A collection of essays on disability justice by sometime-Toronto-based disabled femme of colour activist, writer, and performer Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. A wide range of different kinds of pieces, to deliberately capture the broad spectrum of shared knowledge – from get-through-the-day life hacks to no-holds-barred critique to expansive dreaming – that a commitment to disability justice requires. As such, the kinds of craft found in each piece varies quite a bit, but all in one way or another reflect her piercing political insight.
Personally, I found it quite hard work to read, though in a good way – a pushing-me-to-think-hard-thoughts way, not at all an obscure-writing or irrelevant-abstraction way. Partly, that is because of the author’s great capacity across so many of the pieces to capture the texture of experience of sick and disabled QTBIPOC, including lots of genius and joy, but also the relentless grind of facing not just a mainstream but so many movement and community contexts that exclude, forget, ignore, denigrate, and just generally harm. Partly, it is because the challenge to do better that always weaves through a book like this is a particularly stark one in this instance. When I think back over my involvements in grassroots things over the last twenty-odd years, there were certainly instances of us doing better and worse around the kinds of concerns raised in this book, but nothing that even came close to doing well, and it’s hard to imagine what kinds of conversations or interventions might have fundamentally changed that. Which isn’t an excuse not to do the work, just a recognition of the magnitude of what’s required.
And finally, it was hard to read because it got me thinking about my own very ambivalent relationship to communities formed around radical politics, around particular kinds of identities or practices, or around some combination. This is, admittedly, a bit tangential to what the author writes about, since I am situated in such a vastly different way than her that the networks and communities that I might have access to are very different, as are my options for navigating such things, but it was a big part of the feeling-work that the book required of me. At some point I may write something longer about this, but the basic point is that folks oriented towards movements easily idealize variations on radical community as a key element of what we need in the increasingly dire struggles that the world faces. But as much as I crave relation, sociality, political affinity, and intimacy of various sorts, as someone who is moderately socially anxious and extremely introverted, the kinds of dense social demands (not to mention intense political judginess) that, in my experience of them over the years, such communities almost invariably enact often makes them gruelling rather than nourishing or politically productive spaces for me. Which of course I then feel inadequate and bad about. (None of which, by the way, is meant to disrespect the many lovely people in my life, past and present – organically formed networks of people who share certain things and who like and value each other are wonderful, and I treasure the opportunity to be part of them. It’s collective contexts that are large enough that most individuals don’t necessarily share one-on-one generated trust or affinity or connection with most other individuals but define we-ness through some abstracted combination of rad politics and identity that are trickier.)
But I digress. I don’t know how to meet the challenge that this book presents, but I think a good first step is for more of us who are currently not disabled to read it and start figuring that out.