true journey is return
escaping amerika for the heavy homelands, clear like a knife. a return to teaching and readings for 2025.
welcome to 2025
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held breath
exhale
I don’t believe in gregorian new year but this was the first one I can remember where it’s not even a basic kind dread of what’s about to hit, it’s just, I can’t muster any enthusiasm for the new number on the imperial fake calendar dial. I have no illusions shit will get better this year. though yeah yeah, 2025 pluto in aquarius is the year everything changes. and i feel that, but i felt off all NYE night, more masky that I’d been in a minute. grateful for friends and love and food and my warm home but still stiff, relating in platitudes, harsher than I meant to be. when the ball dropped we didn’t see it, we went out and ululated and made the car alarm noise together. friends did my dishes and went home. I had a migraine and insomnia from the coronal mass ejection and the temp dropping 40 degrees and the winds blowing in cold and new.
hello and welcome back to postcards. thankfulness for your grace in waiting for me to return to this space. my last post was immediately pre-election, a different kind of preparedness. the results got me clear. I may not be wildly enthusiastic about 2025 but I’m also not in despair.
I would like to mark two notations of time:
first, this month marks the 6th pandemic year. we have officially spent half a decade in this shit. sit with that for a second. in this post-truth world, it’s something to remember: half a decade into and of this death, preparedness, grieving, mind bending isolation and denial, reality hits different.
what are you doing with that impact?
what life will you build, this sixth year?
second, it’s a year since I rebooted this substack, for real this time. after a few years of fairly frenzied public publication ( 1 book 2018, one 2019, one co-edited with Ejeris Dixon in 2020, one in 2022, lots of essays and online presence and whatnot continually pumping out throughout), last year I hardly published anywhere at all- except for this space. I moved away from saying and more towards doing last year, including working on things not yet ready for the public. ( I joke about wanting to make a t shirt that says “disability justice means doing things.” don’t jump on me, this is with all the caveats that this doesn’t mean I’m shaming anyone with zero to negative energy including myself, but that I’m into this being about us doing shit, whatever way we can, and talking less. for myself I needed to stop being a talking head on a screen.) this space was my most consistent writing commitment.
thanks for being enthusiastic recipients of this newsletter and its documentations, writings and musings. this year there will be both a continued use of this more private space for writing, and more public releases. thanks for being a free space to think. watch this space for more.
intermezzo: workshops
short notice, but:
I am putting on this “i’m disabled, how the hell do i survive/ resist this? workshop tomorrow as part of a series Mariame Kaba is doing for people worried about the coming u.s. new government, fascism etc. it’s aimed at people new to activism who want to learn more about how to get involved, organize stuff, how they are already maybe doing organizing etc. there are some donation based tickets [people can donate anything they can afford] still available for my session tomorrow. registration link.
notes about the workshop and how it's being organized: I'm Disabled, How the Hell Do I Survive/ Resist This? To Exist Is to Resist: A workshop facilitated by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: Are you disabled/ chronically ill/ have a condition/ Mad, sick, neurodivergent, Deaf/ Hard of Hearing or some or all of the above? Does the escalation in fascism scare the shit out of you and are you wondering how you can resist in a way that is accessible to your body/ mind? If you are disabled you are already resisting on a daily basis; this workshop will be a space to share and learn about different models of disabled organizing and resistance that have and are already happening, and plot your own.
Bio: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (they/she) is an older cousin, regular person, memory worker, disability and transformative justice old bytch, and the author or co-editor of ten books, including The Future Is Disabled, (co-edited with Ejeris DIxon)Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the transformative justice movement, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, Tonguebreaker and Dirty River. A Disability Futures Fellow, Lambda and Jeanne Córdova Award winner, five-time Publishing Triangle shortlister and longtime disabled QTBIPOC space maker, they are currently building Living Altars, a cultural space by and for disabled QTBIPOC writers. They are a new Philly resident after being a longtime visiting cousin.
January 8, 2025 - 6:30 to 8 pm ET/3:30 to 5 pm PT
ASL and Live Captioning will be provided.2.5 This workshop is part of a mini-series of workshops organized that offer an opportunity to answer the question that many people are asking: “How do I take action where I am?”
These five 90-minute sessions happening in December & January are intended to provide concrete ideas and steps that anyone can take. Each session is facilitated by long-time activists and organizers.
