I woke up Saturday morning and spent an hour or two in front of the space heater, in my pajamas, working on a cup of coffee and trying to thaw out from the Bay Area cold snap. Sleeping in the small cedar cabin where I reside has been a little more of a challenge since the temperature's been hovering in the 30s over the last week. I was pretty floored to receive an email from Jess Hoffman, one of the editors of http://www.makeshiftmag.com/ , that the sections from my memoir in progress, Dirty River, had been nominated for a Pushcart Prize! http://www.pushcartprize.com/index.html
The Pushcart Prize is, to quote from their website:
"The Pushcart Prize - Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America. Hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in the pages of our annual collections.Writers who were first noticed here include: Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien, Jayne Anne Phillips, Charles Baxter, Andre Dubus, Susan Minot, Mona Simpson, John Irving, Rick Moody, and many more. Each year most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series."
Pretty exciting. Pretty much not what I was expecting to read when I was home in my PJs.
Please do check out the current issue of Make/Shift, because it's full of incredible writing, especially about radical mothering and healing justice. And consider subscribing- it's one of the most important and only widely-distrubuted feminist magazines today.
As a teaser, here's the first of the two excerpts that were nominated- excerpted from my memoir in progress, Dirty River. Enjoy.
The Punk-Kid-of-Color Clusterfuck
An Excerpt from the Memoir-In-Progress Dirty River
By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
There was always one or two or three kids of color in any given scene, somewhere. Word would spread about the existence of certain clusters. Ning Ning, she’s Vietnamese, she’s in Anti-Racist Action (ARA)in Toronto. Him, I wonder about him, he’s mixed, yeah. There’s that one Black punk girl in ___________. And those cities would become magnets. Places you said, Yeah I want to go to ___________, there’s hella kids of color there. Even though hella kids of color would be, like, three people. Like Agit, Shenaaz, and D. in Toronto; the mythical Pinay Latina mixed-kid happy rainbow alliance we heard tell was in the Bay; and all the alienated kids of color in Olympia who’d gone to Evergreen State because riot grrrl and punk were political there and people talked about feelings and abuse and shit, but who were now stuck there freaking the fuck out, surrounded by white kids crying in the Unlearning Racism: Open to All workshop amid the trees and banana slugs. We loved the punk rock and hated it and bitched constantly in our rooms about it and couldn’t figure out how to go elsewhere, or where that elsewhere was. I’d had so many angst-ridden conversations in dorm rooms and crappy cheap bedrooms of messy apartments with The One Brown Kid, both of us shivering in our insecurity.
Except that we were figuring it out, finally. D. started going to the Coalition Against Racist Police Violence meetings, where the whole thing was actually led by people of color, not like ARA, which had had its moment of being made up mostly of guys D. knew from selling weed around Keningston Market but had inevitably been taken over by asinine white fourteen-year-old vegan children from the suburbs. Shenaaz started tentatively going to Forum of Indian Leftists meetings where everyone was forty, or forty years older than her, anyways. But they were all old-school desi communists who looked like our aunties but were flaming radicals who’d tried to make a revolution in Kerala, all tenderly happy to see there was a new generation.
At Bulldozer we had a secret meeting, me and Shenaaz and Amina and D., and decided that in order to be in the collective you had to be a person of color, poor, a psych survivor, or First Nations. We decided to carry out this directive by ceasing to call anyone who didn’t have those identities to let them know when the meetings were. We hit a few snags, as I found out years later. Lois, who was the most fucking annoying white girl in the scene (she was an aggressive hugger; she’d run up to you and try and throw her arms around you no matter what if you were a kid of color—you could be in the middle of a police riot outside the U.S. consulate and it wouldn’t matter, she’d still try and hug you. One time she tried to hug me when we were waiting for the bus to pull up outside the PIRG office to take us all to Philly for a Millions for Mumia protest, and my arms just automatically went into these karate blocks to get hers from wrapping around me; I didn’t mean them to, I just saw them floating up into the hexagonal blocks I’d learned at Brooklyn Women’s Martial Arts and her face looking confused.)—anyways, it turned out that she’d both grown up poor and been institutionalized as a kid and was really motherfucking pissed off at the fact that we weren’t calling her for the meetings anymore. We just didn’t know.
Despite the failures, we were a little cipher in the punk scene, at the Manning Street house, and we were leaving it. Increasingly, it felt like staying in punk, getting into a huge fight at Who’s Emma Books over racism, telling someone on the riot-grrrl listserv to stop saying that Latino men were more sexist, wasn’t just a pain in the ass, it was a waste of time. Why spend all that energy yelling at idiots? Why not just leave? There were all these people of color. Out there. Somewhere. We were the world majority, right? Out there. Not in tiny groups of two or three in the anarchist group, the activist meeting. Doing their own thing somewhere else.
We were getting ready to leave. Leave punk. Leave anarchism. Go Back Home, wherever that was. But man, in that little moment before we left, having Shenaaz, D., and Ajit in that house felt like enough. Just them being there. Sure, Ajit had kind of an anger-management problem and Shenaaz burst out crying when she was trying to type up the notes from the meeting and didn’t really like other girls because they were weak, but I’d take it. It just felt like enough to be in the house with them for a minute. Ajit would make beet curry and him and D. would eat it and then go to the cop shop in January and piss “FUCK THE POLICE” in the snow in red piss so it looked like it was spelled out in blood. We'd go to Pho Hung and order pho, all of us splitting a large and piling on the free mint and chilis and bean sprouts. We would walk down the streets of Kensington, looking for mangos in the garbage from the fruit stands with still-usable patches, eating $2.99 breakfasts at The Greeks’ diner, stamping off snow. And somehow, for once, I wasn’t afraid.
