Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Some lines from Bodymap:

I want you to love me
after the lipstick wears off

white bois with eager buts
and nonprofit movement jobs you wanted
are just like whole foods take out:
when you are too tired
you can pay too much
for a tasteless version of your culture
that promises it won’t kill you.
afterwards, a greasy crunched compostable box
and debit charge so much more expensive
than you budgeted for.

This border is rotten meat, a hallucination, a wavering line
a stupid idea. Can’t we blink and it'll be gone?

you know your words are like every indie rapper's third album. it’s weird at the not really top.

and then go explode the whole known world
which is like explore but with just one letter different
you know.

.… (more)

I believe in transformative justice like I believe in abolishing prisons and police, like I believe in a utopian anarchist society; it's mostly theory and there are many steps to achieving these far-fetched goals and dreams. There are a lot of steps we have to take to get there, and they make take generations if ever to achieve, but there are people out there doing the work to make it happen. The ends don't justify the means; the ends are the means. I think this is where anarchists and communists disagree.

Beyond Survival is three hundred plus pages of writings by people who have put in the work, against all odds. There are stories of success (few), stories of learning from failures (many), interviews with people who have been knee deep in accountability processes for decades, and more. Progress has been made and there are pockets in the world where communities don't call the police or rely on the injustice system when someone has been wronged. They get together as human beings and figure out what works best for everyone involve to try and make things as right as possible.

As much as I thoroughly enjoyed this book there were definitely parts that I skipped through because I found them irrelevant or boring, but that doesn't mean everyone will. This is the kind of book that I'm glad to own because I know (hope?) there will be many times where I take it off the shelf and use it to help guide my dream of creating a better world.

Every community should have at least one copy of this book, and you can order yours from AK Press.… (more)