The sessions will be offered as Zoom webinars, but we will not record them. A couple of days before each session, we will email a Zoom link to all registrants. Importantly, these workshops are appropriate for people who are new to activism and organizing. They will not be useful if you are a long-time activist and organizer because you’re already taking action.
For the workshops, we will offer ASL interpretation and enable closed captions. We will have live captions for the January 8th workshop. A tech and access support person will be present throughout the event to attend to any emergent participant needs regarding Zoom and access.
Please DO NOT register if you know you cannot attend. This is important. Space is limited. So please don’t register as a placeholder.
These sessions are being offered at no cost to participants BUT this does not mean they are free. There are costs associated with putting together such a program (labor, tech, interpretation costs etc...). If you can make a donation, please do. Funds will cover the costs of ASL. We will donate any surplus funds to REBUILD.
I taught an iteration of hard femme poetics for workshops for gaza on december 22, 2024, for the first time since 2018. I was nervous but it went off without a hitch and reminded me how much I love teaching writing and the importance of femme cultural spaces that’s aren’t cis/white/monied/normal. thanks to everyone who attended and wrote together: we raised $2050 for Crips for E Sims for Gaza.
*
As one of the collective member from workshops for gaza shared at the beginning of the session. that they created the project not just as a place to raise money for Gazan mutual aid, but because they wanted to create space for critical thinking, learning and knowledge-sharing outside the censored and violent university settings that are increasingly untenable. that struck a chord with me and everyone there, I reckon.
*
thus, I’ve decided hard femme poetics will return as a four week online writing class in february 2025, on zoom and discord. more info will go out in a later post, but please keep an eye out for it, it will have more detailed information about the structure, schedule and an application form. here’s the description of the one-off I did at workshops for gaza: the focus will be similar.
Hard Femme Poetics In A Time of Genocide And Yet Survival
What does it mean to be a revolutionary femme in 2024 in a time of genocide and yet survival? What are femme literary lineages and strategies, and what are the revolutionary femme poems and poetics this time demands we write?
*Participants will read poetry and mixed genre/media work by Cyree Jarelle Johnson, Trish Salah, Torrin Greathouse, Mark Aguhar, Danez Smith, Kai Cheng Thom and Stefani Echverria-Fenn and consider femme traditions of rant, manifesto, liturgy, visceral monstrous body in how we write to document, dream and femifest. We will also write our asses off.
*
Workshop will be in Zoom with CART, with a text based space to post work. ASL provided upon request. This workshop will be capped at 40 participants and center BIPOC and non-cisgender femmes.
thirdly, other worlds
a report back
not that long ago, I was someplace else and I came back with the sun and the wind on me.
empire’s everywhere, but not every place is the amerikan empire. this amerikan empire doesn’t want you to leave, so you don’t get to know that there are other worlds out there, there’s different ways it’s possible to be in your body and/or live in them. as my friend audrey said, “oh like the public transit worked and if you got sick there was health care and you weren’t afraid all the fucking time?”
from late nov to late december I got off turtle island and into the southern/eastern hemispheres. a jailbreak plotted for 4 years, with a lot of help from my friends. texta created they/swarm and hustled the australian arts councils for monies so we could buy plane tickets and food. leah manaema avene, texta and me built an all day workshop and a continuing community to practice negotiating power for more access, right relationship against anti Bla(c)kness, and anti-Zionism, work grounded in our disabled Indigenous Pacifika and radical Southie selves that grounded me there. a lot of magic happened. my second cousin opened the facebook message I’d sent him in July the day I arrived. I stayed in Texta’s home residency and they crip brown autistic hosted me. I brought my father’s ashes with me.
I left on the day pluto went into aquarius and it felt both right and weird to be leaving the u.s. right then, when everything called to hunker down with the people I am in it with here. turns out it was a good thing, to go elsewhere and remember it’s possible to breathe different and as dire as now and what’s coming is, there’s different skies and not everything is amerika. amerika is three card monte mind control and doesn’t want you to know there’s anything else or that other hemispheres are real. my cousin’s wife saying we took the superannuation for retirement do you have that in amerika, so hesistent. I said in amerika we don’t have anything but guns.
the whole thing was an experiment in home based offline sdqtbipoc arts residency and long haul travel. I learned a lot. that it was about the ramps made of plywood in the house and the air purifiers and the ease with which we allowed ourself to not talk and watch our comfort shows, but that it was also about brown disabled hosting. it could’ve been another place with all the ADA checklist access devices in the world and it would’ve meant less because there wasn’t that way we welcomed each other, the way we made each other coffees and talked out something we were stuck at on a piece, frustrations with dealing with white assholes in the arts org. not alone.
