way movements are 00:08:04.744 --> 00:08:07.633 so we can actually be part of that radical imagination. 00:08:07.633 --> 00:08:09.200 [Laura] And we can have fun. [Leah] And we can have fun. 00:08:09.200 --> 00:08:11.220 [Laura] Talk about fun. [Leah] What do you want to know? 00:08:11.220 --> 00:08:13.104 [Laura] What you're into. [Leah laughs] 00:08:13.104 --> 00:08:14.546 [Laura] I'm watching you and I'm thinking 00:08:14.546 --> 00:08:21.885 you're talking about some of the most intense, hardcore stuff and yet you're clearly relishing it. 00:08:21.885 --> 00:08:23.521 [Leah] I'm not dead. [Laura laughs] 00:08:23.521 --> 00:08:26.604 I was like many survivors who make it to 40. 00:08:26.604 --> 00:08:29.755 I was not supposed to ... I'm going to quote somebody who's going to make you cry. 00:08:29.755 --> 00:08:35.109 I mean June Jordan, right? The revolutionary queer black poet. 00:08:35.109 --> 00:08:40.650 Cancer survivor and, y'know, cancer not-survivor said right after 9/11, 00:08:40.650 --> 00:08:45.316 "Some of us did not die. I guess it was our fate to live, so what are we going to do about it?" 00:08:45.316 --> 00:08:51.338 I was talking with one of my chosen family members who is also a hardcore survivor who's 42 00:08:51.338 --> 00:08:56.363 who painted this cane and they were like, "We made it. Now what do we do with it?" 00:08:56.363 --> 00:08:58.315 We survived and we have all that knowledge. 00:08:58.315 --> 00:09:01.676 I'm thankful every day and not in some weird bourgie Christian way. 00:09:01.676 --> 00:09:04.327 I'm just like, I get to be alive. 00:09:04.327 --> 00:09:07.057 [laughs] I get to have made it through some of the roughest stuff, 00:09:07.057 --> 00:09:10.864 and that's not to say that there's not going to be disasters that keep coming. 00:09:10.864 --> 00:09:13.460 I have a poem in the book called The Worst Thing in the World, 00:09:13.460 --> 00:09:15.140 which is the truth is, it will keep happening. 00:09:15.140 --> 00:09:20.167 You know, we're about to run out of water in California in a year. Octavia Butler was right. 00:09:20.167 --> 00:09:23.726 What one thing that we also have power over 00:09:23.726 --> 00:09:26.030 is our capacity for joy and pleasure 00:09:26.030 --> 00:09:28.867 and that's something that queer and trans folks have always held onto, 00:09:28.867 --> 00:09:33.108 is, y'know, we don't have to be homonormative. We actually don't have to. 00:09:33.108 --> 00:09:39.220 We have so much that's about sex and joy and pleasure and the powers of decadence on no money. 00:09:39.220 --> 00:09:46.121 You have great examples of how people do confront violence without recourse to the police in your book. 00:09:46.121 --> 00:09:47.374 [Leah] Thank you. 00:09:47.374 --> 00:09:52.368 The group UBUNTU stands out in my mind. The word meaning born to belonging. 00:09:52.368 --> 00:09:54.766 [Leah] I am because we are. 00:09:54.766 --> 00:09:56.584 I am because we are. 00:09:56.584 --> 00:09:58.752 Talk about how they work and why you thought it was important to put them in the book. 00:09:58.752 --> 00:10:03.088 UBUNTU is one of the most amazing groups that I've ever run into ... 00:10:03.088 --> 00:10:07.311 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who is a queer black feminist troublemaker genius ... 00:10:07.311 --> 00:10:08.498 [Laura] Who's been on this program. 00:10:08.498 --> 00:10:11.976 Good! I feel blessed every time I'm in Alexis's presence. 00:10:11.976 --> 00:10:16.830 I ran into UBUNTU's work when I was stealing time from my day job at the eviction hotline. 00:10:16.830 --> 00:10:22.175 They came together after the Duke University rape -I hesitate to call it a trial- 00:10:22.175 --> 00:10:26.476 but where several white male Duke University Lacrosse players 00:10:26.476 --> 00:10:30.551 sexually assaulted black female sex workers who they'd hired to dance for them at a party. 