Powerful book will change you
Care Work: Leah Lakshmi PiepznaSamarasinha | Arsenal Pulp Press $19.95, 266 pages
Imagine being a brown woman in a racist society, a disabled queer “femme” in a society that mainly values the masculine and the able bodied, and a person who lives with profound sorrow and depression in a society that wants everyone to be “positive.”
Welcome to the difficult life of author, performance artist, poet, event organizer and disability justice activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and welcome to her remarkable new book of essays, Care Work.
The essays in this wide-ranging collection include an informal history of disability justice organizing in Toronto, a definition of disability justice that articulates the demands a commitment to this form of radical love and organizing make on other social justice movements, and on the larger society. It includes celebrations of the networks of mutual support created by the author and other “crip activists” and illuminating meditations on femme identity.
She also includes a wonderfully honest, funny and hot account of how she and others live full sexual lives in the their differently abled bodies. This brilliant chapter alone is worth the price of admission, dispelling as it does the commonly held myth that the disabled (a word the author uses often and comfortably in contrast to some other activists and writers who object to it) lead lives scrubbed of all erotic energy and activity by their physical challenges.
This powerful text may shock and scare you, and will, if you are one of the temporarily able bodied, change the way you look at those who live with chronic pain, mobility challenges and non-standard cognitive and emotional lives. This is a difficult and necessary book, luminous with fierce love and commitment to freedom and dignity.
Piepzna-Samarasinha won the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry in 2012 and tells the story of her life in her searing, tender memoir Dirty River, published in 2015. She ran away from America to Toronto and still calls that city her hometown, although she has more recently lived in the Bay Area, where she has been active in organizing performance arts groups highlighting disabled actors, writers and technicians.
Don’t imagine that this woman wants your pity. She demands your respect, and invites us all to join her in a long, often messy journey toward justice for all, a society that leaves no one behind.
Highly recommended.
Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at tos65@ telus.net