I don’t have to tell you how most of us can’t do this kind of trip at all. I didn’t know if I could/I couldn’t for a long time. we rescheduled the whole thing once because of a blown ovary and a dead love. i rebooked tickets twice while en route (for extremely cheap or free, one of the only 2020 changes that stuck around) first because I got the norovirus and needed to not be on a 15 hour sri lankan airlines flight while I was shitting every twenty minutes, and second when I reconsidered whether I wanted to be on a lush cinnamon tree fruit bat jungle home hypersurveilled peninsula island where I knew exactly two people on the day of my mama’s second death anniversary.
first time I got off this continent in over a decade. I haven’t gotten off this continent hardly at all in this life, for all the class money disability mobility reasons. for a long minute in my 30s and earlier 40s I was on planes, trains and busses a lot in north america for work and pleasure and the road, and I never took it for granted. i was in every van, megabus, $99 three stop redeye for years. it was part of a story I kept muttering under my breath that I wasn’t trapped in my parents house or my mother’s fate. lucky stud. free fem.
but it’s been half a decade now of the pandemic and my ass got grounded. house, bed, neighborhood, radius of day’s drive max the length I travelled.
it was good having such a smaller shorter circuit for those years. my knees healed. I wrote a bunch of books. maybe couldn’t have mourned everyone I needed to mourn without being home in one place where I could weep and dig. part of it at first also meant being just another queer trauma4trauma relationship turned abusive in lockdown, oh shit I gotta leave. abuse I never thought I’d see again since the last one in my 20s. getting trapped in a house I loved with a partner I had who now I tiptoed around, my mother’s fate came knocking to haunt me and make me choose. I know I’m not alone, one of many who hit that crossroad.
there’s magic in ground home and also magic in hustling flying free, innit?
sag north node aries cusps thrive on travelling, and there’s a part of me that came alive again on this sojourn. my grandma’s body in my own. there’s one photo I have from just after I was both, my mother, me in the baby carriage and both sets of grandparents on either side. one set is white working class clearly left school grade 8 to work in the shoe factory in webster ma, and then on the right are these cosmopolitan middle class brown people, my grandmother’s husband winking swanky in a singlet with a cigarette, my grandma in slacks rolling her eyes just slightly. these people knew from jet travel and boats. we have moved through different countries as temporary places to home and rest for almost a century, leaving when it gets dangerous. i feel comfortable and powerful in airports, along with being harassed and terrorized,of course. but when I’m in them is one of the places I know I am Jackie’s grandfemme. you can drop me in any city and I’d be ok.
being home i was surprised at what i found. SL is the og root but my grandmother and sisters left 90 years ago the first time around to be in a place less small and staring, more room to move with your ankles showing. singapore felt more like home home, the hijabis in adidas tracksuits, the uncle playing top 40 in the rideshare grab chatting with me about where my dad grew up in serangoon, the international everyone. my friend said people will look but they won’t do anything when I asked if I could wear my protect trans youth shirt with the big knife to take the bus with her to her favorite porridge stall. she was right, we were just both punks. how much my hips sunk into naarm surprised me, how home i felt walking up johnston street in a rubber skirt laughing with texta on the way to get carryout from the singaporean place or the turkish autistic run coffee shop or the dog park that is also the footie pitch. leah manaema said, your grandmother is buried here, of course you have roots here. most of what landed was realizing diaspora really is home, it was ok to accept that home was a plane.
whole thing a crip science experiment to see if my body could make it that far. six hours to LA, shit I booked two separate tickets. grab my suitcase, exit security, limp run my cane tip breaking to thank god the next terminal only. drop the bag, sprint and ask to cut in line to make it on the airship to fly through the long dark with five minutes to spare. uncle next to me is seeing his australian migrated fam for the first time in “thirty years” he says casually. me too. diaspora famillies where half the fam made it to aus half to the united snakes means that long a distance from when we get to see each other not in an aerogram letter or a screen. we don’t have the money for the ticket and the time as money to get to see each other. he also started coughing. i pulled out my p100 elipse and steeled myself to have it suctioned to my face for 15 hours. I’m not getting covid again.