00:10:30.551 --> 00:10:37.189 I always talk about that story when I'm asked to talk about transformative justice 00:10:37.189 --> 00:10:39.895 because that is an example where, you know, 00:10:39.895 --> 00:10:42.772 I mean, just the forces of anti-black racism, whorephobia, 00:10:42.772 --> 00:10:45.472 you know it's a perfect storm of everything awful. 00:10:45.472 --> 00:10:48.928 It would be really easy to feel like there's nothing we can do, 00:10:48.928 --> 00:10:50.887 and UBUNTU came together and they said, 00:10:50.887 --> 00:10:55.348 "We can't control the courts but we can do a national day of truth-telling march 00:10:55.348 --> 00:10:58.020 past the house where the assault happened holding signs saying, 00:10:58.020 --> 00:11:01.056 "Someone I love is a sex worker," and, "I believe survivors," 00:11:01.056 --> 00:11:04.182 and do a dance routine to Audre Lorde's A Litany for Survival 00:11:04.182 --> 00:11:06.525 in front of the house where the assault happened. 00:11:06.525 --> 00:11:11.306 They just grew to do incredible anti-violence work in Durham, North Carolina and beyond. 00:11:11.306 --> 00:11:13.570 Just speaking to that, 00:11:13.570 --> 00:11:16.928 this example that is in the interview that we did with Alexis that pops out at me is that, 00:11:16.928 --> 00:11:20.230 you know they had multiple examples of just, they were like, 00:11:20.230 --> 00:11:22.567 "Yeah, we were just walking down the street one day and we ran into this young woman 00:11:22.567 --> 00:11:26.613 who'd just been assaulted by her partner and we just said, hey, what do you need? Come with us. 00:11:26.613 --> 00:11:30.107 We took her into our home. We made her tea. We talked about our experiences. 00:11:30.107 --> 00:11:32.357 We called her family and her faith leader." 00:11:32.357 --> 00:11:36.947 And when I asked Alexis, "So that's something a lot of feminists wish they could do, 00:11:36.947 --> 00:11:39.723 but when something like that happens, we freeze, so what made that possible?" 00:11:39.723 --> 00:11:41.633 Cycling back to what you said about relationships, 00:11:41.633 --> 00:11:45.021 she was like, "90% of our work doesn't look like traditional activist work. 00:11:45.021 --> 00:11:46.560 It's doing childcare. It's hanging out. 00:11:46.560 --> 00:11:51.803 It's building with each other so we're not a clique, we're an actual community, 00:11:51.803 --> 00:11:57.882 and we know that we can call on each other during the times of deepest crisis and we can respond." 00:11:57.882 --> 00:12:00.920 That's why I think we need to do relationship work 00:12:00.920 --> 00:12:03.214 and that's work that's looked down on because it's feminized 00:12:03.214 --> 00:12:06.708 and it's not seen as like big, beating the chest, I'm leading the rally, work. 00:12:06.708 --> 00:12:09.303 It's just what women and feminized people have always done. 00:12:09.303 --> 00:12:12.966 I always say we have a big fight around the shredding of the social safety net 00:12:12.966 --> 00:12:16.889 but what we don't talk often enough about is not the net but the fabric. 00:12:16.889 --> 00:12:19.926 We need to re-stitch the social fabric. 00:12:19.926 --> 00:12:23.440 Which I think is what you're talking about when somebody opens their doors. 00:12:24.916 --> 00:12:27.164 So much to talk about. 00:12:27.164 --> 00:12:29.329 Mentors. I'd love to hear about more of your mentors. 00:12:29.329 --> 00:12:31.158 What you've learned from different people. 00:12:31.158 --> 00:12:34.383 Then this word transformative justice. 00:12:34.383 --> 00:12:38.329 This idea that you're in a transformative justice moment. What do you mean? 00:12:38.329 --> 00:12:40.116 [laughs] You want me to start with that? 00:12:40.116 --> 00:12:41.078 [Laura] Yeah. 00:12:41.078 --> 00:12:42.952 Yeah. We're in a transformative ... 00:12:42.952 --> 00:12:45.025 I mean we've been in a transformative justice moment all of our lives. 