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Consensual Genocide
Leah Lakshmi
Piepzna-Samarasinha
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The book itself may be slim, but the title Consensual Genocide hints
at the intensity of this first collection of poems by queer
spoken-word artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. Once I began
reading, I wondered how the book's covers contained the explosive
force within.
The collection is loud, urgent and fearless, and there's a lot going
on here. Piepzna-Samarasinha explores her Sri Lankan identity,
sexuality, abuse, racism, poverty, post-9/11 politics. It's a lot of
ground to cover in 74 pages, but it works because of the
collection's strong personality, clear poetic voice and visceral
images.
Piepzna-Samarasinha's writing is excruciatingly raw, as in these
lines from "happy IWD!": "guess all you could dream was a
sidekick/not my naked cunt bleeding in yr hand."
These poems have blood and guts, but they also have moments of
tenderness and poignancy, like these lines from "when kali and oya
met": "When I stayed in the hood you moved from/I couldn't watch the
sari cloth in your window flap/ on my bike ride home anymore."
The intimate, confessional style is one of the elements that gives
this collection its power. Another is the Piepzna-Samarasinha's
ability to connect with the reader as she lays herself bare. The
poems are highly visual and personal--we can see the poet
distributing flyers for seven dollars an hour, wearing a T-shirt
that reads "I do bad things," and hearing as a child that she must
"study hard in school/ be white or just one drop of tea in the
milk."
The poems are also infused with images of war--both ongoing unrest
in Sri Lanka ("20 years of civil war never dented the headlines")
and the Iraq war--and the impact they have on the poet's
consciousness. In "sweet water, 3/19/03," the last poem of the
collection, Piepzna-Samarasinha offers up her voice in solidarity
with the people of Iraq: "I don't have any gun to fight them
with/except my tongue my heart."
Consensual Genocide is a demanding read, and so it should be. There's
no skimming, no sampling, no loitering allowed here; the reader must
invest energy and empathy in these poems, and close the covers only
after her fingers have been singed.
—
Kerry Ryan
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Sri Lankan American Leah Lakshmi
Piepzna-Samarasinha has refined her poetry on the platform in cities
throughout North America. She delights now with the rigor necessary
to make sounds work in lines, on the page. These are home-spun
tones, informal, written to be spoken on the tongue, and they extend
to titles presented in lower-case letters. The lead-off poem is the
marvelous “eating a $5 plate of string hoppers, I think of my
father.”
Snoozing in front of Seinfeld on the beige on beige recliner
his belly folds after years
of American chop suey, hamburgers and Michelob
Nothing
he really wanted to eat
was ever on the shelves
of landolli’s or the Big D
I think of that man
who cried three times in my life
once when appamma died
once when our dog died
and once when I sent him
a 99-cent package of tamarind candy
and he called me long distance after Ma went to bed
weeping from tasting tamarind
for the first time in thirty years
This evocation of her father’s exile as he tastes tamarind is
beautiful and the craft understated: the way the poet moves easily
from television’s Seinfeld to immigration-laded images like
“American chop suey” to remembering father’s Tamil mother “appamma”
in an intimate conversation with the reader, ending with that
tamarind punch in the heart “for the first time in 30 years.”
Piepzna-Samarasinha then gives us “a love poem for Sakia Gunn,”
described as “a black, queer youth murdered May 11, 2003.” While
string hoppers and tamarind serve as madeleines in the first poem,
Sakia’s story inspires a sensual, frank, and whimsical reflection on
the poet persona’s growing up on Brooklyn streets and trains: “When
I was 18 I rode the N train home at 5AM/smelling like Night Queen in
a bra under a bomber jacket.” Earlier, the poet addresses Sakia: “I
know I could’ve fallen in love with you/so easy when I was
sixteen….We could’ve been taking that late train back to
Newark/falling sticky stars all over each other in the vinyl seat/my
titties poking out pussy humming/stupid fearless.”
There’s spatial sense to the ordering of the poems. The first two
lay out territory she will explore throughout the collection. It is
a space rich with longing for stories from a faraway island. It is a
landscape where a young girl discovers tastes in love and identifies
her politics with concerns of the marginal, the different, the once
left out communities—gays, Tamils, women—both in Western
metropolises like Toronto and New York and in cities elsewhere. I
say cities because this is urban poetry conceived in the developed
world but with a recent immigrant and disadvantaged
consciousness—“the guy who let me be seventeen cents short/on my
bulk food store food/making pancakes outta 46 cents a pound mix”—she
says in “1997-1999.” She complains elsewhere about six dollar juice
drinks she cannot afford.
Almost all the poems moved me, and some deserve a wide readership.
In “landmine heart,” “there is an unexploded land mine heart in
me/waiting for a footstep a breath/for troop movements a tsunami.”