***
sleep. stars. no one in any airport asks about the small purple peacock box of my dad’s ashes tied in washi tape. i asked for every prayer and got it. when I was getting ready to leave m. said i might be less scattering my dad than taking him on tour. they weren’t wrong. in the melbourne airport the security surveillance theater is new- i’m used to just shoving my passport in the reader and looking at the camera, but usually there’s still a human checking the print out it spits out after and telling me to pull my mask down. not here. here there is just AI camera reading my biometrics, a turnstile either spits you out or doesn’t.
but I get out and rip the mask off and rub the dents off my face and nose spray again. walk away from uber to get a regular cab, which still exist here. i have cash and give them texta’s address. do you like amerika or australia better? (i’m very tired, I don’t want to have this convo, sorry uncle.)
you look at this quadrant on the map of course pacifika, australia, south east asia and Sri Lanka talk to each other, you redraw it in your mind and we’re a bioregional conversation. of course sri lanka has more in common w se asia than india, and these lands some of us migrated to that smell, feel and look like home. salt crusted short buildings, the banana tree in texta’s yard. m thought i was in lanka and I said no if I was we would be both at home and tighter, less gay in the ways we are. here we are, asses out and laughing, our southie hair turning white the way it does, salt sparking on the wave’s crest.
“every hero has to confront the heavy homeland”- stefani echeverria-fenn
lanka was harder in some ways than it was in 06. then i showed up right after a suicide bomb crashed the ceasefire, but the queers I knew knew where all the checkpoints were and drunk drove around them and brought me and my duty free carton of benson and hedges export to the small free room with bucket bath and no ac by the water in bamba. this time there was a hotel, uber has discovered colombo tuktuks, the road is paved. there were soldiers with AKs in the airport and signs telling you to take your mask down for collective safety, and it was impossible to drive around the checkpoints there were so many. at 1 am we got pulled over and I wondered if I was going to have to bribe my way out with usd. there was no capital before. now capital has arrived and there’s something to protect with guns- the new mall, the new fancy hotels with cinnamon in the name -and some of the rest of colombo is literally crumbling falling into the sea with diesel smoke, salt and shit.
Colombo: feels more Sinhalese sometimes than before the war ended. Colombo: the new gov is center left but still the JVP and sinhalese nationalist too. Colombo: more cops and guards with AKs in front of everything that I remember from when the war was happening. Colombo: no queers like in the amerika but queerness is everywhere. do you know how much sex I could get, someone said. of course. of course in the photos of my family it’s girls and boys, the sisters all together, the men all together, separate. of course I’m covering in 39 C, not like the white women with their shoulders and ass cheeks out we all blink at. somehow some nice girl hidden in my left ass cheek comes out of storage and trills thank yous and nandris.
my friend and me meet up and talk for six hours because there is time to here, them on break from their family’s weddings and holidays, exhaled shoulders. home. we talk about the Lankan political and cultural tradition of obscurity and opacity. the Tamil feminist theater workers who for years performed and published only under their first names, rejecting fame for impact and ability to move.
I am staying in wellawatte and it’s a slight breath but also this is not a place where not-men come on their own without a partner or family. I get by just fine but it’s tight space sometimes being in public. I had mixed kid anxieties the first visit, this time not only are they not there they just don’t have any backing. stopped at the airport because tired and ND when I filled out the visa app I left a number off my passport, the guy says one of your parents is sri lankan or both? i almost snort, sir clearly I got some white in me- but- my grandmother is an alvis, my mother is white amerikan- ok, we’ll let it go. not one person is surprised that I’m a halfie, not one person is suprised I’m lankan.
15 hour flight is just two 6 hour ones and a bit. sl to singapore is just four hours. singpore to san francisco was another 15 hours. you can do anything if you can break it down into bits sometimes. one damn day at a time. i hit two years in a few days. one damn day at a time. i’m an old road dog and I got all the tricks up my (nonexistent) sleeves including not taking this for granted. rest days and collapse days. ok girl get off the bed and into the shower. ok fine, I won’t look cute, I’ll look ridiculous in whatever the most modest outfit i have that makes no sense.
there’s so much more I could write but this post is already too long for email and I don’t have a neat ending. I leave you with the ragged. I leave you with these diaspora stories of elsewhere. may they help you tap into your own.
that’s all for now
til next: be a refuge, be a trick. be something unexpected. go towards where you find free, what keeps your clear.
taking you out with a mix from duiji 13 I danced to this am: here.
love,
L
Beautifully written ❤️❤️❤️