00:12:45.025 --> 00:12:50.995 I think that right now it was really intense being at the Color of Violence 4 Conference, 00:12:50.995 --> 00:12:52.530 which happened this past weekend, 00:12:52.530 --> 00:12:58.576 and feeling, really feeling, how I feel like I've been in movement with the folks who were there, 00:12:58.576 --> 00:13:02.207 the black and brown women who were there, for 15 years, 00:13:02.207 --> 00:13:05.785 and for so many of us we started, y'know, going back to that ... 00:13:05.785 --> 00:13:08.042 the early Incite documents of like, 00:13:08.042 --> 00:13:10.321 so the police don't work for us as black and brown folks. 00:13:10.321 --> 00:13:13.619 When they're called, they arrest us, they beat us, the deport us. 00:13:13.619 --> 00:13:17.355 It's never safe to be a black sex worker who calls the cops when your partner is beating you up. 00:13:17.355 --> 00:13:19.763 It's never safe. It's never going to add to that. 00:13:19.763 --> 00:13:21.157 What do we do instead? 00:13:21.157 --> 00:13:23.457 And to go on these, what Alyssa Vera calls, 00:13:23.457 --> 00:13:27.866 "marvelous journeys and stories that are still being written." 00:13:27.866 --> 00:13:31.168 I think that we're in an incredible moment right now 00:13:31.168 --> 00:13:34.816 with Black Lives Matter as a black feminist-led movement and created movement. 00:13:34.816 --> 00:13:39.782 It is incredible for me to look at Rolling Stone Magazine, to look at that article that says that, 00:13:39.782 --> 00:13:43.492 "Policing's a dirty job and it turns out no one has to do it. Here's 10 alternatives." 00:13:43.492 --> 00:13:46.556 To feel that all over North America, people are saying, 00:13:46.556 --> 00:13:49.840 "Actually calling the cops always ends up with someone getting killed, 00:13:49.840 --> 00:13:54.592 so what are we actually do instead? Because our lives are on the line all the time." 00:13:54.592 --> 00:13:59.327 I've felt complicated about transformative justice and I'm someone who's helped organize it. 00:13:59.327 --> 00:14:03.609 Revolution Starts at Home came out in 2011 and I was very optimistic and I thought, 00:14:03.609 --> 00:14:06.235 "Oh and you know we just had the US social forum and in 3 years we'll just abolish the police. 00:14:06.235 --> 00:14:07.753 It'll be great." 00:14:07.753 --> 00:14:11.111 And it turns out that this project of replacing the state with community based alternatives 00:14:11.111 --> 00:14:16.875 is thrilling, maddening, exhausting, you don't know what's going to happen around the corner. 00:14:16.875 --> 00:14:21.311 It's very hard to work ... it's the most triggering work you can do. 00:14:21.311 --> 00:14:29.481 To speak to especially people in our communities who we love who cause harm, 00:14:29.481 --> 00:14:31.539 and to be able to be in the place where we say, 00:14:31.539 --> 00:14:34.368 "I love you. I do not want you to be locked up for the next 40 years. 00:14:34.368 --> 00:14:37.523 What you did is absolutely not alright and we're not going to let you keep doing it." 00:14:37.523 --> 00:14:41.486 We have not been trained to do this and it takes developing a lot of emotional muscles to do it. 00:14:41.486 --> 00:14:44.197 I believe that we are doing it and it's also not a straight shot. 00:14:44.197 --> 00:14:46.070 Your life is so not the straight shot. 00:14:46.070 --> 00:14:47.366 [Leah laughs] 00:14:47.366 --> 00:14:51.702 You are performing. You are organizing. You have 2 books coming out this year. 00:14:51.702 --> 00:14:53.503 You've written a memoir already. 00:14:53.503 --> 00:14:58.021 A. How do you find the time? And B. Is it a little early for a memoir? 00:14:58.021 --> 00:15:04.872 No. [laughs] I know. I mean, my niece Luna Merbruja, formerly known as Askari González, 00:15:04.872 --> 00:15:08.583 who's an incredible 22 year-old transgender Latina organizer 00:15:08.583 --> 00:15:12.323 who co-organized the first trans-women of color national gathering ever last year. 00:15:12.323 --> 00:15:16.564 Her memoir Trauma Queen came out 2 years ago, she's 23. 