Love

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Bestiary (2020)

  The piracy was obvious: We could see the glare of a screen embedded in a black frame, the walls of a theater shadowing both sides. At the climax, a woman in the audience stood up and shouted something at the screen. A row of heads bobbed along the bottom, a shadow skyline. We watched the movie being watched. We could hear a woman whispering in one of the front rows, repeating every line of dialogue like an echo. My mother and I shushed her even though we knew she couldn’t hear: She wasn’t here. In the middle of the movie, the camcorder lagged and the audio mismatched with the actors’ mouths, language spoken in a different time zone from the listener. We saw what was happening before we heard it. The knife cleaved a belly, too easy. The scream was stalled. In this shot, the sky was the same shade as my mother’s name. _ I ran upstairs to get my brother’s camcorder and came back down, started filming. When my mother asked what I was doing, I said, Pirating. I was the woman choosing between sides, between side-wounds: Ama and my mother, related by blade. I filmed the back of my mother’s head jutting into the frame, her commentary when the love interest committed suicide (I never liked that actress because she has my eyes), the oil on her hands like sunlight. I wanted to set them on fire, to turn her hands into light-bouquets and capture the smoke onscreen. My mother said, You’ll never be able to sell any of that, and I said I didn’t want to sell her. There was a scene near the end where my mother turned her head to look back at the camera, her face outliving the screen behind her, brighter. She held herself still as if posing for a photo. Behind her, credits ribboning down the black like names of the dead, cueing us to continue. I rewatched the footage later and saw that all the actors were blurred or out of frame, no storyline salvageable. Everything off-focus except my mother’s face, the light speaking what I can’t subtitle, clarifying for the audience: She’s the only one I’ve been watching. _

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  This was not easy, especially with Barack. That boy was so mischievous! In Onyango’s presence, he appeared well-mannered and obedient, and never answered back when his father told him to do something. But behind the old man’s back, Barack did as he pleased. When Onyango was away on business, Barack would take off his proper clothes and go off with other boys to wrestle or swim in the river, to steal the fruit from the neighbors’ trees or ride their cows. The neighbors were afraid to go directly to Onyango, so they would come to me and complain about these things. But I could not get mad at Barack, and would always cover up his foolishness from Onyango, for I loved him as my own son. Although he did not like to show it, your grandfather was also very fond of Barack, because the boy was so clever. When Barack was only a baby, Onyango would teach him the alphabet and numbers, and it was not long before the son could outdo the father in these things. This pleased Onyango, for to him knowledge was the source of all the white man’s power, and he wanted to make sure that his son was as educated as any white man. He was less concerned with Sarah’s education, although she was also quick like Barack. Most men thought educating their daughters was a waste of money. When Sarah was finished with primary school, she came to Onyango begging for school fees to go on to secondary school. He said to her, “Why should I spend school fees on you when you will come to live in another man’s house? Go help your mother and learn how to be a proper wife.” This created more friction between Sarah and her younger brother, especially because she knew that Barack was not always serious about his studies. Everything came too easily to him. At first he went to the mission school nearby, but he came back after the first day and told his father that he could not study there because his class was taught by a woman and he knew everything she had to teach him. This attitude he had learned from his father, so Onyango could say nothing. The next closest school was six miles away, and I began to walk him to this school every morning. His teacher there was a man, but Barack discovered this didn’t solve his problems. He always knew the answers, and sometimes would even correct the teacher’s mistakes before the whole class. The teacher would scold Barack for his insolence, but Barack would refuse to back down. This caused Barack many canings at the hand of the headmaster. But it also might have taught him something, because the next year, when he switched to a class with a woman teacher, I noticed that he didn’t complain.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  the people who cross our physical or virtual paths, spark the flame of our interest, earn our devotion and respect and protection our own family, because blood people we are committed to but don’t like anymore How have we been loving? defining love by obligation celebrating love on externally marked holidays keeping the realities of love behind closed doors framing love as a fairy tale on social media framing love as a product we give each other framing love as a limited resource that gets swallowed and used up, tied in plastic when we’re done and piled up out of sight prioritizing romantic love over self, comrade, and friend love This kind of love is not sufficient, even if it is the greatest love of our lives. The kind of love that we will be forced to celebrate or escape on Valentine’s Day is too small. We’re all going to die if we keep loving this way, die from isolation, loneliness, depression, abandoning each other to oppression, from lack of touch, from forgetting we are precious. We can no longer love as a secret or a presentation, as something we prioritize, hoard for the people we know. Prioritizing ourselves in love is political strategy, is survival. From religious spaces to school to television shows to courts of law, we are socialized to seek and perpetuate private, even corporate, love. Your love is for one person, forever. You celebrate it