glub, back up from the depths, letter #1
the threatened return of my Substack finally happens on my dad's third death anniversary
image description: A graphic featuring a photo of large round slices of watermelon in the background. In the center against a white square background text reads, Crips for eSims for Gaza on the top and End to Genocide on the bottom. In the center is a QR code.
hi everyone,
i’ve been saying yeah I’ll restart my substack for oh, a fucking year now, and today, two days after genocide xmas, sitting in my underwear on my hot pink couch waiting to bleed, belatedly after realizing it’s my father’s third death anniversary and that’s why I was feeling weird and stormy for the last two days, as a west philly winter rain greys down outside, in true classic LLPS crip in underwear writing style fashion: here it is, the moment you all have been waiting for.
news: first, over the shitty Christian holiday (which is what I like to call Christmas, now with an extra helping of being cancelled due to genocide in Palestine), me, Jane Shi and Alice Wong (it’s kind of like the Bollywood “three guys with a cause” trope except “three disabled Asians not-men trying to figure out WTF to do about a disaster) created the Crips for eSims for Gaza project. I had been spending a lot of genocide insomnia nights wondering what initiatives disabled BIPOC (and fine, allies I guess) / disability justice people in the west/ outside Palestine could do to concretely get support to Gazans. Like what are the specific disabled/ disability justice organizing strategies in this moment in time, what is a thing we can do with what we have.
As a diasporic Sri Lankan person, I am no stranger to “sending USD to back home never gets old as a strategy” because USD always stretches far into global South currency. Lankans living in diaspora got people to send money to Sri Lanka during every disaster, war-made and the tsunami and during the aragalaya/ porratam (aka the Sri Lankan uprisings of 2022). But I also knew that a) getting money into Gaza has been rendered basically impossible by the IOF war b) it feels tricky to look for specifically disabled Palestinian organizations to reach out to to ask for what they need- they exist, but as many people have expressed, basically all of Palestine is disabled and the dynamics of relating to disability movement and identity are really different and specific because of that.
I had seen Egyptian writer and activist Mirna El Helbawi’s #ConnectingGaza project to get eSims directly to people in Gaza early on in the war, thought it was a really good hack, reposted it and also bought one. A few weeks later, disabled Asian poet and organizer Jane Shi decided to sell her remaining “Immunocompromised people are worth protecting” stickers to raise funds for eSims as well as for Palestinian Youth Movement Toronto’s Community Defense Fund after her friend Divya Kaur (@soft.kaur) suggested fundraising for eSims with art and after her friend Vivian Ly and co-organizer at Masks4EastVan linked Mirna’s instructions in a group chat. Lying there, I messaged Alice Wong my ideas and she suggested reaching out to Jane to see if we could build on/ support her existing eSims organizing- if we couldn’t get people to fuel money into Gaza direcrtly, we could collectively crip pool our $5-20 and buy a shit ton of e Sims so a whole building could get internet, wifi, the news, upload news to Instagram, let their families know where they were and that they weren’t dead. We did, and through the power of the cripple google doc, a statement, image descriptions and QR codes to donate were born.
Stacey’s fundraiser to buy her house that would become the Disability Justice Culture Club was in my mind as we were working on this. She had bought her house in East Oakland, barely, with the intention of it being intentional accessible disabled BIPOC community space, but got ripped off by a bunch of contractors who took advantage of disability related vulnerability, the foundation was fucked up so she had to take out extra loans, and she was paying both her rent and mortgage for ten months. She made this fundraiser and honestly the money that got raised got raised on a ton of people sending $5-20 in the first couple of days of the month after their check hit, and a couple of fundraisers. The DJCC is still there, five years later and three and a half years after Stacey’s death, now successfully a land trust forever.
I get why with the extremely recent rise in a couple of foundations (including one big one with a history of evil and a few smaller social justice-y ones) being like, whoops, we should fund disability stuff over the last few years, many of us have shifted away from the grassroots fundraising that is the only way we have ever been able to fund shit and into trying for grants, especially as the price of eggs and everything else goes up. I have also done it, and I don’t think getting money and using it has to be evil if you stay very clear about working the system instead of being worked by it. For the past 3 years of New Cripple Money, I have taken gigs that offer it because I have not had access to that kind of money for my whole entire life, and I have also been clear that it will not last forever and if we’re offered it without caveats, we should take it and use it/ stack it/ redistribute it while we can.
