#leah lakshmi

[veluigi]

Quoted in The Future is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi

[paranoid-0-android]

Dear Them

I wish you knew

how much I wish you knew.

I'll have your love and 'support', whatever that means to you, always

but never your understanding

Never your accountability

Never your thinking twice before suggesting yet again that I just move 400 miles back home and leave college because it seems like

It's too much for me

Or because I need professional help and don't have insurance here but maybe could get some if I just left this place.

I wish you knew I came home and threw my cane at the wall before collapsing to sob on the floor.

That before then I sobbed in the library

In the car

In the parking lot to Macy's in the pouring hail as I smoked my 3rd cigarette that day and guzzled sweet tea between sniffling the dripping snot back into my nose.

(I wish you knew how to be more like my cat. She gets it. )

I wish you knew how deep your words cut with every subtle victim blame

Every guilt trip

Every emotional abuse tactic you have no idea that exists.

I wish you knew how tired i am how exhausting talking about myself is

Every time my being a Trans queer depressed mad crip is my choice and you're not sure why I don't just change my lifestyle if it's so miserable.

Just

Be

Happy.

I wish you knew

that I wish you never knew...

But yesterday you were diagnosed with a chronic lung disease

And you won't get better.

You won't be able to just be happy

You probably can't spend hours doing crafts and sewing and having lunch dates with Kathy

You won't be able to get out of bed some days

You'll need help getting around

You'll need your oxygen tank again

You won't be able to be out of the house for long some days

You'll need someone to do the cooking the cleaning the bills the laundry the- Jesus I know how much that is going to kill you because I've never been more like someone in my life and I can't stand not being able  to

but

We

Are

Not

Able

To.

I wish you knew how revolutionary you are and that this battle is the hardest you'll know but you're just as strong and I will be by your side to help you through this.

I wish you knew it will all work out in the end because you are not alone and you will have people love you and support you even when you feel like you can't make it one second further and nobody gets you. I wish you knew how many times I would have died without those people. I wish you knew how badly I've always wanted you to be one of those people but you can't.

So I will be one for you

And together we can still work through all this.

[paranoid-0-android]

younger self prompt

I have thought about what I would say to a younger me for years.

How do you tell bobbing pigtails and coloring books about a crip, mad, traumatized future?

What in this moment is important enough to take back to the overalls and scraped glasses lying on a dirty carpet reading encyclopedias?

I survey the room for answers.

Naked body sprawled beneath laptop; oh how you never knew how much you wouldn't fit into your body.

I wish you knew that slicing into meaty thighs would only reveal tissue and blood, not your truths.

Please be gentle

you will run out of money for tattoos to cover the scars eventually

and they will never cover the pain in your bones

An outline of what once was a lover next to you

Hurting.

Angry.

Distant.

Nobody ever told you that you would fall in love

with replicating your abuse

And fall apart

trying to undo it

Nobody taught you to visibilize and appreciate femme labor. Emotional labor.

You’ll learn.

Sometimes listening to Rihanna songs.

Sometimes watching magic manifest before your eyes.

Sometimes just sobbing.

(You will blossom into someone that cries every single day, and you will learn to honor it eventually)

I want you to know there  is no damn handbook on how to be a good white partner, stop spending hours online trying to find the answers in databases and forums.

You boundless capacity to love and support someone right inside yourself

Your experiences are different but your traumas have bound you in a connection you cannot find anywhere else.

You have bravery to stand up, dismantle, and interrupt what you know is wrong.

Put down the dissertations on race and simply hold the brave warrior body lying cold and alone next to you…

I could tell you about battles with this crip body recovering from trauma

I could tell you you’ll have a silky grey cat one day that has the same squinty eye that you do and that you’re convinced is your familiar.

Your room will be cluttered most days and you will always hate hanging up your laundry.

You’ll need to read up on horoscopes much, much sooner in life because those seem to be a big thing to femme queers and you will have no idea what folks mean when they tell you things like “oh that is so your pisces moon” for years before looking into it all.

Oh, by the way, you ARE queer, and one day you will wrestle with your own idea of what femme means and it will feel okay.

You’ll probably have cried or thought about death in the span of writing this poem.

It all seems relative.

Each time I write this I would have something new to tell you.

So I will just share something new I have learned to tell my current self.

You are worthy. Of love. Of care. Of healing. Of support. Of happiness.

You are able. To manifest this in your life. To live authentically and fully.

So please,

All I want you to know Chey is

you are a sacred being. 

[queers-n-allies-blog]

COME CHECK IT OUT!!! Leah Lakshmi will be holding a Q&A and performance TONIGHT in cline library!!