with dying flowers and diamonds. The largest celebration of your life is committing to that person. Your family and friends celebrate you with dishes and a juicer. You need an income to love. If something doesn’t work out with your love, you pay a lot of money to divide your lives, generally not telling people much unless it’s a soap opera dramatic ending. This way of approaching love strangles all the good out of it. What we need right now is a radical, global love that grows from deep within us to encompass all life. No big deal. To help make this a true day of love, here is brief radical love manifesto. Radical Honesty We begin learning to lie in intimate relationships at a very early age. Lie about the food your mother made, to avoid punishment, as you swallow your tears, about loving this Valentine’s Day gift, about the love you want and how you feel. Most of this is taught as heteropatriarchy 101: men love one way, women another, and we have to lie to impress and catch each other. Women are still taught too often to be submissive, diminutive, obedient, and later nagging and caregiving—not to be peers, emotionally complex powerhouses, loving other women and trans bodies. These mistruths in gender norms are self-perpetuating, affirmed by magazines and movies, girded at family dinner tables.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Build Communities of Care Shift from individual transactions for self-care to collective transformation. Be in community with healers in our lives. Healers, we must make sure our gifts are available and accessible to those growing and changing our communities. Be in family with each other—offer the love and care we can, receive the love and care we need. Share your car or meals with a healer in exchange for reiki sessions. Facilitate a healing group in exchange for massages. Clean a healer’s home as barter for a ritual to move through grief. Pay healing forward—buy sessions for friends. Let our lives be a practice ground where we’re learning to generate the abundance of love and care we, as a species, are longing for. This Valentine’s Day, commit to developing an unflappable devotion to yourself as part of an abundant, loving whole. Make a commitment with five people to be more honest with each other, heal together, change together, and become a community of care that can grow to hold us all. 52 Essay reprinted from adrienne maree brown, “Love as Political Resistance: Lessons from Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler,” February 14, 2017, Bitch Media (blog), https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/love-time-political-resistance/transform-valentines-day-lessons-audre-lorde-and-octavia. Quote is from Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light and Other Essays (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1988), 130.53 Butler, Parable of the Sower, 3.The Sweetness of SaltToni Cade Bambara and the Practice of Pleasure (in Five Tributes) Alexis Pauline Gumbs This essay of love is exactly what I expected from magical sisterdoula-witch teacher Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Alexis is one of the most consistent yeses I know, her life full of rest, love, beauty and travel. She is a poet and a sower and a scholar of many things, centering around Black feminism. She has done an incredible amount of archival work on Toni Cade Bambara, the author of The Salt Eaters, the one to tell us writing was a tool for the revolution, that our task was to make revolution irresistible.54 Bambara is a main stream in the lineage of pleasure activism, not just because of what she put on the page and into words, but also because of the ways that she wove community, the way she supported other writers and organizers, the way she engaged healing work. I get chills when I read what Bambara was dreaming and understanding, how deeply we are in the worn groove of her legacy. Alexis has pulled Bambara into the present with this essay.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Dani. When adrienne moved away from Oakland, I feel like she kind of set Jodie and me up. She nudged us to hang more and get to know each other better, since we were both close to her as individuals, and she was kind of leaving us in the friend lurch. Luckily, we did. I think we both identified the ways that life in the Bay can be full and fun but strangely lonely, so we leaned into keeping each other company in meaningful ways, being available for the last-minute drink at the end of the workday, the random stop-by in the middle of a Saturday afternoon to sit on the porch and soak up sun. And somewhere in there the three of us started hanging out together—definitely during adrienne’s trips to the Bay but also going on vacations together, planning joint trips to wherever the third person was living, and, of course, our text thread. amb. I actually remember our first vacation together very distinctly. We went to Orr Hot Springs. It was a big deal to me, because I wasn’t quite sure if it would work, all three of us—I was worried about feeling left out since y’all had been living in the same place and I was across the country. But we went to Orr and ended up piled in a bed after soaking in mineral pools all day, singing Beyoncé. It was so easy. After that, Jodie asked for explicit permission to talk about us to each other, to trust that we would speak of each other with the intention of helping each other. I thought that was so radical, to bring that out into the open. The interdependence really kicked off then. Jodie. I opened up to interdependence around some trauma I was going through, which meant actually needing to count on other people and having people show up for me fully in my most vulnerable state. Being willing to be messy, being overwhelmed, and asking for help. Adrienne, you talking me through my anxiety fears and facilitating some of the process—which I have no memory of because I was completely dissociated. When Dani stepped in to help out with crucial logistics—she saved my whole life, and I was in woe love. amb. Yes! It felt like each time we were there for each other at a deeper and deeper level, we were falling in woe love.