But something I want to hold on to, that I have worried about getting lost in the shuffle, is the power we have always had as disabled people, as BIPOC broke disabled people, to raise money amongst ourselves $5 at a time. Because we control that money. Because that money is immediately accessible. Because we don’t have to wait for a funder to okay us to make the revolution happen. Because it is a similar principle to collective access (disabled people not waiting for others to care for us but attempting to organize care amongst ourselves, by and for ourselves)- where we are not just receiving care, we are offering care as disabled people to each other, we are not just “helpless cripples who must be done for” but people with shit to offer each other. When we grassroots fundraise, it’s not just “wow it sucks we just keep passing the same crip $20 back and forth between each other”, it is also showing the power we have with the small amount of poor/ working class crip dollars we have.
image description: A graphic featuring a photo of pieces of watermelon in the background. In the center against a white square background text reads, Crips for eSims for Gaza on the top and We Keep Us Safe on the bottom. In the center is a QR code.
Anyways. Check out the eSims thing if you like, share and donate if you can. There are QR code images you can save and use that link directly to the post above and below.
Writing about this isn’t me just tooting my own horn, it is one more time of “let’s write down the process of a small significant thing that happens that otherwise might get lost”, my little bit of documentarian/ archive is everything work in general and as part of how I try and Contribute to DJ. It is also part of the ongoing disability justice project of, what are the specific disabled forms of resistance/ solidarity we can do? What’s the equivalent of ramping two steps by taking off our sneakers, or building a makeshift ramp out of plywood when the ramp in the accessible van breaks and no one inside it can get out ( or having the rehearsal inside the van?) What is the shit only we could think of, that we control? That not only is the shit only we could think of, but that the Others will miss, their eyes will skip over, so we can do sneak attacks in the dark?
Recently I read this small zine Shira Hassan wrote about her experiences doing peer to peer support work as a young homeless drug using/ sex working person with her friends who were the same. there’s a lot in it and I’m still digesting it (stuff about, is it possible to do “abolitionist social work” and ways YWEP and other orgs tried to break the rules practice it, what’s the difference between mutual aid and nonprofits trying to be “liberatory”.) But the piece that spoke to me the most was her writing talking about her clear orange pager and how she and her friends would communicate via pager code- they had a code for “meet me at the police station/ hospital” codes for “I got home safe from working.” Shira writes, “We each had a number attached to our names and I had a sheet that I typed on an actual typewriter taped to the outside of my pager that I “laminated” with layers of scotch tape.”
I sent a screenshot of this to a friend who is 8 years younger than me, where our experiences of what I call analog internet (pre- corporatization of everything when it was more a small number of nerds, pre large scale social media pileon/data mining, text based stuff like bulletin boards and Livejournal) overlap but they were more involved in Tumblr world and I was more involved in early to mid (like 2009-2016ish, pre chokeholding and algorithm interference with information access) DJ attempts to hack social media to be a place we could organize, who has often asked me how I think younger people/ anyone will remember how to analog connect and organize once all social media platforms fall or are rendered totally useless.
I said, I have no idea how to bring back pager tech but what Shira is talking about with the pagers speaks to me- a private, offline tech for connecting, using code. And, I think we need to lean into code, given how surveilled everything is. And, that is a really weird think to lean into for a lot of us, given how the model has been “use social media to share absolutely everything and reach ten/ hundreds of thousands of people/ everybody everywhere all at once”- both because we’ve gotten used to social media as a go to tool/ way of engaging with the world, and because right now I know I feel like there is a feel of, we need to scale up massively, masses are required to end mass destruction. so the idea of writing in code, working in code, communicating privately feels counterintuitive. and yet, it might be one of the ways we can best morph to pull off shit.
