Hey beautiful community,

In a couple days, I fly east to meet up with co -editors Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani to celebrate the birth of our beautiful book, The Revolution Starts At Home.

We worked on this thing for seven years. Our first conference call was in 2004.  And it's finally out! And we have tour dates! Read on for more information about what we've got coming up. More dates will be happening throughout the year- if you're interested in trying to have an event in your community, please emailrevolutionathome@gmail.com. You can also follow us on our tumblr, revolutionathome.tumblr.com.  If you can't make it, please buy the book direct from South End Press, through your local independent bookstore or through www.Powells.com

Tour Dates, Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities, edited by Ching-In Chen, Jai Dulani and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

About the book: 

"Was/is your abusive partner a high-profile activist? Does your abusive girlfriend's best friend staff the domestic violence hotline? Have you successfully kicked an abuser out of your group? Did your anti-police brutality group fear retaliation if you went to the cops about another organizer's assault? Have you found solutions where accountability didn't mean isolation for either of you? Was the 'healing circle' a bunch of bullshit? Is the local trans community so small that you don't want you or your partner to lose it?

"We wanted to hear about what worked and what didn't, what survivors and their supporters learned, what they wish folks had done, what they never want to have happen again. We wanted to hear about folks' experiences confronting abusers, both with cops and courts and with methods outside the criminal justice system."

— The Revolution Starts at Home collective

Long demanded and urgently needed, The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities finally breaks the dangerous silence surrounding the secret of intimate violence within social justice circles. This watershed collection of stories and strategies tackles the multiple forms of violence encountered right where we live, love, and work for social change — and delves into the nitty-gritty on how we might create safety from abuse without relying on the state. Drawing on over a decade of community accountability work, along with its many hard lessons and unanswered questions, The Revolution Starts at Home offers potentially life-saving alternatives for creating survivor safety while building a movement where no one is left behind.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: We want to acknowledge that these readings are taking place on stolen Indigenous land and that it is at Indigenous people’s expense that we occupy this land. Community accountability is work that Indigenous communities have been doing outside of and in resistance to systems of state power since before the arrival of colonial settlers and continue to do.

ACCESS IS LOVE: See below for accessible notes about each venue. We were 90% successful at getting wheelchair accessible spaces and are reserving seating for folks who need it due to pain, disability or illness. If you have access concerns or questions, please email revolutionathome@gmail.com.

 Fragrance free is hella love! So that beloved community members including some editors and contributors can be present without throwing up or having to leave, please come to this event fragrance free! This means no cologne, perfume, essential oil and also switching to unscented products. We know folks have a learning curve around this, but if you can ditch the scented (yup, even with 'natural' scents) detergent and fabric softener, it'll go a long way. Awesome scent-free list here: http://eastbaymeditation.org/accessibility/scentfree.html


Saturday, May 14, 2011
7:30 PM
Bluestockings Books

172 Allen St.
New York, NY

With co-editors Jai Dulani and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and contributors Gaurav Jashnani and RJ Maccani (Challenging Male Supremacy Project), Jessica Yee (Native Youth Sexual Health Network) and Timothy Colm (Philly's Pissed, Philly Survivor Support Collective.)

Access: Wheelchair accessible space, tiny tiny bathroom. We're reserving seats for folks who need to sit due to disability and chronic illness/pain.

Sunday, May 15, 2011
5 PM
Food For Thought Books
106 N. Pleasant St
Amherst, MA
http://www.foodforthoughtbooks.com

Co-editors Ching-In Chen and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha will be in attendance, read, sign books and answer questions.


Access: Fully wheelchair accessible, including bathrooms. We're reserving seats for folks who need to sit due to disability and chronic illness/pain.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011
7 PM
A Space
4722 Baltimore Avenue
Philadelphia, PA

Contributor Timothy Colm,  O.G. co-editor Sham-e-Ali  Nayeem  and co-editor Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha will read, do Q and A and sign books.
Co sponsored by Philly Stands Up! (www.phillystandsup.com)

Access: Wheelchair accessible to get in. Narrow bathroom. We're reserving seats for folks who need to sit due to disability and chronic illness/pain.

