Toronto-based queer Sri Lankan writer, spoken-word artist, and teacher Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha released her first published book of poems in April 2006, Consensual Genocide.
Leah spoke with me from Toronto about her new book, her poetry, and the re-emergence of Sri Lanka’s civil war. Clashes over the past month have been the deadliest encounters between government troops and Tamil Tiger rebels since the 2002 ceasefire that ended Sri Lanka’s 21-year civil war.
Here’s Leah…
Can you explain what your process was for getting this collection of poetry together? Did you write poems to fit the theme of the title, or did the poems dictate the title?
I think there are actually a couple of different themes in the book. I was writing to publishers and trying to get query letters out. I was always like, “I’m really good at pitching for nonfiction, but how do you pitch poetry?� But I finally got good at it. And I formed what this book is about—there’s Sri Lankan stuff, there’s abuse survivor stuff, there’s young queer woman of color stuff, and there’s stuff about being in an abusive relationship when being in an activist community. I also knew that I wanted to write a book really badly, and that I wanted to have it be part of the alternative literary canon.
I’ve been performing spoken word since 1998. And I know a lot of performers my age who are maturing as artists, who are totally ready to have a book, who’ve had a really tough time getting their work published. I was going to say if you’re not on “Def Poetry Jam�—but even Def Poetry Jam superstars don’t necessarily get a book deal.
I really love doing spoken word performance. I think there’s something really valuable about being the world you create on stage when you do spoken word. But I also always have wanted to have my stuff be in the libraries and be in print. I wanted it to be accessible to 14-year-olds in Brooklyn or Sri Lanka; to the whole world of people who don’t come to any given show.
I really started [writing poetry] in the early 90s, when I was in my early 20s, and there were still small queer and feminist presses that were publishing a lot of books of poetry and fiction and nonfiction. Sapphire had her first book out. Chrystos was publishing steadily. And presses like Firebrand, Press Gang, Kitchen Table, and Sister Vision were publishing queer women of color on a regular basis, including poets.
But by the time I had a collection of work together, the presses I thought would be there for my first book had gone bust. Sister Vision Press and Kitchen Table Press going belly up were tremendous losses for queer of color communities. So, it was a process of trying to find a small press that was still doing poetry, because a lot of the surviving ones don’t feel they can do it and stay afloat. Which is ironic because with Def Poetry Jam, and how insanely popular spoken word has become, there are more people who are into poetry than ever. But it’s the way it is. I ended up with Toronto South Asian Review Press, an independent press that publishes progressive South Asian writing.
Are these then a collection of poems that you have written over the years?
Yeah. I didn’t start out by saying, “OK, I want to write a book called Consensual Genocide.� [Laughs] The title came to me probably in 2000. Basically, I saw that the overarching theme of the pieces in the book was the ways in which colonialism and internalized oppression make us self-destruct as people of color, as queer and trans people of color, and also the ways we find to take ourselves back. When I looked at the different issues, whether it was partner abuse or internalized racism, or just the experiences with Sri Lanka and it being a postcolonial country, that was the theme that tied it all together. The grief we carry, the damage, and also the ways we find to undo it.
One of the first poems in the book, “Persistence,� is about the work I’ve done as a mixed-race person, and as the child of two people who did not want to talk much about their history to get those stories back. My father had a lot of blockages with talking about Sri Lanka, and my parents didn’t call myself or him “South Asian� growing up. I knew I was Brown, but I had to fight and research, and work to create an identity for myself as a diasporic Sri Lankan woman with a White mom.
I think a lot of us have shame around the ways in which we’re “weird� South Asians, “weird� people of color with complicated stories. Last year I was at Voices of Our Nations, a writer’s retreat for writers of color that happens every year in San Francisco. And I’d brought a poem, “You Bring Out the Sri Lankan in Me,� which is one of those version poems people write off of Sandra Cisneros’ “You Bring Out the Mexican in Me.� I thought it was really dope. And my teacher said, “This is a good poem. You can bring this to any open mic and everyone would clap.� Then she paused and said, “It’s not worthy of you.�
Her point was that I’d written the kind of poem that a lot of artists of color who come up in spoken word write when we want to try to take back our culture. We want to write this great poem that writes about all of these positive things about our culture in three minutes in a very simplistic way. She said, “That’s really great, but what about the dorky fourth grader who grew up in Massachusetts, Leah? Where is that in your poem? You’re writing this poem all about 14th century native Sri Lanka, about heroic women warriors, and not about being nine growing up in Massachusetts in the 80s and what Sri Lanka was like then.� Sri Lanka is me in Massachusetts in 1984. And those stories that are diasporic stories that don’t fit in easily are what we need to be writing.