• From Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  My mother laughed once more, and once again I saw her as the child she had been. Except this time I saw something else: In her smiling, slightly puzzled face, I saw what all children must see at some point if they are to grow up—their parents’ lives revealed to them as separate and apart, reaching out beyond the point of their union or the birth of a child, lives unfurling back to grandparents, great-grandparents, an infinite number of chance meetings, misunderstandings, projected hopes, limited circumstances. My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head, flattered by my father’s attention, confused and alone, trying to break out of the grip of her own parents’ lives. The innocence she carried that day, waiting for my father, had been tinged with misconceptions, her own needs. But it was a guileless need, one without self-consciousness, and perhaps that’s how any love begins, impulses and cloudy images that allow us to break across our solitude, and then, if we’re lucky, are finally transformed into something firmer. What I heard from my mother that day, speaking about my father, was something that I suspect most Americans will never hear from the lips of those of another race, and so cannot be expected to believe might exist between black and white: the love of someone who knows your life in the round, a love that will survive disappointment. She saw my father as everyone hopes at least one other person might see him; she had tried to help the child who never knew him see him in the same way. And it was the look on her face that day that I would remember when a few months later I called to tell her that my father had died and heard her cry out over the distance. After I spoke to my mother, I phoned my father’s brother in Boston and we had a brief, awkward conversation. I didn’t go to the funeral, so I wrote my father’s family in Nairobi a letter expressing my condolences. I asked them to write back, and wondered how they were faring. But I felt no pain, only the vague sense of an opportunity lost, and I saw no reason to pretend otherwise. My plans to travel to Kenya were placed on indefinite hold. Another year would pass before I would meet him one night, in a cold cell, in a chamber of my dreams. I dreamed I was traveling by bus with friends whose names I’ve forgotten, men and women with different journeys to make. We rolled across deep fields of grass and hills that bucked against an orange sky. An old white man, heavyset, sat beside me, and I read in a book that he held in his hands that our treatment of the old tested our souls. He told me he was a union man, off to meet his daughter.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  At last - she gave a yawn, and rubbed her knuckles in her eyes - at last her voice was just a girl’s: melodious and strong and clear, but just a Kentish girl’s voice, like my own.Like the freckles, it made her - not unremarkable, as I had feared to find her; but marvellously, achingly real. Hearing it, I understood at last my wildness of the past seven days. I thought, how queer it is! - and yet, how very ordinary: I am in love with you.Soon her face was wiped quite bare, and her cigarette smoked to the filter; and then she rose and put her fingers to her hair. ‘I had better change,’ she said, almost shyly. I took the hint, and said that I should go, and she walked the couple of steps with me to the door.‘Thank you, Miss Astley,’ she said - she already had my name from Tony - ‘for coming to see me.’ She held out her hand to me, and I lifted my own in response - then remembered my glove - my glove with the lavender bows upon it, to match my pretty hat - and quickly drew it off and offered her my naked fingers. All at once she was the gallant boy of the footlights again. She straightened her back, made me a little bow, and raised my knuckles to her lips.I flushed with pleasure - until I saw her nostrils quiver, and knew, suddenly, what she smelled: those rank sea-scents, of liquor and oyster-flesh, crab-meat and whelks, which had flavoured my fingers and those of my family for so many years we had all ceased, entirely, to notice them. Now I had thrust them beneath Kitty Butler’s nose! I felt ready to die of shame.I made, at once, to pull my hand away; but she held it fast in her own, still pressed to her lips, and laughed at me over the knuckles. There was a look in her eye I could not quite interpret.‘You smell,’ she began, slowly and wonderingly, ‘like -’‘Like a herring!’ I said bitterly. My cheeks were hot now and very red; there were tears, almost, in my eyes. I think she saw my confusion and was sorry for it.‘Not at all like a herring,’ she said gently. ‘But perhaps, maybe, like a mermaid ...’ And she kissed my fingers properly, and this time I let her; and at last my blush faded, and I smiled.I put my glove back on. My fingers seemed to tingle against the cloth. ‘Will you come and see me again, Miss Mermaid?’ she asked. Her tone was light; incredibly, however, she seemed to mean it.