Thursday, May 26, 2011
doors 6:30, 7 PM reading
Toronto Women's Bookstore
73 Harbord St
Toronto, ON
416.922.8744
www.womensbookstore.com

Come to the launch party for this long-awaited, beloved book!

Featuring readings, snacks, discussion and book signings
DJ'd by Syrus Ware
Contributors Jessica Yee (Native Youth Sexual Health Network) and Juliet November, and co-editor Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha will attend and read.

Access: We're reserving seats for folks who need to sit due to disability and chronic illness/pain. TWB is wheelchair accessible to get in, but not the bathroom- this sucks, but every single space we looked at that was fully accessible was booked. We are prioritizing making space for chair users to be present comfortably and with room. Watch this space for ASL and Livestreaming info.

Thursday, June 2
Modern Times Bookstore
2919 24th Street
San Franscisco, CA
415 282 9246
7 PM

Massive gender justice co-launch with Andrea Ritchie (Queering (In) Justice) and Dean Spade. Reading with Gina deVries and more writers TBA

Access: Fully accessible including bathroom. We're reserving seats for folks who need to sit due to disability and chronic illness/pain.

Hey fam,

I hope this finds you in love, light and protection in wonderful and scary times. It's a dark and stormy night outside, and I'm typing at my kitchen table while some bread pudding bakes.

Maybe you've heard of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) - where families pay a monthly fee to a (usually small-scale and pesticide-free) farmer, who then provides them with fresh food for the duration of the growing season? I'm writing because, inspired by Healing Justice track organizer Autumn Brown, I'm interested in using this model to become a Community Supported Organizer to do work at the 2011 Allied Media Conference.   And I need your help.

This year, I have the privilege of serving as a coordinator for the Growing Safer Communities Track at the Allied Media Conference, which takes place in Detroit on June 23-26, 2011. This means that I will be working with a team of amazing organizers and advisors, including Esteban Kelly and Jenna Peters-Golden of Philly Stands Up, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Tamara Costa and Morgan Bassichis of CUAV, Mimi Kim of Creative Interventions, Isaac Ontiveros and Rachel Herzing of STOP,  RJ Maccani of the Challenging Male Supremacy collective and Johonna McCants of Visions to Peace. We're gonna create and facilitate a space at the conference where folks creating ways of dealing with violence and abuse without the state or prisons from all over North America will get together, share strategies, and learn from each other. Growing Safer Communities is going to be badass!

We're all really excited about the new growth that will blossom from this gathering. But it's going to be a lot of work. I know from working on both the Creating Safer Communities and Disability Justice tracks last year that it's probably probably about 10-20 hours of work a week for all of us.

The Allied Media Conference (otherwise known as the best conference in the universe) is a grassroots gathering of folks involved in participatory media to change the world- from building a free wireless network for Detroit to using Twitter to stop immigration raids to queer women and GQ of color skillshares.

The AMC's idea about fundraising is really different than a lot of conferences. Instead of paying, say, one big-name keynote a lot of money, nobody gets paid. Everybody figures out how to build on the strengths that are already within our communities to make sure the whole crew gets there- through pupusa selling, house party throwing or radical women of color spoken word CD making.

I do a lot of organizing work for no money. As a chronically ill person, I can't work a full time job. I work part time, gig based jobs and work from home a lot. I know many, many queer folks of color from low-income lives who are sick or disabled, who work multiple hustles and regularly struggle to make rent and eat. This has always been true for me, and over the past year I've lived on a tighter margin than I have in years. I've been a part of some amazing things, and there have been many months where I've been getting by due to the bulk food in my house's pantry and the fact that I pay super-cheap rent by virtue of living in a little shack in the back of a South Berkeley collective house, but I have $46 in the bank.

I will continue to work for free, but I am also trying to make my living more sustainable, as someone who has to build my life with the understanding that I get sick a minimum of 1-2 times a month.  This is something I- like most folks, and especially queer folks of color with chronic illness - have not been able to admit in the past, for fear that being honest about my sickness would make me less able to find work or be valued in my communities. Being a part of amazing disability justice community has made me want to be honest about it now.

For all these reasons, I'm reaching out to my community to ask you to become part of a new kind of CSA, where you donate money to make it possible for me to do this critical work. Read on for details of how this is going to work!