In “tsunami song,” “ I am used to no one being able to find my
country on any map….Then this wave hits my television/and I am
transfixed/half a world away/and a block/ from the dosa mahal.” That
dosa mahal sounds absolutely right, like Cho fu Sa at the end of
Pound’s translation of “The River Merchant’s Wife, A Letter.” As the
poet journeys through the world’s cities, she needs to be firm with
the language she uses to bear witness and show solidarity with the
world’s downtrodden. This collection’s few weaker poems suffer from
an easy use of slogans and commonplaces. In the uneven “I didn’t
want the end times to be like this: 9/11 in seven slams,” we read
“all us brown folks/Nepali to native/it doesn’t matter to them.” Try
to identify “them,” I say to the poet. Specificity would strengthen
your argument.
—Indran Amirthanayagam
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LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA is a busy woman. The 30-year-old
U.S.-raised, Toronto-based queer Sri Lankan writer is also a
spoken-word artist, activist, event organizer and teacher.
A frequent contributor to Bitch and Colorlines, her
writing has been published in numerous the anthologies. Leah has
performed her work widely throughout North America from
immigrant-rights rallies to Yale University. She teaches writing to
queer, trans and questioning youth through Supporting Our Youth's
Pink Ink program, runs the Browngirlworld series of queer-of-colour
spoken-word events and is one of the co-founders of the Asian Arts
Freedom School, an arts and activism school for Asian/Pacific
Islander youth. Somewhere in there, she found time to write her
first book, Consensual Genocide, which has just launched.
In this candid interview, Leah speaks with novelist Elizabeth
Ruth about telling raw truths, brown-girl border crossings,
mixed-race journeys and high-femme rebellion.
ER: Leah, I’ve seen you perform spoken word live many
times. You are a quick-witted, dynamic presence on any stage, often
implicating the audience in direct ways. How do you define or
describe your work in Consensual Genocide? As poems? Bio-mythographical
snap shots? Something else?
LLP-S: They're definitely poems, but they're also me
capturing moments in time. I write to create badass beauty but also
to document who gets erased — young queer-of-colour lives,
high-femme girl lives, survivor lives, the experiences of Sri
Lankans growing up in the diaspora, the experiences of brown folks
trying to get across the border.
ER: Were there particular challenges you faced in taking
your three-dimensional sensibility and translating it to the
two-dimensional page?
LLP-S: Oh, hell yeah. That's part of why the book took so
long — 7 years. I think every spoken-word artist struggles with how
to make it look as good on the page as it sounds coming out of your
mouth — as I heard [African-American poet and fiction writer]
Sapphire say once, "you can't rock a semi-colon." There are some
artists I love who've pulled it off. For example, Suheir Hammad, who
I was blessed enough to study with this past summer, and Ishle Park
were both totally inspirations — they're both Def Poetry Jam stars
and amazing performers whose books are also beautiful. But I was
totally concerned that Consensual Genocide not come out
looking like a crappy book of spoken word that was fun on stage and
boring in print.
ER: The title of your book, Consensual Genocide, is
strong and encompasses the major themes of colonization, racism,
erasure, hunger and war. The thread that frequently ties these
themes together is the experience of passing. In the poem,
“Persistence,” for example, you write of walking Brooklyn streets as
a teen, passing as Arab, Latina, Jewish, “anything that was safe for
a minute.” Can you say more about your understanding of passing as a
coping strategy, and perhaps — since we are living in a time of war
— how you see passing as it operates in present-day Toronto or New
York?
LLP-S: For maybe the three years after 9/11 I felt under
extreme scrutiny in public space — Price Chopper, airports, the
sidewalk, you name it — as this immigrant, light-brown, could-be
Muslim/Arab woman with a weird last name on her passport and landed
status. When I was organizing the Mango Tribe show for International
Women's Day and had to pick folks up from the airport, I realized
that I didn't know where the regular arrivals exit was because I'd
never been out it. I'd always been sent out the little side door
they send you through when you've been second-staged at immigration
[told you have to go for additional questioning]. In the current
phase of low-level constant war it's ebbed a bit. I don't wear hijab
or have a Muslim last name, so I'm getting grilled less. It could
change back tomorrow.
I wanted to include those poems (like “Persistence”) because I
think the experience of being read as many things is something so
many mixed folks (and other folks) go through. But my relationship
to passing has shifted a lot from when I was in my early 20s. Back
then, I was so much more isolated as a mixed woman, the
conversations about being mixed were really different and I was more
agonized by feeling like no one saw me as who I was, feeling like I
had to prove myself. That's really changed. Not because the world is
so much more wonderful or anything, but because as I've gotten more
rooted in different Sri Lankan communities, I've gotten more
confident in myself. I think I get read as a light-skinned brown
woman in a hoodie who is probably South Asian, most of the time now.
And when people think I'm something else, it's easy to say, I'm a
Sri Lankan woman with a white mom. It's something I had to grow
into.
