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The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs

Book by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha · 3 quotes · Disability Justice, Disability Writing, Disabled Literature

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The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs Quotes

“When I think of disabled literature and writing, I can think of a breadth of writing that spans decades and generations, that uses the D-word and does not. I think of Audre Lorde—Black Lesbian poet warrior mother, legally blind, living and dying with cancer, whose work shines with the knowledge she gained from living with bodily difference and fighting the medical industrial complex. I think of Gloria Anzaldúa, queer Latinx maestra who started her period at age three and lived with bodily and reprogenital differences, living and dying with diabetes. Some of my work as a disability justice writer has been to look at the legacies and work of those foundational second-wave queer and trans feminist writers and creators of color—Audre Lorde and June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa and Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, Chrystos and Sapphire, to name a few—and to witness the disability all up in their work, even if they did not use that word because of any number of factors including the whiteness of the disability rights movement of the time. June's last decade of writing was all about her cancer. Gloria's writing had everything to do with her diabetes and neurodivergence and life-long bodily differences. Marsha and Sylvia were both neurodivergent Trans Black and Latinx activists and creators whose writing, performance, and art was at the center of their lives and activism. Chrystos and Sapphire's Indigenous and Black feminist incest survivor stories and poetry write from spaces of surviving extreme trauma, chronic pain from stripping and cleaning houses, CPTSD, grief, and psychiatrization. "I also think of the deep legacy of disabled writers (some dead, some still living but having done this for a while) who intentionally, politically identified as disabled. Laura Hershey. Leroy Moore. Qwo-Li Driskill. Aurora Levins Morales. Billie Rain. Dani Montgomery. Nomy Lamm. Cheryl Marie Wade. Emi Koyama. Pat Parker. Tatiana de la tierra. Raymond Luczak. Anne Finger. Leslie Feinberg, who died of Lyme disease. Peggy Munson. Beth Brant. Vickie Sears. Writers who are small press, micro-press, self-published, indie press, out of print. Writers I know and cherish, whose names I call when I talk about disabled writing. We are so often kept apart, we disabled people, and kept from knowing each other's names. We are told not to hang out with the other kid with cerebral palsy, told to deny or downplay our disabilities or Deafness or ND. We often grow up not learning disabled history, Deaf literature, or that those are even a thing.”

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Book:The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
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“I thought of Care Work as a community in your pocket when you have no crip friends or you are all alone, as so often we are. I have written or co-created nine books, but it wasn't until my fourth book that I started writing unapologetically about disability. It still felt like a risk. As a friend once said, "Everyone wants to write the poem that makes people go "yeah!" and pump their fist at the performance." So much of the time when I'd tried to write, or read poetry about being disabled, about being chronically ill, the opposite happened: instead of wild clapping and screaming, I got met with awkward silence, the nervous laughter, the "I'm not sure if it's OK to laugh," the #SadFace. If you wanted to be the best, to have people love your work, too often if felt like too much of a risk to write and perform crip work. I was able to finally take that risk and write and perform and publish disabled poems in Bodymap, my third book of poetry, because of the collective work in disability justice writing and performance. Because of Sins Invalid and individual disabled BIPOC writers, because there was starting to be a movement of disabled writers and creators, queer and of color, who were creating space to do our work. I could believe there was an audience who was hungry for the work, and I got it. Without that, my writing would have stayed in my journal, stayed in the drafts that didn't make it into the books I published.”

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Book:The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
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“The disability justice solution is not to abandon those projects when people are exhausted, but to continue to figure out how to resource the work. Our crip skills and working, living, and organizing with low spoons are going to be crucial. They already are… We have knowledge the world needs.”

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Book:The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs
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