In the poem titled, “I am not Ellen DeGeneres,� you write: “Staring into the face of television/that says queer ten years later/and means perky, blond, perfect.� Are you angry with Ellen DeGeneres in this poem, or are you angry at Hollywood for this reality, or both? Doesn’t everybody have to be “perfect� in Hollywood if they want to be successful, or are there higher, unreachable standards for queer folks?
When I wrote the poem, it was kind of right at the moment when mainstream White gayness hit mainstream primetime TV. You had Ellen DeGeneres, you had “Spin City,� you had all this whitewashed land of queer characters on TV. And it was interesting for me, because at that point I wanted to write this poem because I needed to remember all of the crazy things I went through being queer when we weren’t in the media, and there was no public face of queerness, and it was a big deal that there was one gay kiss on “L.A. Law� and then they wrote the character out in the next episode.
The experiences I had growing up in Worcester [Massachusetts] was that we were not protected, we were not sheltered. There were a lot of youth I knew who tested HIV positive. And looking at the now, not much has changed. There’s this public face of queerness—“Queer as Folk,� “The L Word,� “Ellen�—but they don’t capture the experiences of queer and trans youth of color coming out, which is being kicked out by your family, having people trying to beat you up, trying to survive.
I would go to mostly straight people of color poetry events and people when they found out I was queer would be like, “Oh yeah, I like Ellen DeGeneres.� I’m just like, “Oh, my God. No, like her condo and mine have very little similar.� It’s about seeing this whitewashed version of queerness and how it doesn’t reflect the actual lives of 99 percent of queer people in the world.
I watch “The L Word,� and OK, if you’re starving and someone offers you a cracker, you’re not going to say no to it. It’s a cracker. It’s a beautifully shot, really well-written cracker. There are certain individual things that they did that I can sort of relate to, like the crazy grant officer lady because I know from drama I’ve had with grants! But I do not live in a million-dollar house in Los Angeles. I just think about how it would look if it was our lives. It would be queer and trans people of color who are like working in a sex toy store or at the shelter, living in three-room apartments, shopping at Target. That would be more realistic, but it’s probably not going to be on Showtime any time soon.
You end your collection of poems with the war in Iraq and where you are in terms of how you’re feeling about it. I don’t know if you’re still feeling this way, but you write: “I’m not marching to the consulate today/I stay home light another candle/I don’t have a tongue to fight them with/except my tongue my heart.� Can you talk more about this, and if you are still in that place?
Yes and no. I mean, when I wrote that poem I basically wanted to talk about a couple of things: one, that for a lot of people who are South Asian or Arab, the mainstream anti-war movement doesn’t work for us. When it’s our homelands being bombed it’s a different thing to figure out how to protest because it’s not just about politically being like, “I oppose this.� It hits a real emotional place. And we have to figure out ways to live with our grief and despair and to find ways to resist in ways that work for us. And to honor all the ways in which we resist that aren’t necessarily about marching in front of the consulate, that are about everyday survival.
So, I’m writing about that. And I’m also writing about the importance of remembering. Those of us who continue to resist and survive, and those of us who didn’t. Being able to remember our stories, being able to tell what it’s been like to be living in these times, are all acts of resistance.
There’s this book called Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit that I’ve been reading. One thing she talks about is all the protests that led up to the Iraq war. Millions of people took to the streets and we actually thought, “Oh, my God, we’re actually going to make a difference.� And then we were emotionally devastated when Bush began to bomb it.
She says that for sure one way you can look at it is, “Oh, shit, we had all these millions of people in the street and he still attacked.� But at the same time, another way of looking at is that, yeah, he went ahead and attacked even though thousands of international protesters told him not to. But they took away “Shock and Awe� after only a few days when originally it was supposed to go on for months. That’s not the total victory that we hoped for, but it still made change. It created networks of organizing that are still in place. It shifted the way in which the war in Iraq was and is being debated. She talks a lot about how we don’t know what the future is going to be like, and that what changes our actions can initiate things we can’t see. That history isn’t written yet. We make it.
How does the lack of coverage of the war in Sri Lanka make you feel?
Crazy. Infuriated. It’s ridiculous when you’re in the position of almost being jealous of friends who are Arab because their devastation gets coverage. The biggest coverage we ever got was when the tsunami hit [which killed 30,000 people]. The next biggest was when M.I.A. [Maya Arulpragasam, Sri Lankan singer/hip-hop artist] blew up. It’s crazy! You have a 21-year-old civil war: at least 100,000 people get murdered; massive, massive, massive flights from the country; millions of people leave; and it’s not that big of a country, but there’s maybe two lines in the international section.