[garconniere]

underrated badass feminists

i've had this conversation with countless friends over the weekend: how frustrating is it that when mainstream feminists make missteps, we tend to see them in the media even more often than when strong voices are calling attention to various injustices and oppression? why is it so much more tempting to tear other down than to celebrate the ones who aren't constantly fucking up re: intersectional feminism? why are my favourite pieces of writing, where people actually define a feminism that is something i want to be a part of, often written in response to these blatant failings and the ignorance of others who call themselves feminists?

aside from those moments, i also find myself frustrated to hear the same five or six "celebri-feminist" names thrown around, when i often feel like there are so many other people who have said the same things they do, better, and way before them.

in light of these unfortunate injustices, here is my (short) list of highly underrated badass feminists with handy dandy links to their websites. (keep in mind this is my personal list, and this is coming from a white-cis-queer able-bodied canadian feminist's perspective)

Harsha Walia

Jessica Danforth

Adrienne K.

Chelsea Vowel

leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha

Stacey May Fowles

Sarah Nicole Prickett

Meg Clark

Laurie Penny

s. e. smith (edited to add: s.e. tweeted to to let me know they do not identify as a feminist, my bad)

Soraya Chemaly

sheila sampath

Mimi Thi Nguyen

Minh-Ha T. Pham

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Dean Spade

Jenny Zhang

[splazam]

Awesome things, that are awesome. I'm too distracted to comment more on their awesomnity, but Leah Lakshmi, whoever that person is, is an awesome person.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3eZp2DdlLA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkSG5NKRALs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj9EeQsh4Lk

[fistatevergreen-blog]

Transformative Justice Workshop with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha!

Thursday, April 26th 2 - 5 PM at The Evergreen State College in The Longhouse, Room 1007 A

This workshop will introduce the concepts of community accountability and transformative justice approaches to dealing with sexual assault and intimate partner violence- strategies that rely on community intervention rather than primarily relying on the police and criminal legal system. We'll talk about why the cops and courts aren't always a safe or effective form of intervention, as well as talking about the specific dynamics and challenges we face when confronting intimate violence within small communities. We'll also, relying on the scholarship of feminist and queer people of color and allies such as UBUNTU, CARA, Philly Stands Up and STOP, look at specific models that have been successfully used to intervene in violence or harm without primarily relying on the state. This workshop moves from theory to practice, creating a space where we can talk honestly about the complex challenges of creating successful accountability processes and problem solve about how local Olympia interventions can be held more successfully. We'll also discuss and build what intervention and emotional skills we need to develop in order to do this work sustainably and for the long haul. Participants will leave with a packet of resources and tools.

About Leah: Pushcart Prize nominee Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer disabled Sri Lankan writer, teacher and cultural worker. The author of Consensual Genocide and Love Cake and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities (South End, 2011), her work has appeared in the anthologies Persistence: Still Butch and Femme, Yes Means Yes, Visible: A Femmethology, Homelands, Colonize This, We Don’t Need Another Wave, Bitchfest, Without a Net, Dangerous Families, Brazen Femme, Femme and A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over The World. She co-founded Mangos With Chili, the national queer and trans people of color performance organization, is a lead artist with Sins Invalid and teaches with June Jordan's Poetry for the People. In 2010 she was named one of the Feminist Press' “40 Feminists Under 40 Who Are Shaping the Future.” Her one woman show, Grown Woman Show, has toured nationally, including performances at the National Queer Arts Festival, Swarthmore College, Yale University, Reed College and McGill University. She has taught, performed and lectured across the country, including appearances at Columbia, Oberlin, Texas A&M, Sarah Lawrence, Swarthmore, UC Berkeley, USC, and the University of Toronto. She co-founded Toronto’s Asian Arts Freedom School. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, focusing on creative nonfiction and community-based teaching by writers of color. About FIST!: FIST! (Feminists in Solidarity Together!) is a radical feminist student group at The Evergreen State College. We are founded on principles of collective liberation, solidarity, mutual aid, and consensus decision making. Our mission is to bring these values to feminism on campus. Our goals include: providing educational resources on anti-oppression and allyship; creating a network of activist student groups on campus for meaningful collaboration; solidarity with social movements that share our values; and bringing radical feminist events and speakers to campus. FIST! prioritizes the needs, voices, and experiences of those most targeted by oppression. Our Email Address: [email protected] Our Facebook Fan Page: https://www.facebook.com/fist.tesc Our Tumblr: http://fistatevergreen.tumblr.com/ PLEASE EMAIL US FOR ACCOMMODATIONS OR CHILDCARE.

[goinlikeelsie]

Sometimes people I know make Facebook statuses about rad things and Leah Lakshmi comments on them and I fangirl like woah.