The Pushcart Prize is, to quote from their website:
"The Pushcart Prize - Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America. Hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in the pages of our annual collections.Writers who were first noticed here include: Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien, Jayne Anne Phillips, Charles Baxter, Andre Dubus, Susan Minot, Mona Simpson, John Irving, Rick Moody, and many more. Each year most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series."
Pretty exciting. Pretty much not what I was expecting to read when I was home in my PJs.
Please do check out the current issue of Make/Shift, because it's full of incredible writing, especially about radical mothering and healing justice. And consider subscribing- it's one of the most important and only widely-distrubuted feminist magazines today.
As a teaser, here's the first of the two excerpts that were nominated- excerpted from my memoir in progress, Dirty River. Enjoy.
The Punk-Kid-of-Color Clusterfuck
An Excerpt from the Memoir-In-Progress Dirty River
By Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
There was always one or two or three kids of color in any given scene, somewhere. Word would spread about the existence of certain clusters. Ning Ning, she’s Vietnamese, she’s in Anti-Racist Action (ARA)in Toronto. Him, I wonder about him, he’s mixed, yeah. There’s that one Black punk girl in ___________. And those cities would become magnets. Places you said, Yeah I want to go to ___________, there’s hella kids of color there. Even though hella kids of color would be, like, three people. Like Agit, Shenaaz, and D. in Toronto; the mythical Pinay Latina mixed-kid happy rainbow alliance we heard tell was in the Bay; and all the alienated kids of color in Olympia who’d gone to Evergreen State because riot grrrl and punk were political there and people talked about feelings and abuse and shit, but who were now stuck there freaking the fuck out, surrounded by white kids crying in the Unlearning Racism: Open to All workshop amid the trees and banana slugs. We loved the punk rock and hated it and bitched constantly in our rooms about it and couldn’t figure out how to go elsewhere, or where that elsewhere was. I’d had so many angst-ridden conversations in dorm rooms and crappy cheap bedrooms of messy apartments with The One Brown Kid, both of us shivering in our insecurity.
Except that we were figuring it out, finally. D. started going to the Coalition Against Racist Police Violence meetings, where the whole thing was actually led by people of color, not like ARA, which had had its moment of being made up mostly of guys D. knew from selling weed around Keningston Market but had inevitably been taken over by asinine white fourteen-year-old vegan children from the suburbs. Shenaaz started tentatively going to Forum of Indian Leftists meetings where everyone was forty, or forty years older than her, anyways. But they were all old-school desi communists who looked like our aunties but were flaming radicals who’d tried to make a revolution in Kerala, all tenderly happy to see there was a new generation.
At Bulldozer we had a secret meeting, me and Shenaaz and Amina and D., and decided that in order to be in the collective you had to be a person of color, poor, a psych survivor, or First Nations. We decided to carry out this directive by ceasing to call anyone who didn’t have those identities to let them know when the meetings were. We hit a few snags, as I found out years later. Lois, who was the most fucking annoying white girl in the scene (she was an aggressive hugger; she’d run up to you and try and throw her arms around you no matter what if you were a kid of color—you could be in the middle of a police riot outside the U.S. consulate and it wouldn’t matter, she’d still try and hug you. One time she tried to hug me when we were waiting for the bus to pull up outside the PIRG office to take us all to Philly for a Millions for Mumia protest, and my arms just automatically went into these karate blocks to get hers from wrapping around me; I didn’t mean them to, I just saw them floating up into the hexagonal blocks I’d learned at Brooklyn Women’s Martial Arts and her face looking confused.)—anyways, it turned out that she’d both grown up poor and been institutionalized as a kid and was really motherfucking pissed off at the fact that we weren’t calling her for the meetings anymore. We just didn’t know.
Despite the failures, we were a little cipher in the punk scene, at the Manning Street house, and we were leaving it. Increasingly, it felt like staying in punk, getting into a huge fight at Who’s Emma Books over racism, telling someone on the riot-grrrl listserv to stop saying that Latino men were more sexist, wasn’t just a pain in the ass, it was a waste of time. Why spend all that energy yelling at idiots? Why not just leave? There were all these people of color. Out there. Somewhere. We were the world majority, right? Out there. Not in tiny groups of two or three in the anarchist group, the activist meeting. Doing their own thing somewhere else.
We were getting ready to leave. Leave punk. Leave anarchism. Go Back Home, wherever that was. But man, in that little moment before we left, having Shenaaz, D., and Ajit in that house felt like enough. Just them being there. Sure, Ajit had kind of an anger-management problem and Shenaaz burst out crying when she was trying to type up the notes from the meeting and didn’t really like other girls because they were weak, but I’d take it. It just felt like enough to be in the house with them for a minute. Ajit would make beet curry and him and D. would eat it and then go to the cop shop in January and piss “FUCK THE POLICE” in the snow in red piss so it looked like it was spelled out in blood. We'd go to Pho Hung and order pho, all of us splitting a large and piling on the free mint and chilis and bean sprouts. We would walk down the streets of Kensington, looking for mangos in the garbage from the fruit stands with still-usable patches, eating $2.99 breakfasts at The Greeks’ diner, stamping off snow. And somehow, for once, I wasn’t afraid.
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