00:15:16.564 --> 00:15:17.447 [Laura] She beat you to it. 00:15:17.447 --> 00:15:18.996 I think she did. She did. 00:15:18.996 --> 00:15:21.494 Dirty River took 13 years to write 00:15:21.494 --> 00:15:24.955 and it makes me think a lot about the stakes for feminist of color writing. 00:15:24.955 --> 00:15:29.745 Alexis, as you probably know, she was one of the first people to get access to June's archives. 00:15:29.745 --> 00:15:34.793 June wrote, what 27 books over her life time? 30? 00:15:34.793 --> 00:15:38.729 Alexis has spoken a lot about, "Yeah, I read the correspondence where June was like, 00:15:38.729 --> 00:15:40.451 'I couldn't pay my phone bill that month.' 00:15:40.451 --> 00:15:43.737 Or where she was fighting so hard with the publishers of poetry." 00:15:43.737 --> 00:15:47.954 The people who wanted her to delete the subtitle "a revolutionary blueprint." 00:15:47.954 --> 00:15:53.090 I feel immensely lucky to be a queer, disabled feminist of color writing, 00:15:53.090 --> 00:15:57.580 and it's not, you know, it's not ... no one dinged me on the head with a star. 00:15:57.580 --> 00:15:59.868 It's not automatic. It's taken a lot of collective labor. 00:15:59.868 --> 00:16:03.694 It doesn't happen if our presses and media movements don't keep going. 00:16:03.694 --> 00:16:09.088 And like a lot of queer working-class, feminists of color, disabled folks, fill in the blank, 00:16:09.088 --> 00:16:12.032 we've really led real lives. 00:16:12.032 --> 00:16:17.572 My memoir is about me running away from America when I was 21 to set a national boundary 00:16:17.572 --> 00:16:21.283 between me and my parents and their love and their abuse and their internalized racism, 00:16:21.283 --> 00:16:26.146 and walking straight into a movement moment in Toronto in the late 90's that was filled 00:16:26.146 --> 00:16:29.089 with queer feminists of color and Desh Pardesh 00:16:29.089 --> 00:16:33.375 which was a revolutionary cross class south Asian queer organizing center 00:16:33.375 --> 00:16:37.289 and the biggest global diasporic Sri Lankan community in the world. 00:16:37.289 --> 00:16:40.337 And, y'know, nothing like being in love 00:16:40.337 --> 00:16:43.891 with a queer brown crazy boy who you're reading Franz Fanon with 00:16:43.891 --> 00:16:46.173 who also hits you when he's triggered too; 00:16:46.173 --> 00:16:49.092 and that's where my feminism and my organizing comes from. 00:16:49.092 --> 00:16:50.698 And we need those road maps. 00:16:50.698 --> 00:16:52.707 I partly wrote that book because ... 00:16:52.707 --> 00:16:56.440 I mean I'm a book nerd and I have an incredible collection of small press literature 00:16:56.440 --> 00:16:59.107 that's currently in a storage unit in Berkley. 00:16:59.107 --> 00:17:02.750 The incest survivor and survivor narratives that are out there 00:17:02.750 --> 00:17:07.326 are often very white, very from second-wave feminism, very single-issue, 00:17:07.326 --> 00:17:11.881 and I wanted to document all of our true life adventure stories of actually how we survive, 00:17:11.881 --> 00:17:13.960 in a very complicated way. 00:17:13.960 --> 00:17:16.788 Now there's never a moment on this program where I don't use the word queer 00:17:16.788 --> 00:17:18.229 and someone doesn't email me and say, 00:17:18.229 --> 00:17:21.375 "How can you be insulting people. What, are you going to use the 'N' word next?" 00:17:21.375 --> 00:17:22.635 What does queer mean to you? 00:17:22.635 --> 00:17:28.204 Queer means everything that's not straight that's in the practice of moving always towards freedom. 00:17:28.204 --> 00:17:31.507 So, Leah, you agreed generously to read something to us. What are you going to read? 00:17:31.507 --> 00:17:34.155 I'm going to read a poem called Wrong is Not Yours, 00:17:34.155 --> 00:17:36.735 after June Jordan, and it's from my new book Body Map. 00:17:37.405 --> 00:17:42.022 "One day you are a 22 year-old with dread-locked half Desi hair 00:17:42.022 --> 00:17:44.962 you decided to lock when you did double dip mescaline on New Year's Eve 00:17:44.962 --> 00:17:48.605 after staring at pictures of sadhus from south India. 