How do you donate and how much can you give?

You give as much as you want. Anything will help me be able to do this crucial work without getting sick(er) or getting in overdraft again. You can donate a small amount monthly ($5-10), or you can make a one-time donation of any size. I would love to pay myself at least a couple hundred bucks a month to do this work, and having it there would reduce my stress load (and subsequent illness/cognitive problems/ scary dizzy spells/fatigue/ mysterio flu that hangs around for weeks- which then makes it so I can't work, which makes the broke/sick cycle worse) immeasurably!

Are you brokeass? Send me five bucks (once, or once a month) and I'll love you forever.  Are you a Resource Generation queer? Send me some of your inherited wealth! Are you in between? Send what makes sense for you.

• You can send money to me online using Paypal by clicking the link at the top of this post or on this website's homepage.
  
  
• You can send a check to me directly. Ask me for my mailing address!
  

What will I do with the money?

My work as a track coordinator involves:

• working with groups doing community accountability/ transformative justice/no cops no prisons work against violence throughout North America. I'll be working to make sure that communities from all over the Americas (not just the coasts of the U.S.), low-income, disabled, queer/trans and queer/trans POC and Indigenous communities will be able to participate.
  
• help folks propose sessions that fit with the vision of the track and supporting them in their drafting and planning of sessions.
  
• reviewing and selecting session proposals for the conference.
  
• facilitating a beautiful leadership team. In no way am I the big boss- my job is to support everyone in making decisions and building the track.
  
• working with the Healing Justice track to co-create a healing space that has healers who understand violence and all the badass ways we're resilient and survive/transform it, and who for free, will support survivors of violence at the conference,
  
• building with my fam in the Disability Justice track to co-create badass sessions within Creating Collective Access 2 about how sick and disabled folks create safety in our lives
  
• building with the Kids Track to bring transformative justice principles to the childcare at the AMC and how kids and youth hang out and build at the conference.
  
• coordinating fundraising efforts across the country to get presenters and organizers to the conference, with a strong emphasis on making it possible for people of color, young people, disabled and chronically ill folks, elders, queer and trans people, and broke people to attend.
  

What do you get in return?

Everyone who makes a donation will receive monthly updates on the progress the Growing Safer Communities track fam is making in our work on the track. You will also be the recipient of a video blog in early July that will give you a taste of what happened at the Growing Safer Communities Track. I want this initiative to help build the strength of our networks- which includes sharing the knowledge we build at the AMC.

For people who make a donation of $50 or more, I'm still trying to figure out what I wanna give you. Cookies? Copy of The Revolution Starts At Home? Badass tarot card reading? Whatever it is, it's gonna be something!

What is the Allied Media Conference?

The Allied Media Conference, held every summer in Detroit, unites the worlds of media and communications, technology, education and social justice. From this unique intersection, some of the most innovative community organizing models emerge each year. The AMC cultivates strategies for a more just and creative world. We come together to share tools and tactics for transforming our communities through media-based organizing.

What is the Growing Safer Communities Track?

Putting Transformative Justice at center stage, this dynamic track is chock full of communication strategies, tools and dreams for anyone working to build safety from violence and abuse in their communities without using the police or criminal legal system! Building on last year's successful Creating Safer Communities track, this year we'll take conversations about transformative justice and community-based accountability to the next level. Our communities are using tools like zines, safetylabs, flip cam videos, and neighborhood safety mapping to support a safe, healing, and restorative world. We're tapping into into potlucks, posters, story circles, weekend action camps, elder/ youth inter-generational conversations, Twitter, textmobs, stencils and oh so much more to grow these communities. This track will bring together collectives from across North America and beyond to explore the brilliant ways we're kicking butt and building the systems we need to be safe and free.  

Who are you and why should you donate?

You're somebody whose work and self I love and respect and need to exist in the world. You're a QTPOC artist, badass sick or disabled queer, working-class genius or poverty scholar, journalist or writer, teacher or healer, friend, lover, elder, or youth. You're someone who is helping build or cares a lot about building ways of dealing with violence that don't use the state- who knows we need places to come together, share strategies, talk about the places where we're stuck and do the work we need to transform this world to one that doesn't kill us. You're someone who believes in my work, and who believes in supporting disabled and sick people's ability to work - in a way that our society does not. You know my bottomlining Taurus self will do a great job! And you want my sick, queer femme of color, working-class self to do this work without - as I've done in the past - working 18 hour days until my body falls apart.