People in the Sri Lankan community know. But if you read The New York Times, you would never know that anything was happening. We actually had an incident a couple of weeks ago when a UN aid workers got killed, but that was basically it.
But it really brings it home the reason why Lebanon or Gaza are on the front cover. It’s because the United States and Israel want oil. Sri Lanka doesn’t have oil. We have pretty beaches, but there are places with just as pretty beaches a closer flight from North America. And it’s Brown people killing Brown people. And it’s not just Sri Lanka that faces this kind of mainstream erasure. It’s Sudan, many places in Africa, many places in Latin America, many places in Southeast Asia. One reason I write is to break that silence.
I want to be able to record what it’s like to be Sri Lankan in the diaspora and in Toronto, watching this go down. I think that’s one thing we can do as writers, is to be able to both record peoples’ histories and witness what’s going on and play that sacred role.
Have you done book readings for Consensual Genocide?
I did a 14-city tour: Toronto, Ottawa, the Bay Area, Minneapolis, New York, Boston, and finished up in the second-ever queer Pride in Sri Lanka. It’s had been a while since I had been back. So, that was pretty incredible.
What kind of feedback have you received for Consensual Genocide?
People are really hungry. People really love the book. I think a lot of people are really hungry to see stuff that is spoken word and stuff about being queer of color and South Asian and all of that. We need to see our experiences reflected.
I think it’s really rare to see queer poc [people of color] writing that is not self-published. [Consensual Genocide is] an actual book. It sold really well. My publisher was at first, “Well, we’ll see how long we can keep this in print.� But we’ve sold out half of the first run already! And that’s just by word of mouth and community stuff! The press I did the book with has a really small budget, and only publishes six books a year. But, because it’s in Toronto, and because I grew up in the States, I’m back there performing a lot. It’s really been about using the feminist, queer, people of color, artistic, political networks.
I remember reading about Dorothy Allison talking about her experiences publishing Bastard Out of Carolina, and the mainstream press she signed the book onto said, “OK, we’re going to have all the publicity money go to one big ad in Publisher’s Weekly.� And she was like, “No, no. Give me back the money.� And she bought one of those train tickets where you can make 50 stops across the states. And she was like “I just toured for two months and slept on every one of my ex-girlfriends’ futons and that’s what sold the first printing of the book.�
When did you really first start writing poetry?
I remember writing haikus in grade 4 and being really excited. I remember writing stories based on “Battle of the Planets� when I was 10. As a kid what I would want to be, and I would say, is a writer. But I really had no concept of what that meant. I just knew I loved to read and it sounded better than the other options that were out there. And then I was like, “Do people actually make a living out of it?� And my mom was like, “No.� [Laughs]
But I read, and I wanted to be like the people who I read. My mom was all about me taking a lot of books out of the library, and that I was going to go to college, and be the first person in our family to go to college.
Then when I moved to New York, I was living in the Lower East Side paycheck to paycheck and I went to the Nuyorican [Poets Café] all the time. It was a really different time. At that point, no one had any sense that they were going to make any money from their poetry. So, it was much more about people getting up and telling their truth for three minutes. And it was full of all different kinds of folks really respecting each other. Where you could have a young Jewish dyke next to Latino hiphop next to a 65-year-old elder and everyone was hearing each other.
I hear a lot of my youth now saying, “Being in college is destroying my ability to write creatively,� and that was my experience. I was an English major going to these classes and I was reading June Jordan and writing all this stuff about being a survivor, and I was sitting next to these White youth from Long Island who were trying to sound like Jack Kerouac, and I was like, “I’m not sharing my shit with these people!�
And this was at the New School for Social Research, which was a pretty progressive school that actually, at the time, also had a lot of students of color because it used to be cheaper than any other alternative college out there. There’s actually this one poem, “Don’t Fuck Anyone You Wouldn’t Want to Be,� that’s the oldest poem in the book, and it’s my no-more-scary-White-boys-as-lovers poem. And I wrote that, and my teacher afterwards actually came up to me after class and said, “You know the penis is a beautiful thing and you have to learn to respect it.� [Laughs] And I was like, “Oh my God! This is so creepy!� And he was like, “I just find it really disturbing that the penis can be replaced by the platano [plantain] so easily in your poetry.�
And unfortunately, with the queer/trans youth writing group that I run, we’ve done interviews and people are like, “So, why it still important to have a space for queer youth to write?� And I’m like, you know, even now, even though their fellow teachers or fellow students aren’t necessarily overly homophobic, it’s not necessarily a place where they can tell their stories about being queer and everything else they are.