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Monique. There’s an exclusive, until recently, men-only club near Sonoma, California, called the Bohemian Club. Their motto used to be “spiders, weave not thy web here.” The spiders they’re referring to are women. Members of this club include politicians, university presidents, oil tycoons—basically rich white men who believe they own the world. I envision a world full of spiders, weaving interconnected webs that resist patriarchal forms of supremacy that work so well at keeping us distraught, distracted, and divided. The harm reduction movement is composed of such spiders, the likes of which the founders of the original Bohemian Club never imagined. We are a collective of trans- and cisgender people. We are LGBTQIA+ and straight folks. We are people of all races and all ethnicities. We are pacifists and warriors, anarchists and mainstream-ists, socialists and libertarians—all working toward a more just world. One that is powered by people who have been historically pushed toward society’s margins. The rise of the twenty-first-century social justice warrior isn’t simply a trope created by the alt-right or others desperately clinging to the status quo. We’re working to dismantle the very structures designed to keep us divided—and collectively we are legion. I think about the web of mycelium fungi growing underground that you describe in Emergent Strategy. It can kill a forest several times over, but, in doing so, it builds deeper, richer layers of soil that allow larger trees to grow. Harm reductionists, along with our racial, social, and environmental justice warriors, are both mycelium and tree—interdependent and deeply rooted, paving the way for those who come after us. amb. I deeply believe harm reduction is a crucial concept for pleasure activism … in a nutshell, pleasure activism is learning from what pleases us about how to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have. Can you break down how you see harm reduction practices potentially increasing our capacity for pleasure? Monique. We take pleasure in treating people kindly. At the core of harm reduction is unconditional love for people who sometimes have very little love in their lives. For years now, harm reduction practitioners have served as role models for people searching for ways to work with drug users. We use community-centered and people-centered approaches to remind them they are worth more than what the rest of the world tells them, that they are valued, and they don’t have to hide themselves from us. We’re here to help in whatever healthy ways they want us to. We won’t push, but we will support.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  My mother rolls my head off her belly, reaches down for my feet and says they’re ripe enough to eat. Imagine this: I eat your foot like a fruit. I shit out its seed in some city far from here. The seed grows into a tree. You walk by the tree and know I’ve been there. You cut down the tree, count its rings, add it to how old I am. Wherever you’re going, I’m already there, a tree waiting. Massaging my mother’s feet until she sleeps, I slot my knuckles between her toes, trying to tell when they’ll be tender. At the back of her heels and calves, I know each of her tendons by note. Pluck them into music, play away their pain. She once told me that a tree’s leaves are its ears: A leaf listens to the light. I want many ears growing from my skin, a whole field to listen with. When my mother farts in her sleep, I shape the steam with my hands and release it outside as fog. I remember the story she once told me about how all mountains were once hammered out of mist, and that’s how they move, how they rise and dissolve, returning to the genealogy of the sky. At night, Ben climbs over my mother’s body and nestles her head in my armpit. We kiss until our tongues can’t tell themselves apart. I dream of biting off her nipple, spitting the coin of it back into her palm. Make a wish, I say, while she flings the nipple-coin into her mouth, swallows. We wake together at the same time, our names in each other’s mouths, our heat making glue of the moon, and it means we’ve come true.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  Ah Zheng’s feet had never felt land, and the idea of living with his feet locked to the earth— that shit-colored filth—made him physically ill. The sea, on the other hand, was his glittering garment. He was so blessed, even the storms bounced off his boat. Ah Zheng resembled an ordinary hog *7 on land but was handsome on water, especially reflected off a surface—he wore the hat of a Tanka, but underneath, his hair was like water, stroking his shoulders or coiling on its own. He was born with a blowhole on the top of his head that he liked to stick a miniature flag inside, a flag that was just a piece of toilet paper. His eyes were the bitter color of grapes. Always remember to spit out the grape skins or you’ll get eyes like that too, all seed. You’ll see everything dark as light, everything loved as lost. All this to say: Old Guang, my beefhearted fishdicked hogspawned grandfather, fell in love with Ah Zheng. At the beginning of his piracy career, Old Guang was seasick, bent at the waist and waddling to the rails. Ah Zheng would clean my grandfather’s face with his own silk sleeve. He told my grandfather that acupuncture would cure his seasickness, and invited him back to the captain’s cabin. Ah Zheng’s acupuncture needles were made of fishbone, invisible to the light. Though Old Guang was afraid of needles, he said nothing. Ah Zheng was undressing him, and suddenly my grandfather’s mouth felt like a sea urchin, spike and salt. When Old Guang was naked, Ah Zheng directed him to lie facedown on the pallet. He sterilized each needle in seawater and strong vinegar, then hovered his hand over my grandfather’s left shoulder-bone. Old Guang yelped, and Ah Zheng laughed: I haven’t even put it in yet. *8 When Ah Zheng slipped the needle directly into the shoulder-bone, Old Guang moaned. It didn’t hurt, but the sensation stayed for days. Old Guang and Ah Zheng fucked with urgency. Ah Zheng’s beard tasted of sea spray, stinging his whole skin. My grandfather really believed that Ah Zheng was a reincarnation of a god—how else could he be so young and so confidently commanding a fleet larger than the emperor’s? How else did he grow such stately long legs, such a deeply cleft ass, a crack all shadows lusted to live inside? Sometimes, their lovemaking was closer to prayer: My grandfather held Ah Zheng’s semen *9 in his mouth for as long as possible, torturing it of taste. Old Guang was the crew’s best navigator. He claimed to have ejaculated all the stars into the sky. Even his crewmates—mostly other kidnapped fishermen—had to admit Old Guang was their best addition. Occasionally, when they did get lost, Old Guang wanted to stay that way: Ah Zheng fucked better when he was lost and needed another body to shore on.