One thing I am clear about rejecting is passing as a survival
strategy. My parents and grandparents thought it was the only way
they were going to survive in the world, and if fascism really busts
out on my block tomorrow, who knows, I might feel the same way. But
I don't think it's really an option. I don't think cutting off
myself from my chosen family, my communities would be real survival,
and I know it would be soul death. I would rather choose to stay
inside my brown, queer communities and fight — and this has always
been a choice that mixed or light-skinned folks of colour have made.
ER: Among the various identities you render visible
through your writing, is that of sexual abuse survivor. Unlike the
excavation of a Sri Lankan identity, the excavation of abuse in the
book is treated tentatively. What do you see as the relationship
between these lost and recovered selves? Do you see similarities
between the colonization of a people and the colonization of an
individual body?
LLP-S: It's funny, because when people said things like
you just did, I'm like, "What do you mean? Incest is all through the
book!" But it is and it isn't. I was dealing with healing from
sexual abuse and dealing with coming home as a Sri Lankan at the
exact same time in my life that many of these works were written.
But I don't have a big, gory, "This is what happened" poem in the
book. It's more subtle. I have respect for other poems and poets who
go there — Sapphire's "Mickey Mouse Was A Scorpio" is one poem that
was, and is, incredibly important to me — but I think sometimes
folks think that's the only way to write about incest. I wanted to
write about the aftermath, and also, for me, my mother's abuse of me
was so intertwined with her racism that writing about them is almost
the same thing. For people of colour who survive sexual abuse, I
don't think we can deal with them separately — whether it's people
of colour or white people who are our perpetrators, sexual abuse is
always about power, and as people of colour who are survivors, being
abused is all about teaching us that we are not valuable, that the
borders of our bodies aren't respected. Whether it comes from the
racism of a white person or the internalized shit of a person of
colour, the lesson is similar.
ER: Many of the most intimate poems touch on hunger —
hunger for home, for the motherland, or for full ownership and
inhabitation of one's physical self. In one piece entitled, “eating
a $5 plate of string hoppers, I think of my father” you write that
you only saw the man cry three times in your life and once was when
you sent him a 99-cent package of tamarind candy, because it was the
first time he'd tasted tamarind in 30 years. Can you say more about
various appetites in Consensual Genocide, that aren't filled
or sated?
LLP-S: I think the main appetite that's getting filled is
the desire to get free. I mean, the poem you referenced and "Colorslut"
are all about growing up in a house where there was almost no colour
anywhere — in the clothes we could buy, on the walls, anywhere — and
growing up and running away to this world where there is hot pink
and tamarind, sex and freedom, the opposite of this tight white
rigidly contained abusive home. In a lot of poems — "good sistas",
for one — I wanted to paint this vision of a gorgeous, fractious,
high-femme diva revolutionary petunia life, where there is colour
and booty and revolutionary fabulousness. Life.
ER: You write of crossing various borders — visible and
invisible, literal and metaphoric. You are an American living in
Canada, yet publishing work in both countries, you have a family
history of being colonized and being the colonizer, and you have had
lovers who are male, female and transsexual/transgendered. You
straddle more than one “home” at all times. What advantages, as a
writer, do you think you have as a result of not standing firmly in
any single comfort zone?
LLP-S: Well, I don't think I have any choice — I am
this queer femme who dates all kinds of people who are queer and
masculine in their gender, as well as other femmes, and I’m a brown
woman living on stolen land. I don't have any choice but to be and
represent who I am, which is something most of the people in the
world are, in different ways. I guess it means I don't have to write
boring, self-reflective white artsy poems, or live in the Drake
(that kind of a high-end boutique hotel that epitomizes the
hipster-cool, gentrifying, very white and bougie "art hotel"
cultural scene you can find in many cities). But see, I think even
straight, white, moneyed folks live in different worlds, too — they
are colonizers and colonized, they probably run into a mix of
gendered and classed and raced folks all the time. They're just
oblivious to it.
ER: We are living in a time of war, and you write of war
in various forms, and of the everyday experience of terror for those
who are marginalized. Yet, you retain a level of optimism in terms
of people's ability to resist, adapt and survive. Would you say that
this book is as much about love or hope as it is about struggle?
LLP-S: Yes. For a while I was like, oh man, it's a book
full of all these depressing poems! Because I really hated
that kind of cheesy, upbeat positivity kind of poems at some open
mics, when everybody is rhyming “revolution” with “evolution” — I
was like, fuck this, I want to just tell the truth, and it's not
that cheesy! I'm a pretty sarcastic and crass person, too, and that
comes out in the poems. But damnit, sarcasm is a survival strategy!
