Mai’a Williams - This Is How We Survive: Revolutionary Mothering, War, and Exile in the 21st Century

Part diary, part travelogue, part black feminist manifesto, This Is How We Survive by Maia Williams charts one womans journey across global warscapes as she confronts and negotiates the impact of human conflict on the mothering project. Throughout, Williams is a brave witness, a warrior, questioning what we might do to rescue our humanity. There is an urgency in the writing here, for Williams understands, deeply, that motherhood is not simply the act of giving birth; it is an understanding of the needs of the world.

Alexis De Veaux, author of Dont Explain: A Song of Billie Holiday and Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde

Maias ongoing journey is about mothering as a daily revolution, brought into focus by living and loving at major revolutionary sites of our contemporary world. From Palestine to Egypt, Chiapas, Berlin, and especially the U.S. Midwest, Maia shares her experiences of navigating the intimate intergenerational impact of a constant state of political and personal war with detail and a crucial side-eye. This book is an opportunity to see the life you are living, and lives you would never see otherwise, in new and interconnected ways.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of M Archive: After the End of the World

Magical, poetic, adventurous, eye-opening tales of global community organizing and resistance. Maia breaks the hold of American mind control, despair, and isolation with tales of gatherings around the world of everyday revolutionaries who do not have the privilege to decide whether or not to engage or fight for their lives.

China Martens, author of The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends & Others

I drank down Maia Williamss This Is How We Survive like a glass of delicious water hitting me where I was the most thirsty. Williams gives us the story weve been waiting for and deeply needing, about the ways Black, Indigenous, and Brown women and mothers across the globe birth freedom struggle as they open their homes, hold late-night cigarette conversations, and insist that everyone be present to the work of liberation. Her work, and her lifes story, is crucial to what will bring us home.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, writer and organizer, author of Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

In reading the work of Maia Williams, its hard not to be excited by the sense of possibility.

Hip Mama

This Is How We Survive redefines revolution beyond the headline grabbing events to the everyday resilience of families living under ever-present threats of bombings, assaults, arrests, and disappearances. This book will push you to expand and reimagine your definitions and ideas of revolution.

Victoria Law, author of Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women

This Is How We Survive: Revolutionary Mothering, War, and Exile in the 21st Century

Maia Williams

2019 PM Press.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 9781629635569

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018931529

Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com

Interior design by briandesign

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

PM Press

PO Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623 www.pmpress.org

Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.

www.thomsonshore.com

Let me tell you a story about migration, about movement, the back and forth of love. Across boundaries and borders, across heartbreak and forgiveness. Let me tell you how we got free, got imprisoned, broke out, broke down, and got up to fight once again. Let me tell you about memory, about resistance, and yes about mothering. This is a story for these times. About what it takes to create love in the face of fascism. The war is everywhere. The war is here. And this is how we are going to survive the 21st century.

When I first became a mother, my politicized communities back in the United States frowned on the whole thing like it was a sellout to consumerist normalcy. Revolution, they believed, was fought in the streets with no concern for the babies on our backs or the underpaid babysitters at our apartments or the multigenerational conversations that happened over dinner-making.

This kind of thinking hasnt gotten us very far.

We dont need angry masculinity to fight angry masculinity. We dont need the mind-sets of colonialism and enslavement to save us from the genocidal legacies of colonialism and enslavement.

So whats the real alternative to this shit-show of a white capitalist war machine? Maybe it starts with centering femmes, mothers, and children. Welcome to Maia Williamss revolutionary love experiment, a dynamic test kitchen of radical reenvisioning that will affirm, inspire, and transform the way you think about and engage in parenting, direct action, and self-preservation.

At turns empowered in her defiance and plowed over by cops and doctors, our mama-guide through these pages never claims to have all the answers, but shes willing to take us along on the learning curve. Because this is real life, and time is of the essence.

These are stories of real revolutions blooming every day in everyday communities all over the world. These are stories of femmes, mothers, and children centering each other. This is the resistance we dont see on TV.

In times of quickening instability, Maia knows that its easy to feel overwhelmed, to succumb to the fears that late-stage capitalism feeds on, to get depressed. And its not that she doesnt feel these ways sometimesits just that she insists on living and standing up to power anyway.

When she meets a mother in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo who envisions a society that would reward her sons for working toward the good of the community and not for destroying the community, Maias ethos, the ethos of this book, crystalizes: We are talking about moral liberation here. We are talking about centering love instead of greed.

Maia does it the way Maia does it. This book will have you strategizing ways to do it the ways youll do it. Because this is how we survive. Its ancient and brand new. Its radical love. Its the kind of revolution that multigenerational, politicized communities everywhere are ready for.

Ariel Gore

There is no end

To what a living world

Will demand of you

Octavia Butler

Ive been accused of being impatient. Its true. Im impatient. I dont have time to fuck around. None of us do. There is hard work to be done now. And those of us on the marginswe mamas, caretakers, femmes, black aunties, lovers, and fightersthe work is on us. Its not fair that this work is on us, but it is. No one else is going to do it.

Have you seen white people for the past five hundred years, their colonization and enslavements, their genocides and exploitation of the natural world? The delusions they tell themselves that they are somehow so separate from the natural world, that they can destroy the world, each other, and us andstill survive? They are a mess.