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Build Communities of Care Shift from individual transactions for self-care to collective transformation. Be in community with healers in our lives. Healers, we must make sure our gifts are available and accessible to those growing and changing our communities. Be in family with each other—offer the love and care we can, receive the love and care we need. Share your car or meals with a healer in exchange for reiki sessions. Facilitate a healing group in exchange for massages. Clean a healer’s home as barter for a ritual to move through grief. Pay healing forward—buy sessions for friends. Let our lives be a practice ground where we’re learning to generate the abundance of love and care we, as a species, are longing for. This Valentine’s Day, commit to developing an unflappable devotion to yourself as part of an abundant, loving whole. Make a commitment with five people to be more honest with each other, heal together, change together, and become a community of care that can grow to hold us all. 52 Essay reprinted from adrienne maree brown, “Love as Political Resistance: Lessons from Audre Lorde and Octavia Butler,” February 14, 2017, Bitch Media (blog), https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/love-time-political-resistance/transform-valentines-day-lessons-audre-lorde-and-octavia. Quote is from Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light and Other Essays (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1988), 130.53 Butler, Parable of the Sower, 3.The Sweetness of SaltToni Cade Bambara and the Practice of Pleasure (in Five Tributes) Alexis Pauline Gumbs This essay of love is exactly what I expected from magical sisterdoula-witch teacher Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Alexis is one of the most consistent yeses I know, her life full of rest, love, beauty and travel. She is a poet and a sower and a scholar of many things, centering around Black feminism. She has done an incredible amount of archival work on Toni Cade Bambara, the author of The Salt Eaters, the one to tell us writing was a tool for the revolution, that our task was to make revolution irresistible.54 Bambara is a main stream in the lineage of pleasure activism, not just because of what she put on the page and into words, but also because of the ways that she wove community, the way she supported other writers and organizers, the way she engaged healing work. I get chills when I read what Bambara was dreaming and understanding, how deeply we are in the worn groove of her legacy. Alexis has pulled Bambara into the present with this essay.

• From Bestiary (2020)

  The pirates called him Three-Blades—and yes, of course he carried three blades, all of them different lengths, all of them named after snakes—until he killed his first merchant. Isaw took that merchant’s name because he liked to collect names the way other men collected wives, and because it would help him pass for Chinese. Now all the pirates called him Old Guang. Back on land, my grandmother thought he’d capsized and died, and soon resigned herself to widowhood—she never minded it, really. She didn’t love her husband any more than she loved having fungus between her toes. My aunts and uncles didn’t miss him either: Old Guang was just a fart that infiltrated the house. Before he was kidnapped, we saw him only once a moon. *3 The captain of this pirate fleet was a Tanka man *4 named Ah Zheng, younger than my grandfather but taller, slender as a dagger. From afar, his ship looked like a mouth: The wood was sun-dyed white as a jawbone, and along the railing of the ship he’d embedded stakes of ivory that looked like teeth from a distance. The ivory stakes were a form of defense against being boarded. Most of Ah Zheng’s people had been slaughtered by the Cantonese, and piracy was vengeance—if the Cantonese called him unfit for land life, he would wield the water as a whip. He would capture all their ships, welt their hulls, melt their foreign gold and gild all his teeth in it. All his life, the shore was a father *5 — he knew he would never be allowed to meet it. Fine by him. He preferred water to women. *6 He had been conceived and born at sea. Some say he could sing to fish, that they threw themselves into the boat whenever he was hungry. Some say his balls were big enough to shoot out of cannons. I knew a man like that back on the island. He had a fishpenis and had to live waist-down in water. If he waded onto land, it’d breathe the air and die. All the other fishermen held their breath to blow him. His fishpenis shot eggs down their throats, and they gave birth out of their mouths a month later. You were conceived in a mouth, too. Your mother spoke you in her sleep, during some dream about drowning. Don’t believe when she says you’ve got a father. The other pirates all said his ship was powered solely by flatulence, that he stood at the prow and farted a wind that blew him anywhere in the world. They say his ship was armed with sharks swimming always beneath him, and that was why he’d never lost a battle. In two weeks he’d won so much loot, his entire fleet began to sink with the weight of all that shine. Now they stored their bounty in seaside cliffs, branding treasure maps into one another’s backs.