Thank you for reading and thank you for your presence in the world. I'm glad to be on this journey with you.

Leah Lakshmi

solar flashlight

some batteries for backup flashlight

matches/lighter

small  "rocket" camp stove

power bars

jerky

oatmeal

dried beans, masoor dhal

salt

potatoes

small cooking pot

chocolate

dried fruit and almonds

seaweed

iodine (wound cleaning and radioactive iodine prevention if used topically)

papers- birth certificate, passports

water (one gallon, in plastic)

a couple of those meal replacement powder things

emergen-c

ibuprofin

vicodin

broad spectrum antibiotic

hydrogen peroxide

bandaids and ace bandage

echincaea

siberian ginseng

nettle/mullein/chickweed

baby wipes( for sanitation)

small bottle bleach (water sterilizer)

a couple of n-95 masks (they're 2.50 at the hardware store and have a small respirator in them)
soap (little dr. broners)
knife
rope and duct tape
blanket
toothpaste, toothbrush, floss, cloves to chew for toothache
coconut oil for hair and skin
sunblock

handkerchief

sturdy shoes

change of clothes- jeans, hoodie, socks, underwear, bra

some tampons and menstrual pads

cash

arnica cream

photos of ancestors nearby

phone numbers and addresses

map of cali

Dear loved ones,

I hope this email finds you doing totally kickass. 2011 is already exponentially better than 2010 for me.  I don't usually send out these giant emails, but I'm writing with a whole bunch of really good news. Here it is:

1. I've signed the contract, and my second book of poetry, Love Cake, will be published by TSAR Publications this fall. I'm super excited about bringing these poems I've been working on and performing for the last five years into the world. TSAR emerged from Toronto South Asian Review and is an independent press committed to publishing diasporic South Asian writers. 

I'm planning on touring the book for fall 2011- please get in touch if you're interested in bringing me out, and watch this space for more updates. I could also hella use your help promoting this- so, if you can, write a review, interview me, blog about it, get your course or book club or whatnot to read it. If you're a writer, poet or performer and you want to organize an event together, let me know.

2. April 8-10, 2011

Sins Invalid: An Unshamed Claim to Beauty in the Face of Invisibility

Z Space (formerly Theater Artaud)
San Francisco, CA

Join us in celebrating the
5TH ANNUAL SINS INVALID PERFORMANCE

Sins Invalid celebrates the power of embodiment & sexuality, stripping taboos off sexuality and disability to offer a vision of beauty that includes all bodies and communities. 

Featuring the world premier of work by artists:

Aurora Levins Morales
Antoine Hunter
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Ellery Russian
Nomy Lamm
Alex Cafarelli
Juba Kalamka
Leroy F. Moore Jr.
Patty Berne
Todd Herman
seeley quest
Maria Palacios
Ralph Dickinson
Ryon Gesink


This venue is wheelchair accessible. Please note that the Saturday, April 9th, evening performance will be ASL interpreted by Stage Hands and audio described.

In solidarity with loved ones and community members who are chemically injured and would like to attend the show, please refrain from using perfume, cologne and other scented products. Scent-free seating will be available for all three days.

 From April 8-10, I'll be premiering a new suite of performances, Crip Sex Moments, as part of Sins Invalid 2011. I've been developing this performance suite for the past year, in collaboration with Ellery Russian, and am very excited to share them with my community. Crip Sex Moments tells stories about, well, crip sex moments- about the searingly hot, the complicated, the hard and the fucking awesome parts of having sex in our sick and disabled bodies. 

It's hard for me to sum up how much Sins Invalid means to me. Sins is the only performance collective in the U.S. lead by queer people of color with disabilities that does performance about sick and disabled folks and sex. This year, we are diving deep into eugenics, queer of color disabled freedom fighters, environmental racism, the health care system, beautiful perverse queer sex as a means of survival, and so much more. Seeing Sins three years ago changed my life, my understanding of what was strong, complicated and beautiful about my chronically ill body and others disabled and sick uncontrollable bodies, and made me cry through the entire show. Sins is a cultural space that's kicked off so much disability justice organizing - from Creating Collective Access at the 2010 Allied Media Conference to the Azolla Story and much more.

