A few weeks ago, I made my merry way to The Gladstone Hotel for the launch of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s new book, Consensual Genocide (also available at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore) . I arrived early and thirsty after doing a bit of cybernet sleuthing…having only read a couple of her poems previously, the research was very necessary:
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha was raised in Worcester , Massachusetts , the daughter of a Sri Lankan father and an Irish/ Ukrainian mother. After moving to New York for four whirlwind years of coming of age in the middle of riot grrl, queer, anarchist and student of color organizing, she moved to Toronto in 1997 in the hopes of no longer being the only Sri Lankan in the room. Her work has been published in the anthologies Colonize This!, Dangerous Families , With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn , the Lambda Award-nominated Brazen Femme, Without a Net, Geeks, Misfits and Outlaws and A Girl’s Guide To Taking Over the World . A frequent contributor to Colorline s and Bitch magazines, she has performed her work throughout North America, from gigs at Yale University and Oberlin College to benefits for queer youth resource centers and at antiwar protests. She teaches writing to LGBT youth at Supporting Our Youth Toronto, for which she won the City of Toronto Community Service to Youth Award in 2004, and is one of the organizers of the Asian Arts Freedom School. [Link]Respect!
My experience within the Toronto literary scene is a sad state of affairs so I was feeling a little unsure of my footing in the creative landscape that is West Queen West (TO’s Soho, why do we have to have these NY rip off names, WHY? Another time, another post :-) As my frothy malt bevvie began to settle I caught Leah standing nearby, talking with friends. Her remarkable bio had me a little star struck so the best I could muster was an awkward smile/nod combo in her direction. She promptly walked over and gave me a hug as if we had been friends forever. Let us pretend, for the sake of my silly pride, that it was not simply a case of mistaken identity…hugs rule! You could say that the hug or even the sheer amount of M.I.A. playing at the launch informed my resulting opinion of it. You would not be entirely wrong.
Rosina Kazi’s (of LAL) opening performance was superb (fingers crossed for a new LAL album). Leah’s reading was fresh to death. She conversed easily with her audience, between poems, about post-9/11 border crossings, girlfriends, getting her Canadian passport, loss of community space and other facets of her journey from writing to being published. The following day, I devoured one poem after another on the metro, overwhelmed by the honesty and wit, the beauty and hurt, which lay before me. Mummy, look! That crazy ladys hugging a book! Psha, kids! It was but a small gesture for the inexplicable gratitude I felt at being able to experience writing that elicited more than slow beat from my colder-than-a-witchs-teat heart.
A little taste of what made me so giddy This is the first poem:
eating a $5 plate
snoozing in front of Seinfeld on the beige on beige recliner
his belly folds after years
of american chop suey, hamburgers and Michelob
Nothing
he really wanted to eat
was ever on the shelves
of Iandolli’s or the Big D
I think of that man
who cried three times in my life
once when appamma died
once when our dog died
& once when I sent him
a 99-cent package of tamarind candy
& he called me long distance after Ma went to bed
weeping from tasting tamarind
for the first time in thirty years
+++
Many thanks to Leah for letting us steal the photo and the poem.