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  Nevertheless, Gandhi saw his theory through to its ultimate conclusion. Nonviolence meant not only loving your enemies, he maintained, but realizing that they were not your enemies at all. He might hate the systemic and military ruthlessness of colonial rule, but he could not allow himself to hate the people who implemented it: Mine is not an exclusive love. I cannot love Moslems or Hindus and hate Englishmen. For if I love merely Hindus and Moslems because their ways are on the whole pleasing to me, I shall soon begin to hate them when their ways displease me, which they may well do any moment. A love that is based on the goodness of those whom you love is a mercenary affair.9 Without reverence for the sanctity of every single human being and the “equanimity” long seen in India as the pinnacle of the spiritual quest, “politics bereft of religion,” Gandhi believed, were a “death-trap because they kill the soul.”10 Secular nationalism seems unable to cultivate a similarly universal ideology, even though our globalized world is so deeply interconnected. Gandhi could not countenance Western secularism: “To see the universal and all-pervading Spirit of Truth face to face one must be able to love the meanest creature as oneself,” he concluded in his autobiography. Devotion to this truth required one to be involved in every field of life; it had brought him into politics, for “those who say that religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means.”11 Gandhi’s last years were darkened by the communal violence that had erupted during and after partition. He was assassinated in 1948 by a radical nationalist who believed that Gandhi had given too many concessions to the Muslims and had made a large monetary donation to Pakistan.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Alana. I love good music, especially really good lyrics. I love to see live music, theater, performance art. I love film. Historically, I love literature, but reading isn’t as accessible to me these days. I love sharing an amazing meal and good conversation with friends. I love sex. I love obsessing about really random things. I love admiring the moon in all its phases. I love making people laugh. amb. This may be too personal, in which case, tell me shut up … but I feel so aware of how Malkia looks at you and sees your beauty and sensuality every single day, allowing everyone else to see you through that lens. It feels like that would be good medicine as your body goes through the challenges of cancer. Is that the case? Alana. Mac makes me feel like a sexy beast, no matter what. Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes I don’t. It reminds me of my humanity as I manage cancer. It helps me have more compassion and love for myself and others. It makes me feel like a superhero, honestly. amb. Have you read Audre Lorde’s cancer writings? She also seemed to share this commitment to pleasure through transition, and I wonder if she has influenced or encouraged you from the ancestral realm? Alana. I read her Cancer Journals a few months after my diagnosis.85 What struck me the most from it was her commitment to doing whatever it would take to continue her life’s work. I honestly found it to be difficult to relate to—I’m someone who has always struggled with understanding my purpose. Part of me hoped that maybe this cancer diagnosis would activate some secret purpose-filled part of me that was sitting dormant, but that hasn’t really happened. What has happened is that I’ve started a blog and am working on a documentary, and I grow my love for Mac every day. So, in a way, I’ve been able to rekindle some creativity that hasn’t had much attention in many, many years. That feels connected to Audre in some way. amb. What do you wish everyone understood about pleasure? Alana. I think we are on earth, in these humanly bodies, to experience pleasure—among other things. I also do believe the saying “everything in moderation,” with the emphasis on the word “everything.” And, finally, I believe in pleasure as a practice. You can fall out of practice, but life is so much better when you’re exercising your pleasure muscles. 83 Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake (New York: Putnam, 1997), 219.84 Mac is Malkia Cyril, director of the Center for Media Justice and lover extraordinaire.85 Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980).Care as PleasureLeah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a prolific writer and teacher in the realm of disability justice and care work. Every time we talk she changes something in my foundational sense of myself. When I think of care and pleasure I think of:

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  And I was very much raised by a lineage of, a generation of, Black women who came from Georgia, North Carolina sharecroppers, and the Black Seminole Nation. They really embodied truth. They were very much my orators and taught me, very much so, how to love myself. I used to say, “I don’t know if I love myself.” And one of my aunts put me in front of the mirror at age six and seven, and she said, “You are gonna look at yourself in the mirror and say ‘I love myself.’ And then you’re going to say ‘I love Black people.’” And at first I resisted, but then I was like, “OK. Let’s do this.” And she was committed to that practice every time I saw her. Until it rolled off the tongue and there was no pause and she could say, “OK, go to the mirror, and love yourself.” And I would, knowingly, lovingly. You feel me? amb. I love that. I literally just told someone to do that today. I told them they need to look at themselves in the mirror and say they love themselves. And do it every day. Cara. These are not small things. They changed my life. And in this quote here, from “Uses of the Erotic,” Lorde says, “Our erotic knowledge empowers us. Becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly, in terms of their relative meaning within our lives.”38 I based my whole political theatrical process around the question of how to acknowledge erotic power. I did a whole performance around this and the historical oppressive violence against us and the state of Black women. amb. Do you have a copy?