This past year, due to some Sins' members serious health concerns, we made a totally brave and kick-ass decision to postpone our 2010 show from its regularly scheduled time of October 2010. This was disability justice in action- instead of sucking it up and pretending everything was fine while breaking our bodies, we actually stopped the show and made it work for us. 

This is awesome. However, we want to make sure folks still know the show is happening! What that means is: buy your tickets in advance here if you can- advance tickets help us fund our huge, high quality, beautiful show: If you're broke, please know that no one will ever be turned away from a Sins show for lack of ability to pay. Please bring your fam, spread the word, put out postcards where you work and hang out, and blog and post about the show. You do not want to miss this indescribable, world changing performance.

3. And finally, at long last: The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities,  the book I have been working on for the past six years with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, is coming out on South End Press in a couple months! This book has been a beautiful marathon of work- six years of conference calls, and much evolution from when we thought we were just going to do a little zine. (And for the zine, go here:  http://incite-national.org/index.php?s=114)  With over 250 pages of testimony from individuals and collectives working to transform violence and abuse without using the cops or the courts, it's an amazing resource for and testimony about the world we're building. You can pre-order the book at the link on the book above, and again, please hit us up at revathome@gmail.com if you want to bring us to your university, bookstore or community.

4. Last thing: I'm the track coordinator for the Growing Safer Communities track of the 2011 Allied Media Conference. The AMC is the best conference in the world- a grassroots queer feminist of color lovefest that looks a lot like the new world we're building. This year we have 19 fabulous tracks, including Disability Justice: Creating Wholeness, Media in our Bodies: Dance and Performance, Yalla! Media Strategies to End Israeli Apartheid and Science Fictions: Imagining What's Possible, and so much more. See everything here: http://alliedmedia.org/amc2011/program/amc2011-tracks. You have til March 15 to propose a session; please think about bringing some of your brilliance to Detroit, where there is so much,

5. My mind is on: freedom in Africa and Southwest Asia and all our homelands, no gang injunction in Oakland (go to http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=190415580990465  for the week of actions against the proposed injunction), and what we're building for and with each other.

love to all of you,
Leah Lakshmi

1. another fibromyalgic queer coloredgirl morning
   
   

Dear Gloria,



Dawn. Sun rise floats through the window slats of my shack, the little EI-safe house in the back of the queer collective house I inhabit. Some days, I will rise now. Some days I will hit the snooze alarm for three hours. I will turn over and over in my big bed. I will shift. I will get up oh, so slowly. How damp is it out, how bad is my pain, how shaky is my balance and my cognitive ability today?


Yet another fibro morning. Dawn creeps past my eyelids and I shove her away. Not yet! My fatigue- the deep fatigue of chronic illness, untouched by days and weeks of good sleep, not the fatigue of a night staying up too late- has not been touched today. I turn over and over. I drift back down to sleep. My life is bookended by library books, vibrator, and baths. Something more than simple self care, and something other than a life of a lazy, privileged girl. It is a crip life, a chronically ill life. It is a life of dreamtime.


I am a chronically ill, disabled writer. I am a queer woman of color writer. I have a shelf full of anthologies my words are in. I have been able to pursue the path of red and black ink.

I am a queer woman of color writer. I am a chronically ill woman.

My entire adult life has been marked by illness. Its hard for me to tell when the pain, butterfly balance, fatigue and immune transparency I name as fibromyalgia really started. A childhood filled with abuse, terror and a need to sleep as much as possible bleeds into a chronically tired yet overacheiving college years, bleeds into the early 20s when I walked back into my incest memories, got sick and spent a lot of time on my futon, struggling with fatigue, pain and shakiness.