And speaking the truth is also about love and hope, even if the
truths are hard sometimes. And there is so much beauty in the book —
in the way it documents how people just survived, regardless. I also
got the guts together to put in some love and sex poems, so you
know, that's in there too. The thing is, it's always a time
of war, and we've also always kept resisting — whether that
means painting your toenails, taking your mom to the doctor so you
can translate and advocate for her or organizing with all the folks
and moms in the waiting room so you don't have to go through the
bullshit anymore.
ER: As well as writing and publishing in recent years,
you’ve been busy mentoring younger writers through Pink Ink, and
programming your own regular performance-based event, Browngirlworld.
How do these projects influence your writing and activism?
LLP-S: Urgency. Toronto in the late 90s gave birth to me
as a writer because there were places where I could perform as a
queer woman of colour. Those spaces don't exist in the same way
anymore — it's really hard work to do event promotion and get the
community off its ass to come out! Those spaces only exist if we
make them, but it's damn hard work to be pouring out energy to
create community institutions and do your own work at the same time.
But what other choice do we have? One thing that I'm glad to come to
is that I'm really comfortable with seeing the cultural work I do as
activism. I can't deal with being in a meeting for five hours, but I
can create the spaces for political art to happen.
ER: Given the span of time in your life and the world
events you document in Consensual Genocide, this work has
been a long time coming. You obviously took your time getting it
right. How is it for you then, to have spent so much time one-on-one
with these words, and now to share them with the world?
LLP-S: For the past two weeks, I've been having the
typical writer nervous breakdown: "They suck! What do you mean, I
can't change anything after it goes to the press on Tuesday?"
Sometimes I can't stand to look at my journalism or anthology pieces
for a while after they come out, so this takes it to the next level.
Because I'm writing about incredibly personal stuff that
implicates other folks as violent — my abusive ex-partner, who still
lives in Toronto, and my family — I had to sit down and really pray
over what it meant to send this work out in the world. My abusive ex
sent me this email at 4 a.m. a year ago after he'd somehow seen the
small handmade edition of the book. He basically went on saying how
sorry he was for four pages (never mind that I'd asked him not to
contact me and instead he'd chosen to Google my email) but then at
the end quoted a whole bunch of lines out of context and kind of
threw them at me, like a big, harsh snowball — "Look how mean you
were to me!" So I had to sit with this for a while and think about
my own safety in publishing this work; was he going to go ballistic
when it really got published, and was in the library? Would all the
people who were implicated be able to hear the stories that are in
the poems? The bottom line for me is that survivors have the right
to tell our stories, and that if anyone who's been in an abusive
relationship in the kind of activist context I was and sees themself
reflected, it's worth it. I think there's actually a lot of
compassion in the poems, but there's also a demand for
accountability.
Part of the time lag was that most of the queer and feminist
presses I thought would be around to publish my work went bust
before I finished the manuscript. I totally thought Sister Vision or
Press Gang would be the ones, and then they weren't there anymore.
Most surviving presses cannot publish poetry because it's seen as a
financial loss, and there is, truthfully, a lot of horrible poetry
out there publishers don't want to be flooded with. It worked out in
the end. I self-published a limited-edition, handbound book in 2004
with my friend Jamie Munkatchy at Booklyn, and then TSAR responded
and wanted to bring it out. They're a small press that published
progressive South Asian writing, so it worked really well.
A lot of spoken-word artists I know are reaching a place where we
should have a book out — we're 30, we've gotten to a certain level
in our work — but unless you're Saul Williams, most of the time that
door is shut. The great thing about self-publishing is that all the
profits are yours and you have complete control, but your books
probably won't get into libraries or get reviewed, and you can't
submit them to the Lammies or other awards. I really wanted the book
to be accessible to anyone who wanted it, not just people who came
to a show I did. The happiest moment so far was looking up my name
in the Toronto Public Library catalogue and seeing that they've
ordered 8 copies, one of which will be in the Parkdale branch, where
I've spent so much time hanging in the poetry section of the
Black/West India Heritage collection.
In between the self-published version and this one I was able to
take out a lot of the really old pieces and put in new ones. I
didn't know you could do that and had put together this manuscript
that just had every single piece of writing I'd done since 1997.
When I was living in new York for two months this fall, I was
working with Bushra Rehman, my friend and editor, and I was moaning
about how I was gonna have to tour the book and there were all these
sucky poems and she was like, "You know you can put in new ones,
right?" Thank you, Bushra.
ER: So, given that you had to really think through what it
would mean to publish, I'm curious whether your family has read the
book?
LLP-S: No. But I'm wondering if they'll show up at either
of the two Boston launches. That would be interesting — my family in
a big trans and queer space, or in an Asian-American poetry slam.
ER: Are you working on another book-type project? What's
next from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha?