• From Bestiary (2020)

  A fence as high as our foreheads split the lot from the sidewalk. Her father was unraveling the fence, rolling it up like a tongue. The land was concave, sunken in the middle, swallowing two trees that stood in the center of it. Ben’s father began the foundation by renting a bulldozer and carved a hole so deep we joked he was digging himself back to China. I walked an hour west on weekends to visit Ben and her family, who moved into a small shed bordering the hole. Ben’s father built the shed in two weeks, complete with a bunk bed for Ben and her brother, a dining table made of exposed plywood, and a drain in the corner for showering. Instead of a sink, they owned a bucket. Instead of a kitchen, they stacked a wall of tinned tuna and Spam, a tapestry of meats. Instead of a toilet, there was a spade by the door for us to dig our own holes. When it stormed, the tin roof chattered like teeth and the walls italicized themselves. Leaks veined the walls and bled rain. When I described it to my mother—bleached walls, a soil floor covered in prayer rugs, plastic-wrapped holes for windows—she said it sounded like a chicken farm, the kind she used to work for in Arkansas. In a past life, Ben’s mother sold one of her ovaries when she was a teenager, after a river molested her city and she needed money to rebuild her house. If Ben and I offered our hands, kneading her mother’s neck for an hour first, she’d let us ask her about it. She’d worm out of her skirt to show us: The scar made her loss legible to us, an indented hyphen three inches to the left of her belly button. Ben stroked the blue scar like a bird, as if she could calm it and coax it into her hands. What Ben wanted was to hold our hurts for us. She once told me a bruise was scratch-and-sniff. She scratched the one on my knee and sniffed it and said, Sweet. Inside the shack, Ben and her brother pretended they lived in a bomb shelter: Outside was a war they could win solely by surviving. When we played together, the bunk bed was our only bunker and every cockroach was a landmine. If I stepped on one, the penalty was death. Ben wore the uniform of a soldier, white pajamas that turned fog-thin with her body heat. I dressed in the uniform of a casualty, a masking- tape X over my heart, a bullet hole penned into my neck. We argued what color it should be: Ben’s brother said red, because of blood. Ben said black, because that’s the color of the hole itself. I wanted to say neither, but I was already dead. Ben’s birdcage was neutral territory.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  When I drew it from its wrappings and held it up against me before the glass, I shook my head, quite stricken. ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said to Kitty, ‘but how can I keep it? It’s far too smart. You must take it back, Kitty. It’s too expensive.’But Kitty, who had watched me handle it with dark and shining eyes, only laughed to see me so uneasy. ‘Rubbish!’ she said. ‘It’s about time you started wearing some decent frocks, instead of those awful old schoolgirlish things you brought with you from home. I have a decent wardrobe - and so should you. Goodness knows we can afford it. And anyway, it can’t go back: it was made just for you, like Cinderella’s slipper, and is too peculiar a size to fit anybody else.’Made just for me? That was even worse! ‘Kitty,’ I said, ‘I really cannot. I should never feel comfortable in it ...’‘You must,’ she said. ‘And, besides’ - she fingered the pearl that I had so recently placed about her neck, and looked away - ‘I am doing so well, now. I can’t have my dresser running round in her sister’s hand-me-downs for ever. It ain’t quite the thing, now is it?’ She said it lightly - but all at once I saw the truth of her words. I had my own income now - I had spent two weeks’ wages on her pearl and chain; but I had a Whitstable squeamishness, still, about spending money on myself. Now I blushed to think that she had ever thought me dowdy.And so I kept the dress for Kitty’s sake; and wore it, for the first time, a few nights later. The occasion was a party - an end-of-season party at the Marylebone theatre at which we had spent such a happy month. It was to be a very grand affair. Kitty had a new frock of her own made for it, a lovely, low-necked, short-sleeved gown of China satin, pink as the warm pink heart of a rose-bud. I held it for her to step into, and helped her fasten it; then watched her as she pulled her gloves on - aching all the time with the prettiness of her, for the blush of the silk made her red lips all the redder, her throat more creamy, her eyes and hair all the browner and more rich. She wore no jewellery but the pearl that I had given her, and the brooch that had been Walter’s gift. They didn’t really match - the brooch was of amber.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  Michi. In thinking about burlesque as a liberation practice, I’ve also been thinking about that just because you are taking your clothes off doesn’t mean liberation is a given. In some ways, I feel like burlesque has everything to do with liberation—the stripping down, stripping off, freeing, revealing of bodies or truths, the use of satire and political critique. I feel like the structure offers a lot if you are trying to get free. But, you know, just because I am on vacation doesn’t mean I’m relaxing! The body might be there, but if the mind and heart aren’t there with it, then it may not feel like a freeing, self-loving experience. I feel like what makes it a liberatory practice is a lot in the intention we bring to it. Like in ritual, there are deliberate steps to help induce a state or experience, the structure offers all these gateways, but you have to actually bring your own intention as you walk through it, so just taking your clothes off doesn’t mean you’re going to be liberating yourself if you’re still— Una. Hating the body you’re in, or doing it just to please the audience. Michi. Yes, yes. But, burlesque does offer us these opportunities to practice it, because it’s not like the first time you get on stage and get naked for an audience that it’s just gonna be all easy, breezy “I love myself and I’m at peace with systems of oppression that have made me internalize the hatred in the world” and so on and so forth! Sometimes, even when we are performing sexy self-love liberation, we may not feel that way. But doing the performance will remind us that part of us does feel that way, and by performing it, practicing that love for ourselves and all people, I feel like it can strengthen our ability to get there. Una. And it’s especially vulnerable because it’s our bodies that are up there. Doing burlesque is not like a play we wrote that someone else is performing. We’re up there, embodying the story. Michi. You have mentioned that it’s been a journey to pace yourself and not take your clothes off all at once. People think of burlesque performers as these super sexually comfortable people, but I feel like you taking all of your clothes off at once is in some way being afraid of your own sexiness. Do you want to talk about that? Una. Yeah, it’s like, here, I’m aggressively showing my body before you can reject me. When I was younger and liked people who didn’t like me back, I found that all the power I felt like I had was in being able to confront them, asking them directly “do you like me?” They would be like, “Umm, I don’t even know you to know if I’m into you,” so that wouldn’t go very far.