While we’re at it, back in August, Oliver Baez Bendorf asked if I wanted to join his 100s group. the idea of the 100s comes from Dr Kim Tallbear’s critical poly 100s- you get a group of 6-7 people together, everyone picks a day and writes 100 words and emails it to the group. the next person writes the next day, maybe inspired by the last poem/ piece, maybe not. it’s a way of creating community and carving out regular time to write in a busy life. it’s been good and a way of coming back to poetry when I never stopped, but I haven’t been able to perform except for twice offline for the past four years, and have had less exposure to the kind of poetry/performance community that I used to write for than in a couple decades.
after October 7, most of our writing has been about Gaza. we are figuring out publishing them and/or having a reading as a fundraiser for Palestine sometime soon, watch this and all my other spaces, but in the meantime, I wanted to share a few (text below, might add audio later if I get fancy.) I always call the name of and follow the great Palestinian sis/star poet maestra’s Suheir Hammad’s work. Her writing changed the trajectory of my life before I knew her and her maestra teaching fundamentally shared who I am and what I know how to do as a writer and teacher. the poems she’s written and shared throughout the war are relentlessly important in documenting the specifics of the brutality and war and spiritual crimes of what is happening. I never forgot that poetry is important but somedays in recent times it has felt harder to write when most people are in the bomb blast of overwhelming reality and don’t want poetry: a means of tellling the truth. Suheir’s work and the work of so many Palestinian poets, including those targeted for murder like Refaat Alareer, show us without question that the colonial imperial war death machine know that poets, journalists and writers are a threat. I hope in a small way the small poems I am writing provide some kind of crystal to capture facets of this moment.
thursday, nov 23 2023
in the thick dust of death in a dry mouth
in seventy-eight ton of buried bone
in a curl of children in one incubator, eyes naked, accusing and alive
in the angel gay face starting the morning instagram hello, I am still alive
in the stranger-friends on jitsi plotting arrest cheerful
in the friend who can't look at the supermarket meat anymore
because it reminds of body parts once child held by father
in the place where all the bullshit falls away, calls
what will you do, what will you do.
100s for palestine
1.
the land reached skeleton hands up to grab me as I slow broken-
back loaded my car and left. how dare you leave us?
land always grabbed, land never stops its refrain: you belong to us.
i drove away from the maple and white pine wet
that grew me, where the worst things in my life happened,
where I came back to freely as an adult and freely chose something different.
eighteen months later My friends heartbeat of drum step,
standing holding our stupid holy signs by the rotary
or running rage unpermitted through the Halloween full moon eclipse
climate change hot October streets. Hearts ripped in half,
a hole in them that is the universe’s hole.
I said does everything we do feel futile, my friend said yes
but I keep seeing myself in the future, curved back and old,
looking back at me asking, did you do everything you could
and I want to always refrain, yes.
2.
You know it’s bad when someone snaps
well at least Israel is trying! in response to your Affirm Life
brown cardboard sign propped up on your brown cardboard knees
I want to snap a poem back that says what are they trying to do, X
kill children? because they’re succeeding
but a thousand dead Palestinian children kite past my eyes
and I’m so tired and they can’t ever feel tired again.
you know it’s bad when saying affirm life life is a right, not collateral or casual
words your poet teacher wrote 18 years ago
still true
still body on fire mad anyone
refuses to see
3.
hi my name is ---, i voted for you. I am begging you
to demand a ceasefire. my heart is breaking. we will
be forever changed by this. t. called me an outsider
who didn't understand, in my head I said, none of us
is outsider to this. sri lankans
watched almost exactly this for 26 years
which culiminated in exactly this- 60,000 dead
in a week as the world coughs.
I am no stranger to nailbiting and weeping
over al jazeera.
I'm in an
almost-empty house of grief filled with sunlight
from many windows, packing to move,
praying we all will be free.
it’s as corny, and simple as that.
disabled queers march on washington for a free Palestine
Heart in Duwamish by the boat, heart
in t dot, heart with Bisan,
heart wherever there’s a fight
Body back
in my night kitchen unpacking boxes and boxes
Body marched five aching rehabbed miles,
stopping every few blocks to stretch pain-
all the access supplies made it
except the SI belt
but L picks up a dropped scarf
of Palestinian colors, ties it tight
around my busted L5
to shove my spine in place
so I can march slowly
with everyone I’ ve ever met
I’m so old
and so is war, this one
isn’t even that old yet
300k, not 10k, shout FUCK JOE BIDEN for hours
at this barricaded
white dome that rules us.