00:17:48.605 --> 00:17:53.347 Years before Carol's Daughter in Target or Palmer Coconut Hair Milk or Kinky Curly, 00:17:53.347 --> 00:17:58.369 and you have no idea what to do with all that curly, curly hair. 00:17:58.369 --> 00:18:00.602 And you decide you want to change your name 00:18:00.602 --> 00:18:02.562 from Albrecht to no more Albrecht. 00:18:02.562 --> 00:18:04.617 You want your great grandmothers'. 00:18:04.617 --> 00:18:09.456 You are a 22 year-old on a straight diet of nothing but Franz Fanon, Marlon Riggs, and Chrystos. 00:18:09.456 --> 00:18:13.082 You are a Sri Lankan daughter of the Dutch East India company. 00:18:13.082 --> 00:18:15.562 You want no more Albrecht. 00:18:15.562 --> 00:18:17.164 No more rape in your pelvis. 00:18:17.164 --> 00:18:18.763 No more, "Where'd you get that name?" 00:18:18.763 --> 00:18:20.726 No more, "Are you adopted?" No more. 00:18:20.726 --> 00:18:24.315 Even though your grandmothers whisper, "Keep a white name for the passport." 00:18:24.315 --> 00:18:28.558 In fact, keep as many passports as possible. 00:18:28.558 --> 00:18:30.832 You never know what boat you're going to have to get on. 00:18:30.832 --> 00:18:33.244 Who you'll have to bullshit in an immigration office. 00:18:33.244 --> 00:18:35.892 You'll never know where we'll have to run to. 00:18:35.892 --> 00:18:37.854 Make home on. Sip your tea. 00:18:37.854 --> 00:18:39.653 Cook your rice. Wait for death. 00:18:39.653 --> 00:18:42.809 Looking at an ocean almost like your own. 00:18:42.809 --> 00:18:46.457 But you, you want your great grandmothers' name who eats hot pepper. 00:18:46.457 --> 00:18:49.314 Who walked out of Galicia with 13 children. 00:18:49.314 --> 00:18:50.976 Your other great grandmother 00:18:50.976 --> 00:18:54.690 whose name is a foot-note in a Lankan history books' cross-reference index, 00:18:54.690 --> 00:18:58.503 you find researching your senior thesis on mixed race women in Sri Lanka. 00:18:58.503 --> 00:19:01.964 Teachers, union organizers, and sluts, every one of us. 00:19:01.964 --> 00:19:06.880 And you get something infinitely Google-able. And infinitely unpronounceable 00:19:06.880 --> 00:19:09.336 except for Ukrainians and Lankans and Dravidians. 00:19:09.336 --> 00:19:12.387 And even when Dennis Kucinich runs for president 00:19:12.387 --> 00:19:15.499 and puts and Mp3 file on his website saying how to say his name 00:19:15.499 --> 00:19:19.288 and you think it might be a good idea, too. 00:19:19.288 --> 00:19:21.229 Your name is not wrong. 00:19:21.229 --> 00:19:23.414 Wrong is not your name. 00:19:23.414 --> 00:19:27.041 It is your own. Your own. Your own. Your own. 00:19:27.041 --> 00:19:27.748 Your. 00:19:27.748 --> 00:19:29.429 Own." 00:19:29.829 --> 00:19:36.139 Listening to you read Leah, I hear references to home. You have the word tattooed on your chest. 00:19:36.139 --> 00:19:37.270 [Leah] I do. 00:19:37.270 --> 00:19:39.962 June Jordan also wrote a collection Moving Towards Home. 00:19:39.962 --> 00:19:41.272 What does home mean to you? 00:19:41.272 --> 00:19:43.212 Oh, you sucker punched me. 00:19:43.212 --> 00:19:47.549 I think that, for those of us who are diasporic, home is always a question. 00:19:47.549 --> 00:19:50.101 I think that part of the reason why I got "home" tattooed there 00:19:50.101 --> 00:19:54.056 is that this body is the only thing that I'll ever own, and it's on loan. 00:19:54.056 --> 00:19:57.355 And I think that for those of us who have been forced from our homeland 00:19:57.355 --> 00:20:02.128 through, y'know, the top 5 of colonialism: rape, genocide, war, imperialism, et cetera, 00:20:02.128 --> 00:20:07.503 we carry home in our body's memories. In our cells. In our bones. 00:20:07.503 --> 00:20:10.503 We make home wherever we are. 00:20:10.503 --> 00:20:12.221 Whether it's a prison cell. Whether it's Brooklyn. 00:20:12.221 --> 00:20:15.165 Whether it's wherever we go when we're gentrified out of Brooklyn. 