Fibromyalgia is a name I choose for the constellation of repeating cycles of fatigue, muscle pain that does not have an organic source, immune system meltdowns, shakiness, balance problems and cognitive delay that hit me when I am stressed or doused with chemicals. Yoga, a regular bedtime, flextime, herbs, quitting smoking, kale and protein and quinoa all helped but there is no cure for this body. This is my body. This syndrome is new/old and ongoing, unfolding. It changes as we find new ways to think about/ see trauma, our bodies, embodiment, environmental racism, and sickness.

Chronic illness sucks. But, oh, there is the secret bliss of bed! Chronic illness may not have made me a writer, but it illuminates my writing life. I can't work a 9-5 - the times I tried left me winded in bed after three days- but bed time means lots of dreamtime. Sometimes it's low-quality dreamtime- dreamtime where I am zonked on a half a Soma, watching Caprica on Sidereel, using my vibrator and soaking in hot baths with laying on a big ice pack to manage my pain. But whether it is high or low quality dreamtime, being a sick girl means I have more dreamtime than most 9-5ers or movement organizers could ever dream of!

It is so difficult to write both of what sucks about disability- the pain, the oppression, the impairment- and the joy of this body at the time. The joy of this is body comes from crip community and interdependence, but most of all, of the hard beauty of this life, built around all the time I must spend resting. The bed is the nepantla place of opening.

Capitalism says that disabled, tired bodies that spend too much time in bed are useless. Anyone who cannot labor to create wealth for owners is useless to capitalism. That's why social programs are cut, why Hitler referred to us as “useless eaters”- we often are not able to be fast, assembly line workers who produce wealth for someone else.    Gloria, capitalism said our bodies were useless. We snuck through the hole in our bed to the sky to write about it.

I joke that my bed, heaped with cushions, is my office, my world headquarters. I lie it in thinking of all my other crip poet friends who spend most of their days in bed too. Draped in pillows, red and plum sheets, surrounded by good art to look at, curtained by plum sari fabric. this is my place of power, the fulcrum, place everything emerges from.


Throughout her creative life, Gloria wrote about her creative time as dream time, crazy time. She wrote about the spiritual process of going in and down, shedding skin as she wrote. 


Gloria, we meet in bed. You never said you were disabled, that I can find, every inch of evidence you left resisted that label. But whatever you felt about that world, this is where you dreamed and lived too. This place of bodily difference, a tired body that comes in pain and suffering, that allows us to work part time weird jobs, to rest and to fly.

1938: Gloria is born in Hargill, Texas. At three months, her mother sees tiny pink dots of menstrual blood on her diaper and freaks the fuck out. The doctor says “Don't worry, she's a throwback to the eskimo- eskimo girls get their periods early.” Is she intersex? Would she call herself that now? She calls herself jota, mita y mita, half and half, the way lesbians are called in South Texas. Her breasts develop at 8, there is a secret, a folded rag pinned to her underwear, in grade school, here breasts bound down tight with bandages by her mother. “Keep your legs shut, Prieta.” In her twenties and thirties, fibroids and 104 degree fevers rock her body monthly. In her 40s, she develops diabetes. During the week of May 15, 2004, Gloria Evangalista Anzaldua transitions to the ancestors/died of complications related to diabetes. She is 61.

A quote from Borderlands: “It is dark and damp and has been raining all day. i love days like this. as i lie in bed i am able to dive inward. perhaps today i will write from the deep core.” 

speaking in tongues: on being a third world woman writer, 169


She writes while other people sleep.. she writes of getting up, sitting down, looking for, and always, the writing.” the path of red and black ink."

Gloria, the written record I have access to is often silent about how sick you were, how much those knife like fibroid pains, those energy drops from diabetes that stole your life early, affected your life. But on the record is how you stole dreamtime. Stole time to write and dream. You stayed up all night, slept all day. You joked about how you would do anything, anything to avoid the writing- clean house, make nopalitos, take a bath, burn candles. But you knew the writing was always there, waiting, your constant lover and companion. The toad inside that makes poems opens to you. You chose writing over lovers, over others. You wrote of being a bridge, drawbridge, sandbar or island  as a queer woman of color- a bridge connecting disparate communities, an island when the burnout and bullshit of that position made you need to take a break- identifying finally as a sandbar, a natural formation that could be connected or isolated as the tides turned.