LLP-S: Once Consensual Genocide is out, I'm hoping
to steal time to finish Dirty River, which is one of those
memoir/fiction hybrids about coming of age in the mid-90s in New
York and Toronto, as a brown freaked-out girl in the middle of the
Riot Grrl race wars, straight people of colour activism and late 90s
queer woman of colour land. (I promise all the names will be
changed.) When I read Michelle Tea's, Valencia, I loved it so
much, but I was so struck by the fact that the queer girl 90s world
she documented had no people of colour in it at all, and I was like,
I need to tell the brown girl's version... or a brown girl's
version. In my head, Dirty River is half a brown girl's
Valencia, half a South Asian, 21st century version of Audre
Lorde's Zami.
I'm also working on completing Blood Memory: A Sri Lankan
Storytelling Project with my sistergirls Marian Yalini
Thambyanayagam and Varuni Tiruchelvam, both of whom are in Mango
Tribe. Marian is a spoken-word artist, dancer and theater artist,
and Varuni is a cellist who plays with Mango Tribe and Stone Forrest
Ensemble, a group that uses beatboxing, cello and violing with MCs
over the top. It's a collaborative spoken word, music and movement
performance about Sri Lankan women's and trans people's untold
stories — sex, the civil war, diaspora and exile, home. I'm really
excited to get it done, not only because what we have is completely
badass, but because we're going to create new space to be Sri
Lankan.
Finally, I'm going to Sri Lanka, for the first time in my life,
to launch Consensual Genocide at the Equal Ground LGBT Pride
Festival in Colombo, in late May. It feels like I'm waiting for a
multiple orgasm or a nervous breakdown, or both. I can't wait.
—
Elizabeth Ruth
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Toronto-based queer Sri Lankan writer, spoken-word
artist, and teacher
Leah Lakshmi
Piepzna-Samarasinha released her first published
book of poems in April 2006, Consensual Genocide.
Leah spoke with me from Toronto about her new
book, her poetry, and the re-emergence of Sri
Lanka's civil war. Clashes over the past month have
been the deadliest encounters between government
troops and Tamil Tiger rebels since the 2002
ceasefire that ended Sri Lanka's 21-year civil war.
Here's Leah:¦
Can you explain what your process was for
getting this collection of poetry together? Did you
write poems to fit the theme of the title, or did
the poems dictate the title?
I think there are actually a couple of different
themes in the book. I was writing to publishers and
trying to get query letters out. I was always like,
"I'm really good at pitching for nonfiction, but how
do you pitch poetry?" But I finally got good at it.
And I formed what this book is about - there's Sri
Lankan stuff, there's abuse survivor stuff, there's
young queer woman of color stuff, and there's stuff
about being in an abusive relationship when being in
an activist community. I also knew that I wanted to
write a book really badly, and that I wanted to have
it be part of the alternative literary canon.
I've been performing spoken word since 1998. And
I know a lot of performers my age who are maturing
as artists, who are totally ready to have a book,
who've had a really tough time getting their work
published. I was going to say if you're not on
"Def Poetry
Jam" - but even Def Poetry Jam superstars don't
necessarily get a book deal.
I really love doing spoken word performance. I
think there's something really valuable about being
the world you create on stage when you do spoken
word. But I also always have wanted to have my stuff
be in the libraries and be in print. I wanted it to
be accessible to 14-year-olds in Brooklyn or Sri
Lanka; to the whole world of people who don't come
to any given show.
I really started [writing poetry] in the early
90s, when I was in my early 20s, and there were
still small queer and feminist presses that were
publishing a lot of books of poetry and fiction and
nonfiction. Sapphire had her first book out.
Chrystos was publishing steadily. And presses like
Firebrand,
Press Gang, Kitchen Table, and Sister Vision were
publishing queer women of color on a regular basis,
including poets.
But by the time I had a collection of work
together, the presses I thought would be there for
my first book had gone bust. Sister Vision Press and
Kitchen Table Press going belly up were tremendous
losses for queer of color communities. So, it was a
process of trying to find a small press that was
still doing poetry, because a lot of the surviving
ones don't feel they can do it and stay afloat.
Which is ironic because with Def Poetry Jam, and how
insanely popular spoken word has become, there are
more people who are into poetry than ever. But it's
the way it is. I ended up with
Toronto South
Asian Review Press, an independent press that
publishes progressive South Asian writing.
Are these then a collection of poems that
you have written over the years?
Yeah. I didn't start out by saying, "OK, I want to
write a book called Consensual Genocide."
[Laughs] The title came to me probably in 2000.
Basically, I saw that the overarching theme of the
pieces in the book was the ways in which colonialism
and internalized oppression make us self-destruct as
people of color, as queer and trans people of color,
and also the ways we find to take ourselves back.
When I looked at the different issues, whether it
was partner abuse or internalized racism, or just
the experiences with Sri Lanka and it being a
postcolonial country, that was the theme that tied
it all together. The grief we carry, the damage, and
also the ways we find to undo it.
