Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - Dirty River: a Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

Dirty River

DIRTY RIVER

Copyright 2015 by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any meansgraphic, electronic, or mechanicalwithout the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

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Canada

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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada (through the Canada Book Fund) and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program) for its publishing activities.

Cover illustration by Cristina Carrera

Design by Gerilee McBride

wrong is not yours was previously published in Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinhas Bodymap. Toronto, ON: Mawenzi House Publishers, 2015

Quote from Eating Salt by Lisa Kahaleole Hall in Names We Call Home: Autobiography on Racial Identity, edited by Becky Thompson and Sangeeta Tyagi (Routledge, 1996) used with permission of the author.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi, 1975, author

Dirty river: a queer femme of color dreaming her way home / Leah

Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55152-601-0 (epub)

1. Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi, 1975. 2. Poets, Canadian (English)21st centuryBiography. 3. Sexual minority womenCanadaBiography. 4. Minority authorsCanadaBiography. I. Title.

PS8631.I46Z53 2015 C811.6 C2015-903471-X

C2015-904761-7

The Recipe

Cayenne. Turmeric. Cloves. Allspice. Cinnamon. Cardamom. Cumin. Sichuan pepper. Fennel. Curry leaf. Mustard seed. Pomegranate. Breadfruit. Sorrel. Soursop. Coconut. Cocoplum. June plum. Lime. Mango. Tamarind. Sweetsop. Carilli. Habenero pepper. Ackee n Saltfish. Jerk chicken. Ting. Peas an Rice. Shrimps. Curry Goat. Doubles. Roti. Fry Dumpling. Macaroni Pie. Crab. Snapper fish. Conch Fritters. Healing herbs. Herb garden. Vegetable gardens. The Humber River. Baby bats. Zebras. Gazelles. Sea creatures. Seashells. The ocean. Waves. Our countries. The two-thirds world. Oxygen. Breath. Breathing. Our languages. Dialect. Ebonix. Pidgin n Patois. Rastamouse. Parenting. New life. Midwives. Black kids. Black n brown kids. Di Youth Dem. Sharing. Learning. Unlearning. Unschooling. Freeschool. Africentric School. Writing. Poems. Rhythm. Building. The Movement. The Movement for Black Lives. #BlackLivesMatter. Transformation. The Transformative. LGBTT2QQ1. B(lack)I(ndigenous)POC. Thinking. Remembering. Tearing down walls to reveal our raw, bleeding, beating hearts. Healing. Fighting. Bleeding. And. Dying FREE. Reading. Getting read. Vogue. Suicide drop. Snaps. Dancing. Jump up. Fucking. Lovers. Sweating. Moaning. Cuming. Kink. Caning. Flogging. Games. Sxting. Pussy Pulsing. Dildos. Screaming. Hardcore. Grindin. Grindin on that wood. Beyonc. Sa-Roc. Jah Cure. Afrikan Boy. Lady Saw. LAL. Angel Haze. CeCile. Tanya Stephens. G98.7. Jean Grae my blood is a million stories. The Jean Grae Show. Katt Williams. JOKES. Laughing. Kickin it on the couch. Restin. Doing nails. Enhanced eyelashes. Dog-ear fitted. Fashion. Button-downs. Mini-skirts. Hair wraps. Kicks. The Spiritual. The Stars. The Moon. Fire. Ritual. Meditation. Tarot. Catharsis. The Altar. Altered States. Rum an Juice. Spliffs. Pills. Getting carried away. Going too far. Harm reduction. Being reined back in. Being humbled. Accountability. Chatting. Chattaz. Talkin. Talkin di tings. The hair salon. The barber. Connection. Exchange. Being Alone. Being quiet. Being heard. Being seen. Being held. Soulmates. Being loved. Being in love. Loving. LOVE. COMMUNITY. FAMILY. LeRoi Newbold

I love the word survival. It always sounds to me like a promise. It makes me wonder sometimes though, how do I define the shape of my impact upon this earth? Audre Lorde

Sometimes, youre so busy surviving you forget you have. David Mura

I got guides, angels, ancestors, and homies / Pick me up when I dont know where Im going / Home. Gabriel Teodros

for all the adult runaways

and mostly, for Lisa Amin.

Table of Contents

Contents

This book is not The Courage to Heal and its not Push. Its not When Youre Ready or No: A Womans Word or any of the other brutal, pastel-covered incest books of the lesbian, feminist 70s and 80s. Its not an incest horror story book, and its not palatable, either. In the end, I dont get normal. I get something else.

Theres uplift, but its not a straight shot. Im not overcoming my terrible pain, my terrible, horrible, tragic lost-innocence childhood. My therapist is not a major character in it, and the therapy sessions, court dates, and talking with nice policemen, ditto.

This book is something else. Its about how running like fucking hell at twenty-one and living in an apartment with shit-gray wall-to-wall carpet, a weedy leaning tree out back, and a bunch of dandelions you eat for greens when youre broke, a yellow fluorescent light, a bathtub, and a half-busted door that doesnt completely fill the doorway but still locks can feel like paradise. Can be paradise.

The thing I always wanted to say is that surviving abuse sucks.

But its also a choose-your-own-adventure story.

The hero(ine) sets off on a journey of lockdown, screaming at Christmas/Eid/Pesach, fucked-up yelling, a bus ticket, changing and un-listing your phone number, writing that mammoth email/letter and sending it to your parents, poverty, getting a stable girlfriend, and then everything falling apart again.

This is a road map. True romance. Leaving America, finding a one-room apartment, true brown love revolution and bullshit, finding yourself in your own body memories, chronic illness, brown sisterfemmes, homemade Diwalis, walking away, and building a new family. Not the easy way that we brown girls think about it sometimes. Those words, Family and Home, are so seductive, especially when we put Chosen in front of it. But theyre not simple. Not simple at all.

Its heroic. Not heartwarming.

Throw in a little undocumented immigration, sex work, brown-on-brown domestic violence, and the struggle for social justice, plus A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Queer Brown Femme, and youve got something.

Sometimes surviving abuse isnt terrible. Sometimes, when you leave your whole life behind, it feels blissfully free. Stepping away from everything youve known. The bliss of your very first door that shuts all the way. Wind between your legs. Stopping everything that happened for seven generations.

Free. Free. Free.

Come in. Let me tell you the story.

I got on the Greyhound to Toronto at Port Authority in New York when I was twenty-one, with two backpacks, a tight black vintage slip, and a pair of fourteen-hole Docs. That was it. You only need one outfit if its fabulous.

One of the bags was the fake-Guatemalan hot pink and lime green tote Rafaels mami had given me on my last visit to Toronto, drooling out clothes and cloth menstrual pads from its open top. The other was the massive army backpack Id been hauling around for the past few New York years, stuffed full of textbooks and groceries from the Park Slope food co-op and pepper spray, all of it always inducing massive lumbar pain.