In your writing of this concept, I see echoes of disability. Disabled bodies are natural. We are also unpredictable, as nature is. We do not submit well to clock time or capitalist ablist white supremacy under its present form. Queer people of color who are bridges reach a moment where we say, enough, and retreat. My queer woman of color chronically ill body has its own schedule. Like the tides of our bodies- our sick, in pain, in less pain bodies that resist a boxed-in life that an ablist world demands.


Queer people of color never say we are disabled if we have any choice about it. We come from famillies who believe in being tough, in sucking it up. We can't afford to take days off work. We do not want any more identities than we already have to wrestle with. Our bodies already seen as tough, monster, angry, seductive, incompetent- how can we admit weakness, vulnerability, interdependence and we still keep our jobs, our perch on the “thin edge of barbwire” we live on? Why would we join crips  in the mainstream disability rights movement dominated by white people?  What would we get out of it?


The question I ask is: How do we claim this body broken beautiful as not a liability but a gift? To know that interdependence is what has saved us time and time again- as queers and trans people, people of color, women, broke folks. how my lovers and friends help each other survive- passing $20 back and forth across the movement, driving me to groceries when I can't make it down the stairs.  How do we say that my hurting body in bed sucks and is also a beautiful ability to write for hours because I can't hold down a 9-5 even if I wanted to?


And part of the beauty is our access dream time. time for the stories to grow. time that is not logical, rational, clock time, punch the clock time. At 35, I am surrounded by people who say, how do you have time to write those poems and stories, co-create those projects? how are you so productive? I am so productive because when my gut tells me to take a day off, i do. I lie. say i have a family emergency. Sometimes, often, my life is full of the work of survival and I dream. and I do what I am supposed to do. When I was a kid I knew that I was supposed to grow up and work a 9-5 job but i didn't ever understand quite how it would happen. I follow the words out my belly. I give in to the bed, to the dreams, to the long long sleeps and times curled up. the words curl close to me because of it. How can i say that being chronically ill is a gift? That maybe i would not have become a writer if i had not been too sick and tired to work? That I had to figure something else out? That my illness opens the door to write be in the nepantla place. takes me to the path of red and blank ink. to where the stories go.


Everything I write here would be useless if I didn't talk about how we struggle to live. This story is not just the secret bliss of bed- it is about the worry of how to survive economically while we do so. Every kind of crip knows this struggle. Because while we may enjoy the secret bliss of bed, we also all live in a panic about how we are going to get cash from capitalism to feed and clothe ourselves. I grew up straddling the line of upper working class/lower middle class. When I got first got very sick, I lived poor and struggling for a big chunk of years- isolated in abusive relationship, off the books in another country. Fifteen to twenty bucks a week food budget, walking everywhere when I was able to walk, paying the bus with the penny jar, packing the Good Food Box once a month for a free meal and a free box of veggies. Handing out flyers on the street for some cash, resting after. With a work visa came the four hour shifts my body could handle, doing phone canvassing and fundraising, cleaning houses at the eco-friendly cleaning place. Then came the better paid, twelve  to fifteen hour a week feminist crisis counseling job. I did occasional workshop gigs, began to apply for and get arts grants.  My college degree, my ability to pass as nondisabled and ability to hustle  all helped me gradually come out of that hole, figuring out some ways to live kind of okay on part time and flexible work.  My experience of that bliss is specific to a disabled body that struggles with impairment and also has some ability to write, think, walk, talk, be in the world. and most of all, to possess energy. My energy level came back, beating butterfly wings, from the weeks and months and years of needing to rest for a day after walking up a flight of stairs. That is the currency

The relatively more stable Canadian arts grant and OHIP infrastructure gave me precious time to rest and heal. It was possible to get grant money, a chunk, to live off of- easily, your friends had all done it, and they weren't super privileged folks. You could have that couple thousand in the bank and work small gigs that allowed for the week or two of flares. Moving back to the States was one of the scariest things I've done. It meant giving up free nurse practitioner and emergency room visits and the existence of any kind of arts and health infrastructure. When folks ask me why I moved to Canada at 22, it is easier for me to talk about needing to put a national border between myself and my family, about the Sri Lankan and radical South Asian community, about other mixed kids, than to talk about how I looked at Toronto, saw its health care and grants, jobs that were over $5  or $8 an hour as people I knew were making in new york in the mid 90s, its backyard gardens, and knew my sick self would be able to survive there.