One of the first poems in the book,
"Persistence," is about the work I've done as a
mixed-race person, and as the child of two people
who did not want to talk much about their history to
get those stories back. My father had a lot of
blockages with talking about Sri Lanka, and my
parents didn't call myself or him "South Asian"
growing up. I knew I was Brown, but I had to fight
and research, and work to create an identity for
myself as a diasporic Sri Lankan woman with a White
mom.
I think a lot of us have shame around the ways in
which we're "weird" South Asians, "weird" people of
color with complicated stories. Last year I was at
Voices of Our
Nations, a writer's retreat for writers of color
that happens every year in San Francisco. And I'd
brought a poem, "You Bring Out the Sri Lankan in
Me," which is one of those version poems people
write off of
Sandra Cisneros' "You Bring Out the Mexican in
Me." I thought it was really dope. And my teacher
said, "This is a good poem. You can bring this to
any open mic and everyone would clap." Then she
paused and said, "It's not worthy of you."
Her point was that I'd written the kind of poem
that a lot of artists of color who come up in spoken
word write when we want to try to take back our
culture. We want to write this great poem that
writes about all of these positive things about our
culture in three minutes in a very simplistic way.
She said, "That's really great, but what about the
dorky fourth grader who grew up in Massachusetts,
Leah? Where is that in your poem? You're writing
this poem all about 14th century native Sri Lanka,
about heroic women warriors, and not about being
nine growing up in Massachusetts in the 80s and what
Sri Lanka was like then." Sri Lanka is me in
Massachusetts in 1984. And those stories that are
diasporic stories that don't fit in easily are what
we need to be writing.
In the poem titled, "I am not Ellen
DeGeneres," you write: "Staring into the face of
television/that says queer ten years later/and means
perky, blond, perfect." Are you angry with Ellen
DeGeneres in this poem, or are you angry at
Hollywood for this reality, or both? Doesn't
everybody have to be "perfect" in Hollywood if they
want to be successful, or are there higher,
unreachable standards for queer folks?
When I wrote the poem, it was kind of right at the
moment when mainstream White gayness hit mainstream
primetime TV. You had Ellen DeGeneres, you had "Spin
City," you had all this whitewashed land of queer
characters on TV. And it was interesting for me,
because at that point I wanted to write this poem
because I needed to remember all of the crazy things
I went through being queer when we weren't in the
media, and there was no public face of queerness,
and it was a big deal that there was one gay kiss on
"L.A. Law" and then they wrote the character out in
the next episode.
The experiences I had growing up in Worcester
[Massachusetts] was that we were not protected, we
were not sheltered. There were a lot of youth I knew
who tested HIV positive. And looking at the now, not
much has changed. There's this public face of
queerness—"Queer as Folk," "The L Word," "Ellen"—but
they don't capture the experiences of queer and
trans youth of color coming out, which is being
kicked out by your family, having people trying to
beat you up, trying to survive.
I would go to mostly straight people of color
poetry events and people when they found out I was
queer would be like, "Oh yeah, I like Ellen
DeGeneres." I'm just like, "Oh, my God. No,
like her condo and mine have very little similar."
It's about seeing this whitewashed version of
queerness and how it doesn't reflect the actual
lives of 99 percent of queer people in the world.
I watch "The L Word," and OK, if you're starving
and someone offers you a cracker, you're not going
to say no to it. It's a cracker. It's a beautifully
shot, really well-written cracker. There are certain
individual things that they did that I can sort of
relate to, like the crazy grant officer lady because
I know from drama I've had with grants! But I do not
live in a million-dollar house in Los Angeles. I
just think about how it would look if it was our
lives. It would be queer and trans people of color
who are like working in a sex toy store or at the
shelter, living in three-room apartments, shopping
at Target. That would be more realistic, but it's
probably not going to be on Showtime any time soon.
You end your collection of poems with the
war in Iraq and where you are in terms of how you're
feeling about it. I don't know if you're still
feeling this way, but you write: "I'm not marching
to the consulate today/I stay home light another
candle/I don't have a tongue to fight them
with/except my tongue my heart." Can you talk more
about this, and if you are still in that place?
Yes and no. I mean, when I wrote that poem I
basically wanted to talk about a couple of things:
one, that for a lot of people who are South Asian or
Arab, the mainstream anti-war movement doesn't work
for us. When it's our homelands being bombed it's a
different thing to figure out how to protest because
it's not just about politically being like, "I
oppose this." It hits a real emotional place. And we
have to figure out ways to live with our grief and
despair and to find ways to resist in ways that work
for us. And to honor all the ways in which we resist
that aren't necessarily about marching in front of
the consulate, that are about everyday survival.
So, I'm writing about that. And I'm also writing
about the importance of remembering. Those of us who
continue to resist and survive, and those of us who
didn't. Being able to remember our stories, being
able to tell what it's been like to be living in
these times, are all acts of resistance.