00:20:15.165 --> 00:20:17.266 And we make it in the imagination. 00:20:17.266 --> 00:20:21.526 And we also get to envision where home's going to be that hasn't happened yet. 00:20:21.526 --> 00:20:23.687 It doesn't just have to be loss. 00:20:23.687 --> 00:20:26.219 It doesn't have to be the thing that we're imagining that we want to get back to. 00:20:26.219 --> 00:20:30.089 When Palestine is free, it's going to be a different place than it was in '48. 00:20:30.089 --> 00:20:31.828 Yeah. And we make it with each other. 00:20:31.828 --> 00:20:33.349 Right. Exactly. 00:20:33.349 --> 00:20:35.431 You can find out more about our guest Leah, 00:20:35.431 --> 00:20:40.865 and June Jordan, the Poetry For The People founder and professor at UC Berkley at our website. 00:20:42.571 --> 00:20:45.449 This is Airport Ode #1 from Body Map. 00:20:45.449 --> 00:20:47.511 "the truth is, I ask for the opt out. 00:20:47.511 --> 00:20:51.446 I ask for it every single time. 00:20:51.446 --> 00:20:56.260 I would rather be patted down by a 60-ish white working class woman who looks just like my mom 00:20:56.260 --> 00:20:59.216 who I will studiously ma'am and ask about her day, 00:20:59.216 --> 00:21:02.781 than to sit sweating waiting for it to happen. 00:21:02.781 --> 00:21:05.225 than to have beam of atoms shot through my body 00:21:05.225 --> 00:21:10.633 and still get barked aside, patted down, tarot card, cock and coconut oil wanded. 00:21:10.633 --> 00:21:13.367 Once on my way to a red-eye from a performance in a cocktail dress, 00:21:13.367 --> 00:21:15.214 you were young and brown and queer 00:21:15.214 --> 00:21:19.204 and you said damn, it'll be easy to search you, you're hardly wearing anything at all 00:21:19.204 --> 00:21:20.597 you complemented my mukkuthi 00:21:20.597 --> 00:21:23.352 and because I am a frequent queerartbrownlady flier, 00:21:23.352 --> 00:21:26.342 you remember me from a week or two ago 00:21:26.342 --> 00:21:28.284 this is where we are in 2012: 00:21:28.284 --> 00:21:31.861 I chat friendly and deliberate with the sister who searches me 00:21:31.861 --> 00:21:32.933 legs spread out in front of the other, 00:21:32.933 --> 00:21:36.492 the back of the hand on sensitive areas your zipper line, your bra 00:21:36.492 --> 00:21:41.197 casual spread eagle in public as everyone hops on shoes, puts laptops back 00:21:41.197 --> 00:21:48.579 Not too long ago, every airport line a panic attack, every airport four hours sweating armpit rank, 00:21:48.579 --> 00:21:53.164 every bus crossing the small room and barking guards who don't even pretend to be polite 00:21:53.164 --> 00:21:56.656 who go through all your things and take you to the glass toilet 00:21:56.656 --> 00:22:03.331 Every time they chirp or bark, "I'm going to pat your hair now" I go deep inside and all the way out 00:22:03.331 --> 00:22:06.752 once, my girlfriend picked me up at the airport with a little tupperware of dinner 00:22:06.752 --> 00:22:09.633 and fucked me in long term parking bent over the hood of her car 00:22:09.633 --> 00:22:14.752 I was too nervous to come but I loved how she wanted to feed me, 00:22:14.752 --> 00:22:16.663 how she wanted to fuck me back 00:22:16.663 --> 00:22:24.294 in the middle of all these concrete cameras wands scanners fingerprints nexus red blinking eye 00:22:24.294 --> 00:22:26.708 this place that hates us." 00:22:30.680 --> 00:22:32.879 That was a poem from Leah's new book Body Map, 00:22:32.879 --> 00:22:35.680 about which you can get more information and find out how to get a copy for yourself 00:22:35.680 --> 00:22:37.742 at our website: GRITtv.org 00:22:37.742 --> 00:22:39.853 It's hard to imagine an American poet 00:22:39.853 --> 00:22:43.779 more celebrated than 4 time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost. 00:22:43.779 --> 00:22:46.157 Whose most famous poem concludes 00:22:46.157 --> 00:22:50.990 "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by. 00:22:50.990 --> 00:22:53.123 And that has made all the difference." 