In recent years, depending on where I live and the state of the economy, I've stitched together arts grants, gig money, money from writing articles, teaching gigs, part-time badly paid bookstore work, good college gig money, contract work with nonprofits during good times.  I teach pussy school- teaching med students how to give pelvic and breast exams, part time occasional work that is high paid for short hours, when it comes. During tight times, I've read tarot cards and shrunk my budget back to the minimal one I can survive on. I've stressed out. All of us struggle to find some way to survive- whether it's SSI or disability, depending on partners or family we may or may not have the greatest relationships with, working off the books or in street economies, trying to find nonprofit, arts or other workplaces that will get it, getting state funding for our PCAs.  Always I have worried about flying with no safety net but what community and privilege and access can cobble together for me. Sometimes I have worried and realized that non-crip QTPOC friends don't get it- they see the part time gigs as insane luxury, my sleepy body as lazy and spoiled. The realities of capitalism are the bones under the bed.

 
Says Ana Louise Keating, “Although Anzaldúa had been living with diabetes for over a decade, many of her readers were unaware of the disease's ongoing, debilitating effects on her life. Even those of us who knew her well were shocked by her sudden death. As Kit Quan, one of Anzaldúa's oldest friends and writing comadres (in keeping with Anzaldúa's practice, I do not italicize the Spanish words in this essay) explains, "Gloria always told me that she was going to stick around for 20 more years. She struggled with diabetes and all its complications daily... but she was so well read on the disease... and worked so hard at managing her blood sugars that I believed we still had more time."

What did her friends see and not see?

If I say all this story, maybe no one will be surprised at my death. Maybe someone will know when I get really sick. Maybe I will have enough time. Maybe my sick, dreaming, flying, writing body will have enough people around it who recognize that place for its strength and weakness, too.

But when I roll over onto my pink t-shirt fabric sheets on another disabled woman of color artist day, feeling the bliss of the cotton on my sore body, when I sleep late and stay up late typing, I feel your body brushing me. We brush sick bodies that hurt and also fly. Our sickness a road out from the 9-5, trading labor for cash life. Our bodies can't work like that so they dream instead. Steal time for dreams, poetry, world changing, on that thin edge of barb wire. We dream a away through the teeth of the dragon of  whitecapitalistpatriarchal amerika. Turn over, write another line. Poems flying in our teeth.




“"Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar. Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks."”- Gloria Anzaldua.

Rest in power, love. Thank you.

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.

-for critical resistance, and after amir rabiyah and li young lee



in the city of my desire
we own this house. or we don't own it,
but I've lived here for forty years now.
we made additions. fixed the hole in the roof. had time, stories and bread. 
I lived to be an old woman, still hot
nobody owns anything
but I had time to put down roots
and just live here.
just
live:
We 
just 
live here.
There is no panic attack every two weeks:
love shot!/ millions of dollars going to something terrible!/a bad sentence/ 
 a youtube video of streets bleeding/facebook fight over tactics 
all now unsurprising.
no one is evicted
by gun or signature on paper 
no one is taken away from us
by someone who despises us 
In the city of my imagination,
I get to be surprised
I get to not know
how the story ends

that loud        that terrifying          that held on to hustled

that deep bell peeping and sounding your earth's shake

a magnet four times stronger than the earth's core

that's me sitting in a straight-backed chair in business casual

saying yes, I'm his sister             yes, I'll stay in the room during the procedure

yelling at the tube they've stuck you in

I know you can't hear me but I love you

and I'm yelling it whether or not you can hear me

he says you didn't seem like yourself that day

i say this is my self

crunching my forehead to stay in the palace of words

lamaaze breathing through pain spikes

asking for a vicodin with a shaking hand

check out this super cute and amazing video about Cuav's Safetyfest 2010. watching it made me feel so blessed to be in this fierce, QTPOC centered community that is actively working to figure out how to transform violence in our lives. and safteyfest 2011 is coming... get involved and look out for it! there's more here: http://www.cuav.org/


http://vimeo.com/13948776