• From Philosophy and Religion in the West (1999)

  2. Denys, influenced by Proclus, describes a celestial hierarchy of immortal intellects—the angels. 3. Unlike the Gnostics, however, Denys’ realm of immortal beings is not governed by a dynamic of fall and return, but rather of illumination and ecstasy: every being remains in its place in the hierarchy, illuminating beings below it, and going out of itself in love toward God above. 4. For Denys, God too is “ecstatic” (i.e., he goes out of himself): for it is the nature of the Good to “diffuse itself.” B. Trinity as Simple Incomprehensible One 1. Denys clearly puts the Trinity at the level of Plotinus’ One. 2. The simplicity of the One is the explanation of why the Trinity is one God. 3. Denys enthusiastically adopts the Neoplatonist description of the One as “above essences” or “beyond being.” 4. Denys emphasizes (more than Augustine) God’s incomprehensibility. 5. Denys develops the via negativa or apophaticism, the strategy of trying to hint at the nature of God by saying what God is not. IV. Western Christian Neoplatonism: Augustine A. Happiness Is Seeing God 1. While Denys clearly locates the Trinity at the level of Plotinus’ One, Augustine of Hippo often uses concepts associated with the level of the divine Mind (e.g., intelligibility and Form) to describe God. 2. Thus for Denys, God is like the sun, too bright for us ever to gaze at with our mind’s eye, while Augustine thinks that when our minds are strengthened and made perfect, we will find our happiness in seeing God. 3. The desire for this happiness is charity, the love of God, which lifts us up to God (as inevitably as fire goes up to the heaven). B. God in the Soul’s Inner World 1. In contrast to Denys, for Augustine the angels have no role as mediators of divine light: we find the true light by turning inward (like Plotinus). ©1999 The Teaching Company. 55

• From Bestiary (2020)

  When the first boy was shot, the rest fell in with him. The army saved bullets this way. Polishing their names on its tongue, the river strung through their skulls and necklaced them. Snakes erased the boys’ bodies, entering through eye sockets to eat the rubymeat of their brains. At night, the river cleaved from its bed and heaved itself onto land, roaming as a snake. The red rain receded to a rumor, but some said the day the river was impregnated with snakes, there was a woman seen on the banks. Some said this woman had no spine, snakes for arms, teeth for eyes, adding details until she was nothing they could name. One night when she was almost nineteen and married to Agong, her second soldierfuck, Ama went down to the banks in the dark to see if it was true, if her snakes were women at night, if the river walked itself. Ama waded in and the river didn’t budge, thick as jelly. Ama waited for the snakes to circle her ankles, the snakes she’d birthed on her own. The moon pimpled the skin of the river. She walked back to the bank and sat in the mud, wondering where the snakes had gone, if they still loved her, if they still missed the color inside her. She closed her eyes and lay on her back, imagining all her ribs were the rungs of a raft. How bright a boat she would be. When she opened her eyes, three moons in the sky. One was whole and the others were halves. She sat up and saw a snake hanging on to her calf by its fangs. Ama wrenched it off. Before she could lie back down, the water tore in two. A body nosed onto the banks, gutting the mud. It was a woman with scales the color of blood, wearing her skin inside-out. She tucked her arms and legs into her body before oaring them out, shoving away the mud with each winging. Ama undressed and curled beside the riverwoman in the mud, soaking in the palm-sweat of night. She lowered her head to the riverwoman’s skin, tilting her tongue into the belly button, lapping out its sour lake of sweat. Ama remembered the river was conceived not by the sea but by a body: It had been pissed down the mountain Papakwaka, cleaving streams into the stone. Ama propped herself above the riverwoman’s ribs. The mud slapped against itself, a sound like farting, and they both laughed. Ama kneeled between the riverwoman’s knees and touched with her tongue the black hair there, gummy with mud and moonmilk.