Were you ever really nervous to read and perform your poetry?
Oh, my God, are you kidding? I mean, recently, someone told me that I look fearless up on stage, and I was like, “Wow, thank you, but it took a really long time to get there.�
The thing about any kind of performance is that fear that you’re going to get up there and if you suck people are going to throw tomatoes at you. [Laughs] When you’re not writing about stuff in the abstract, when it’s about your life, that stuff gets really personal and really vulnerable. It’s not like you’re going up there reading a poem about oranges! It’s about your family. Sri Lanka. Being an incest survivor. I am truly grateful to communities out there where we can perform our stuff and get thanked for it because there are still community places where we’re not, unfortunately.
What advice do you have for someone who wants to write a book of poems?
Unfortunately, because of Amazon.com and Borders, a lot of small presses went bankrupt and the small presses that are still around will publish on their websites, “We don’t publish poetry because it doesn’t make money.� I think that’s really ironic because within the last decade, there are more people who will buy it now more than ever before.
I also think especially for spoken word, for many people, it’s hard to make the transition from stage to page. Sapphire said once, “You can’t rock a semi-colon.� It’s true. With the oral tradition, you can really make a poem really new every time that you’re up there. But when you’re publishing, that’s what’s going to be down forever. Don’t be afraid to take it seriously. What you write could save someone’s life. Lots of lives have been saved by books. That’s why we do this.
On the technical side of things: To publish poetry, you don’t really need an agent. Check out the publishers of the books you love, and check out their websites for submission guidelines. Think about self-publishing your work. If you can learn bookmaking skills you can make something as or more beautiful than a traditional publisher. Booklyn.com is a great source of info. Plus, you get to keep all the money!
Don’t expect that they’re going to pay for a 17-city tour with first-class sights. And no one cares more about your work than you, so it’s going to be on you to get your work to who needs it. Think about the different community bookstores and slams where you already know people. Let all the magazines that you love know it exists. And hit up your library.
I do feel that there’s this new wave of people who are maturing right now and it’s going to be a renaissance of writing in print by radical people of color, and queer and trans people of color. I hope. We’re good at thinking creatively to find ways to make something out of nothing, and people are getting sick of the same old. I’m really inspired by examples like RedBone Press, where Lisa Moore is doing an incredible job of publishing Black queer writing that shines, and getting it out there to the world.
Are you supporting yourself by your writing or do you have a day job?
I quit my day job this year! I worked in nonprofit jobs for years. I was a rape-crisis line worker for four years and then I worked on a tenant rights hotline. But I finally worked my way to the point where this is my job. It does mean that I have 20 little jobs. [Laughs] I do a lot of arts education gigs, I perform, I write articles, publish, and there is the wonder known as Canadian arts granting. In the Canadian NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] there’s a spoken word department, and the guy who runs it is Native. This would so not happen in the U.S. [Laughs]
But it’s not easy. It still means a lot of hustle, but right now it’s worth it. I see so many brilliant writers who are stuck in the 9-to-5 or nonprofit activist burnout hell who want to create but are stuck. I want us to share strategies so we can get our work out there in the world. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, and our work is needed. As someone with working-class roots, I know how huge it is for us to take ourselves and our work seriously. There are so many stories that only we can tell and we need to hustle and support each other and make ways for them to be in libraries, in jail cells, in 10th grade classrooms, and at queer youth drop-ins everywhere.
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How dare she have breasts and allow herself to be photographed in profile! Has Ann Outhouse seen this? I thought this blog was supposed to be progressive!
Interesting stuff. While I'm a proser, I'm interested in rejuvenating popular interest in poetry, so it's encouraging to see communities buying poetry books so readily!
wow ... long name.
Am I the only one who was embarassed to know absolutely nothing about the civil war in Sri Lanka? I think that in addition to supporting the independent publishers, we've also got to support alternative news sources - you know, the ones that give more attention to major world events than the celebrity gossip of the day.
the civil war in sri lanka is very hard to get information about. I lived there for a while. It's been very bloody and very nasty and horribly depressing.
but I just wanted to comment on two things -
1st - thank you thank you thank you celina, for doing articles like these- i read them every week - and thank you for presenting a sri lankan poet.
2nd - just to point out a small error - (which backs up both her and manda's point about how little news there is about sri lanka) Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha mentioned that UN workers was killed a few weeks ago - it was actually 17 aid workers for ACF (action against hunger) who were killed. it was an atrocious crime and recieved very little coverage.