Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha - The Future Is Disabled - Prophecies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs

Groundbreaking, hilarious, and brilliantly written, this book is a vital manual for navigating disabled grief, joy, and survival in pandemic times. If you need advice on how to crip mutual aid, how to make revolutionary disabled art, or how to make some really good chicken soup, this book has you covered. The Future is Disabled cements Piepzna-Samarasinhas status as one of the most important disability thinkers of our generation. They make the disabled future absolutely irresistible.

JINA B. KIM, assistant professor of English and of the Study of Women and Gender, Smith College

The Future Is Disabled is a timely and necessary collection of essays about what disability justice is, has been, and could be. It contains the disabled stories, secrets, knowledge, humor, and creativity that we need now and what we will need to create the just futures we deserve. The brown cripqueer femme love and hope and rage and grief contained in these pages is astounding and necessary a gift to us all. Its the kind of book you dog-ear, write in, quote from memory, and pass along to every disabled-even-if-they-dont-use-that-word friend, lover, comrade, and fellow artist you hope to make a better world with. Its a community building tool and a personal balm for anyone invested in collective liberation, especially disabled people of color. Buy it. Read it. Pass it on.

SAMI SCHALK, author of Black Disability Politics

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha has created a guidebook for Deaf, Mad and disabled activists and artists everywherea love letter to all of us in these times of change and speculative futures turned into lived realities. The Future Is Disabled dares to dream of a different kind of futureand asks us to consider how we will show up for each other in these new realities. There are stories about our newly passed on kin and strategies for building mutual aid and DI groups from scratch. This book is everything we need in a moment of profound change, and at a time when the disabled and Mad futures described by Octavia Butler are settling in around us. Thank you, Leah, for helping us to dream, and helping us to consider what we need to do to survive into the future.

SYRUS MARCUS WARE, co-editor of Until We Are Free: Black Lives Matter in Canada

The Future is Disabled moves us past disability as an identity category, or awareness of disability justice as an anti-oppression check mark. By addressing her beloved community on her own terms, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha teaches us that disability justice is a possible world that already exists, full of the love we deserve and the complexity we already embody.

ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS, author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

The Future is Disabled is the kind of world making that has until now been reserved for science fiction. This book is committed to community, blazingly experimental, and embedded in the practical work of everyday disability justice.

The Future is Disabled speaks in a multitude of voices, including words of wisdom, interludes, herbal remedies, recipes, autistic long form, and access riders, to provide clear instructions on how disabled people can get free. Throughout this groundbreaking work, Piepzna-Samarasinha finds meaning in recent history, and leaves readers with no doubt that the disabled future is now.

Piepzna-Samarasinha has provided us with a primer, a language, a lucid image, and a guide to disability justice, one of the most vital and rapidly expanding movements of our time.

With reverence for the work of their contemporaries, elders, and the next generation of disability justice thinkers, Piepzna-Samarasinha sets out to honor, elegize, and create disabled and chronically ill citizen scientists. The Future is Disabled will leave any crip saying, I could be disabled like that.

Cyre Jarelle Johnson, author of Slingshot

THE FUTURE IS DISABLED

Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs

ARSENAL PULP PRESS VANCOUVER

THE FUTURE IS DISABLED

Copyright 2022 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 licence from Access Copyright.

ARSENAL PULP PRESS

Suite 202 211 East Georgia St.

Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6

Canada

arsenalpulp.com

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 and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program) for its publishing activities.

Arsenal Pulp Press acknowledges the xmkym (Musqueam), Swxw7mesh (Squamish), and slilwta (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, custodians of the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories where our office is located. We pay respect to their histories, traditions, and continuous living cultures and commit to accountability, respectful relations, and friendship.

Lyrics from THIS IS A PROTEST FOR YOUR HEART!!! by Left at London are reprinted with permission.

Pod Mapping for Mutual Aid is reprinted with permission of Rebel Sidney Fayola Black Burnett.

Cover and text design by Jazmin Welch

Edited by Lisa Factora-Borchers

Copy edited by Jade Colbert

Proofread by Rachel Spence

Printed and bound in Canada

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

Title:The future is disabled : prophecies, love notes and mourning songs / Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

Names: Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi, 1975-author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220228779 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220228957 | ISBN 9781551528915 (softcover) | ISBN 9781551528922 (HTML)

Subjects: LCSH: People with disabilities. | LCSH: People with disabilitiesSocial conditionsForecasting. | LCSH: Social justice.

Classification: LCC HV1568 .P54 2022 | DDC 305.9/08dc23

For Stacey, LL, Carrie Ann, Mel Baggs, Elandria, Don, Eugenia, and Graeme, forever.

And for all of usliving, dead, and not yet borncreating the disabled future.

Disability justice dreams got me this far, and Im going to keep betting on them.

STACEY PARK MILBERN

I could cut my wrists up

I could put my fists up

Either way, I cant cheat death

I dont wanna live, thats fine

Cause the years will still go by

I dont wanna miss them

I dont wanna miss them

I dont wanna miss them

Not this time.

LEFT AT LONDON, THIS IS A PROTEST FOR YOUR HEART!!!

Hard times are coming, when well be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. Well need writers who can remember freedompoets, visionariesrealists of a larger reality.