There's this book called Hope in the Dark
by Rebecca Solnit that I've been reading. One thing
she talks about is all the protests that led up to
the Iraq war. Millions of people took to the streets
and we actually thought, "Oh, my God, we're actually
going to make a difference." And then we were
emotionally devastated when Bush began to bomb it.
She says that for sure one way you can look at it
is, "Oh, shit, we had all these millions of people
in the street and he still attacked." But at the
same time, another way of looking at is that, yeah,
he went ahead and attacked even though thousands of
international protesters told him not to. But they
took away "Shock and Awe" after only a few days when
originally it was supposed to go on for months.
That's not the total victory that we hoped for, but
it still made change. It created networks of
organizing that are still in place. It shifted the
way in which the war in Iraq was and is being
debated. She talks a lot about how we don't know
what the future is going to be like, and that what
changes our actions can initiate things we can't
see. That history isn't written yet. We make it.
How does the lack of coverage of the war
in Sri Lanka make you feel?
Crazy. Infuriated. It's ridiculous when you're in
the position of almost being jealous of friends who
are Arab because their devastation gets coverage.
The biggest coverage we ever got was when the
tsunami hit [which killed 30,000 people]. The next
biggest was when M.I.A. [Maya Arulpragasam, Sri
Lankan singer/hip-hop artist] blew up. It's crazy!
You have a 21-year-old civil war: at least 100,000
people get murdered; massive, massive, massive
flights from the country; millions of people leave;
and it's not that big of a country, but there's
maybe two lines in the international section.
People in the Sri Lankan community know. But if
you read The New York Times, you would
never know that anything was happening. We actually
had an incident a couple of weeks ago when a UN aid
workers got killed, but that was basically it.
But it really brings it home the reason why
Lebanon or Gaza are on the front cover. It's because
the United States and Israel want oil. Sri Lanka
doesn't have oil. We have pretty beaches, but there
are places with just as pretty beaches a closer
flight from North America. And it's Brown people
killing Brown people. And it's not just Sri Lanka
that faces this kind of mainstream erasure. It's
Sudan, many places in Africa, many places in Latin
America, many places in Southeast Asia. One reason I
write is to break that silence.
I want to be able to record what it's like to be
Sri Lankan in the diaspora and in Toronto, watching
this go down. I think that's one thing we can do as
writers, is to be able to both record peoples'
histories and witness what's going on and play that
sacred role.
Have you done book readings for
Consensual Genocide?
I did a 14-city tour: Toronto, Ottawa, the Bay Area,
Minneapolis, New York, Boston, and finished up in
the second-ever queer Pride in Sri Lanka. It's had
been a while since I had been back. So, that was
pretty incredible.
What kind of feedback have you received
for Consensual Genocide?
People are really hungry. People really love the
book. I think a lot of people are really hungry to
see stuff that is spoken word and stuff about being
queer of color and South Asian and all of that. We
need to see our experiences reflected.
I think it's really rare to see queer poc [people
of color] writing that is not self-published. [Consensual
Genocide is] an actual book. It sold really
well. My publisher was at first, "Well, we'll see
how long we can keep this in print." But we've sold
out half of the first run already! And that's just
by word of mouth and community stuff! The press I
did the book with has a really small budget, and
only publishes six books a year. But, because it's
in Toronto, and because I grew up in the States, I'm
back there performing a lot. It's really been about
using the feminist, queer, people of color,
artistic, political networks.
I remember reading about
Dorothy
Allison talking about her experiences publishing
Bastard Out of Carolina, and the mainstream
press she signed the book onto said, "OK, we're
going to have all the publicity money go to one big
ad in Publisher's Weekly." And she was
like, "No, no. Give me back the money." And she
bought one of those train tickets where you can make
50 stops across the states. And she was like "I just
toured for two months and slept on every one of my
ex-girlfriends' futons and that's what sold the
first printing of the book."
When did you really first start writing
poetry?
I remember writing haikus in grade 4 and being
really excited. I remember writing stories based on
"Battle of the Planets"when I was 10. As a kid what
I would want to be, and I would say, is a writer.
But I really had no concept of what that meant. I
just knew I loved to read and it sounded better than
the other options that were out there. And then I
was like, "Do people actually make a living out of
it?" And my mom was like, "No." [Laughs]
But I read, and I wanted to be like the people
who I read. My mom was all about me taking a lot of
books out of the library, and that I was going to go
to college, and be the first person in our family to
go to college.
Then when I moved to New York, I was living in
the Lower East Side paycheck to paycheck and I went
to the Nuyorican
[Poets Cafe] all the time. It was a really
different time. At that point, no one had any sense
that they were going to make any money from their
poetry. So, it was much more about people getting up
and telling their truth for three minutes. And it
was full of all different kinds of folks really
respecting each other. Where you could have a young
Jewish dyke next to Latino hiphop next to a
65-year-old elder and everyone was hearing each
other.