We’re at the very center
of the anus of the
axis of evil
Nomy’s sign:
I represent hundreds
who couldn’t be here.
Next to us, a block-long scroll
of all the dead whose names we know.
nov 27, 2023
a femthem waits for a lover to text back rings a bell
curls up in magenta velvet bomb womb of couch
sore middle backed from shots with corporate red
and white hearts taped over the wound. finds pleasure
as the world keeps ripping open and staying the same.
sleeps too late, wakes too late, sore neck, saltpaper sinuses
from what the aqi doesn’t say is in the air of the new city.
messages in dms lover brain broken by police think of
you often don’t want to crowd/ not crowding
possibility uncurls on a park bench, in a signal message
in 1200 people in the rain on a bridge, in eyeball roll at the cops don’t beat
us because we’re white, in staying eyes on
here i am, face glossy, nipples always hard, compulsively
horny and grief hardened. nothing can kill me until it does.
let us find pleasure as everything unfurls.
lastly: I’m working on my new poetry book in earnest, working title the way disabled people love each other. I started this book when I first learned my parents were starting to die, and I’m finishing it a year after my mom passed. the last section is called leaving the grief house. sandwiched in between are a lot of poems about disability justice complex love, a mourning/ honor song/ ode suite for Stacey, a lot of pandemic memory. watch all spaces for more.
endure, remember, survive, witness, create, stay human or more/ other than human, take care of yourselves and each other. make something with what you have.
love,
Leah
self promotion shit: my interview with Margaret Killjoy on her anarchist prepper podcast Live Like the World is Dying is live with transcript here, I talked about crip prep/ disabled prepping, the ways trad prep relies on tired ableist tropes, ableism in The Last Of Us and so much more. I relaunched my tarot practice here, as a partial fundraiser for Middle Eastern Children’s Relief. the second printing of The Future Is Disabled, with new afterword and “Against the Great Forgetting” essay, is available at the link above. Tina Zavitsanos and my Long Winter Covid Survival Guide aka how to COVID-safer hang out outside in the freezing ass cold and not die got updated with stuff people wrote in to suggest, here, even more important as we hit the second highest wave of COVID and few are talking about it. I wrote a piece for Alice Wong’s Low and Slow disabled food series for Eater here.
personal life update shit: I moved to Philly after visiting family here for the past 17 years and multiple attempts to do so, and am settling in and finding my way in how I want to be here. persephoneing up from the underworld and cracking the seed after a hell of a four years. my wc accessible backyard is joking tongue in cheek gonna be called c space (for crip cunt connect cranky) after my friend Naima read new work from her show she’s gonna do in January in it yesterday to a small crew of friends and my friend Adrian was telling another friend twenty year old west philly memories and mentioned that the vacant lot next to A Space used to be jokingly called B Space. when I was in a always gonna be temporary place in MA the last year of my mom’s life and after, I dreamed of a big accessible yard where people could covid safe hangout gather, and prayer and spellwork lead me to this apartment with one, in a nice&semi falling apart house in a gentrifying/ed block with holdouts. everything is temporary til its not, everything is crossroads, everything something you hack the best you can.
I went offline for six months because of being doxxed, stalked and death threated by a couple of people, but the bxtch is back/ never left/ will act in protective and self determined ways that allow me to keep creating, thriving, doing, going away and offline, and back. you’re not supposed to feed the trolls but I did want to mention this to just point out that so many people you know doing any kind of public work who are some mix of some kind of disabled/ BIPOC/ queer have to deal with assholes doxxing us and trying to end our lives.
substack update: the last one of these was in 2019 ofc. since then the media landscape has changed another 50 times and a lot more friends have optional paid memberships. i turned mine on because of the cost of eggs, etc. most everything will remain free, I reckon, maybe I’ll do an occasional “special goodie for the $5 a month people” but if you want to shoot me some cash/ subscribe, please feel free to do so.
A graphic featuring a photo of pieces of watermelon cut into triangular shapes in the background. In the center against a white square background text reads, Crips for eSims for Gaza on the top and No One Left Behind on the bottom. In the center is a QR code.