00:22:53.123 --> 00:22:56.562 When the most celebrated poets' most well known lines praise difference, 00:22:56.562 --> 00:22:58.594 why is it that we're so scared of it? 00:22:58.594 --> 00:23:00.119 "Maybe we need more poets." 00:23:00.119 --> 00:23:02.955 That's what John F. Kennedy said just weeks before his death, 00:23:02.955 --> 00:23:06.632 at the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College. 00:23:06.632 --> 00:23:09.873 It was soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Cold War was raging on, 00:23:09.873 --> 00:23:14.107 10 million Americans needed jobs, "America needed strength", said Kennedy. 00:23:14.107 --> 00:23:16.442 "But strength takes many forms, 00:23:16.442 --> 00:23:20.095 and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant." 00:23:20.095 --> 00:23:21.348 His words. 00:23:21.348 --> 00:23:25.517 "The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the nations' greatness," 00:23:25.517 --> 00:23:27.095 the president continued, 00:23:27.095 --> 00:23:30.768 "but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable. 00:23:30.768 --> 00:23:34.379 For they determine whether we use power, or power uses us." 00:23:34.379 --> 00:23:38.042 Music and poetry and the arts push us, said Kennedy. 00:23:38.042 --> 00:23:44.874 "When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. 00:23:44.874 --> 00:23:48.369 When power narrows the area of man's concern, 00:23:48.369 --> 00:23:53.487 poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence." 00:23:53.487 --> 00:23:55.850 That was half a century ago. 00:23:55.850 --> 00:24:00.393 Today we have entire months dedicated to something we call diversity, 00:24:00.393 --> 00:24:03.219 including this one, June, LGBTQI Pride. 00:24:03.219 --> 00:24:06.895 Except mostly, we don't celebrate diversity. We celebrate sameness. 00:24:06.895 --> 00:24:11.860 We honor all the progress that we lesbian gay bisexual and trans Americans have made, 00:24:11.860 --> 00:24:15.338 becoming accepted as normal by straight America. 00:24:15.338 --> 00:24:18.677 Now I'm for everyone enjoying the same rights in these United States, 00:24:18.677 --> 00:24:22.467 I support that ongoing project, for everybody. 00:24:22.467 --> 00:24:25.016 But I would like to celebrate something else this June: 00:24:25.016 --> 00:24:27.424 Roads Less Traveled. 00:24:27.424 --> 00:24:34.024 Especially the roads less traveled that LGBT people have taken, and take daily. 00:24:34.024 --> 00:24:37.324 The same old roads will take us to the same old places. 00:24:37.324 --> 00:24:40.889 It's divergence, as the straight white poet once wrote, 00:24:40.889 --> 00:24:43.268 that makes all the difference. 00:24:43.268 --> 00:24:44.336 Tell me what you think. 00:24:44.336 --> 00:24:46.551 Laura@GRITtv.org 00:24:46.551 --> 00:24:48.165 And thanks for listening. 00:24:57.488 --> 00:24:59.660 Today on the Laura Flanders show, from the archives, 00:24:59.660 --> 00:25:02.975 an interview with author and law professor Dean Spade. 00:25:02.975 --> 00:25:06.874 [Spade] One of the really interesting, um, contests, inside trans communities, 00:25:06.874 --> 00:25:08.891 and more broadly in queer and trans politics, 00:25:08.891 --> 00:25:11.598 is whether or not hate crimes laws actually work. 00:25:11.598 --> 00:25:13.125 [Flanders] And an exclusive preview of 00:25:13.125 --> 00:25:15.325 Spade's new film about pinkwashing. 00:25:15.325 --> 00:25:18.201 [speaker] Israel is gay friendly when it serves its purposes... 00:25:22.984 --> 00:25:30.565 [speaker]... every year, chemical pesticides kill no fewer than 3 million farmers. 00:25:32.272 --> 00:25:41.210 Every day, workplace accidents kill no fewer than 10,000 workers. 00:25:41.210 --> 00:25:48.317 Every minute, poverty kills no fewer than 15 children. 00:25:49.380 --> 00:25:53.105 These crimes do not show up on the news, 00:25:53.105 --> 00:25:58.627 they are, like wars, normal acts of cannibalism.