I hear a lot of my youth now saying, "Being in
college is destroying my ability to write
creatively,"and that was my experience. I was an
English major going to these classes and I was
reading June Jordan and writing all this stuff about
being a survivor, and I was sitting next to these
White youth from Long Island who were trying to
sound like Jack Kerouac, and I was like, "I'm not
sharing my shit with these people!"
And this was at the New School for Social
Research, which was a pretty progressive school that
actually, at the time, also had a lot of students of
color because it used to be cheaper than any other
alternative college out there. There's actually this
one poem, "Don't Fuck Anyone You Wouldn't Want to
Be," that's the oldest poem in the book, and it's my
no-more-scary-White-boys-as-lovers poem. And I wrote
that, and my teacher afterwards actually came up to
me after class and said, "You know the penis is a
beautiful thing and you have to learn to respect
it." [Laughs] And I was like, "Oh my God! This is so
creepy!" And he was like, "I just find it really
disturbing that the penis can be replaced by the
platano [plantain] so easily in your poetry."
And unfortunately, with the queer/trans youth
writing group that I run, we've done interviews and
people are like, "So, why it still important to have
a space for queer youth to write?" And I'm like, you
know, even now, even though their fellow teachers or
fellow students aren't necessarily overly
homophobic, it's not necessarily a place where they
can tell their stories about being queer and
everything else they are.
Were you ever really nervous to read and
perform your poetry?
Oh, my God, are you kidding? I mean, recently,
someone told me that I look fearless up on stage,
and I was like, "Wow, thank you, but it took a
really long time to get there."
The thing about any kind of performance is that
fear that you're going to get up there and if you
suck people are going to throw tomatoes at you.
[Laughs] When you're not writing about stuff in the
abstract, when it's about your life, that stuff gets
really personal and really vulnerable. It's not
like you're going up there reading a poem about
oranges! It's about your family. Sri Lanka. Being an
incest survivor. I am truly grateful to communities
out there where we can perform our stuff and get
thanked for it because there are still community
places where we're not, unfortunately.
What advice do you have for someone who
wants to write a book of poems?
Unfortunately, because of Amazon.com and Borders, a
lot of small presses went bankrupt and the small
presses that are still around will publish on their
websites, "We don't publish poetry because it
doesn't make money." I think that's really ironic
because within the last decade, there are more
people who will buy it now more than ever before.
I also think especially for spoken word, for many
people, it's hard to make the transition from stage
to page. Sapphire said once, "You can't rock a
semi-colon" It's true. With the oral tradition, you
can really make a poem really new every time that
you're up there. But when you're publishing, that's
what's going to be down forever. Don't be afraid to
take it seriously. What you write could save
someone's life. Lots of lives have been saved by
books. That's why we do this.
On the technical side of things: To publish
poetry, you don't really need an agent. Check out
the publishers of the books you love, and check out
their websites for submission guidelines. Think
about self-publishing your work. If you can learn
bookmaking skills you can make something as or more
beautiful than a traditional publisher. Booklyn.com
is a great source of info. Plus, you get to keep all
the money!
Don't expect that they're going to pay for a
17-city tour with first-class sights. And no one
cares more about your work than you, so it's going
to be on you to get your work to who needs it. Think
about the different community bookstores and slams
where you already know people. Let all the magazines
that you love know it exists. And hit up your
library.
I do feel that there's this new wave of people
who are maturing right now and it's going to be a
renaissance of writing in print by radical people of
color, and queer and trans people of color. I hope.
We're good at thinking creatively to find ways to
make something out of nothing, and people are
getting sick of the same old. I'm really inspired by
examples like
RedBone Press, where Lisa Moore is doing an
incredible job of publishing Black queer writing
that shines, and getting it out there to the world.
Are you supporting yourself by your writing
or do you have a day job?
I quit my day job this year! I worked in nonprofit
jobs for years. I was a rape-crisis line worker for
four years and then I worked on a tenant rights
hotline. But I finally worked my way to the point
where this is my job. It does mean that I have 20
little jobs. [Laughs] I do a lot of arts education
gigs, I perform, I write articles, publish, and
there is the wonder known as Canadian arts granting.
In the Canadian NEA [National Endowment for the
Arts] there's a spoken word department, and the guy
who runs it is Native. This would so not happen in
the U.S. [Laughs]
But it's not easy. It still means a lot of
hustle, but right now it's worth it. I see so many
brilliant writers who are stuck in the 9-to-5 or
nonprofit activist burnout hell who want to create
but are stuck. I want us to share strategies so we
can get our work out there in the world. We are the
ones we've been waiting for, and our work is needed.
As someone with working-class roots, I know how huge
it is for us to take ourselves and our work
seriously. There are so many stories that only we
can tell and we need to hustle and support each
other and make ways for them to be in libraries, in
jail cells, in 10th grade classrooms, and at queer
youth drop-ins everywhere.
—
Celina
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