this week on the laura flanders show native hearts and pleasure we go in depth with two feminist or those and a feminist bookstore st to barnard college for a talk with the qana activist and author about her st book release in eight years then a unique kind of activism from adrian marie brown whose latest bestselling book is an examination of activist pleasure all that and a landmark feminist bookstore t hi i'm laura flanders welcome to the laura flanders show so just how far back do we have to go for a reclamation of ourselves that's really the question at the heart of a new book by sheree moraga native country of the heart you know sheree though most likely as the coeditor with gloria and the do a of this classic book this bridge called my back if you've heard reference to audrey logs boss does tool will never dismantle the mouth of house speech college's highest honor its medal of distinction i'm thrilled to have a chance to talk with you surely we've never met but i feel as if we did yes life of the family so i get a chance you may get a chance to make some comments today you know earlier in the day i'll make some comments what do you think is important for the students of this year to hear from you  oh i think that in part i think one of the reason i would imagine one of the reasons i like to think this of getting this award has everything to do with you know the fact of the specificity the ethnic and racial specificity and of my work you know as a cheap gun and also i'm a queer woman and i have been out about those things for forty years and you know at least thirty five years of publishing and the effort i think is to respond to what's happening politically in the united states now it kind of you know incredible you know and they specifically any time mexican rhetoric you know we're suddenly we're all lumped into a lie you know that's not true for those of us who have been here from the beginning of time as indigenous people here and awful very recent immigrants you know so i you know i think what what i would say what i want to do or just kind of show by member chill presence is that you know we're the complexity of all that experience and i and i think barnard's if that was the rationale for the you know for the selection i'm honored to have it in the one thousand nine hundred and eighty s when you were involved in the publishing of these books to you know coming of age or sixteen thousand nine hundred and sixty eight it's like you to stop imagining the world was just the future meant progression the future meant liberation the future meant that every look you know this is that you know emerged of the civil rights movement all the people of color movement then came that you know the feminist movement then the lesbian again with this if you don't get let's just break it down you know continue in this way i think i never anticipated such you know  bonafide legitimize hatred and all one can hope and think is it because it is so radically wrong you know that there is and emergence of a radical response to it so why a book of history now situation and that situation was at forty i gave birth to my son and and he was born very premature and you know that at one point has he and he's fine now i can say that but at one point very early on his life was very threatened and it took me on a sort of a three year journey of having to sort of deal with the fact that you know that i was only the st and only time i was pregnant and you know i was gave birth and then suddenly there was the possibility of losing him very quickly and that became sort of that memoir had a very specific approach was a question about you know why we're here on this planet you know and we're here longer short but what do you do with your life i mean that question put me on a whole road about leaving the relationship i was in making a renewed commitment to my own political activism but also questions of you know what what is your what is your proposed people your purpose in life and i thank my friend for that so that was long in mind i've written you know collections of essay since and there and they are they tend to be somewhat topical right like a responding to a question i might have politically and there's always a personal relationship i do this and i learn from feminism more than anything else about the personal political and the political  poem you know what kind of lover have you made me mother and the nd poem was for the color of my mother and you know i'm mixed race and i you know was raised in the completely machine gun of family but here i am where do you you know and color and so that formation of stuff around coming out of the law as being within the context of gigante that was is thirty five years old if not older so when my mother's passing and all and all  my her siblings passed at the same time suddenly the book came to me is that it wasn't isn't that question of my mother's intimate abuja which was very hard to feed her loser stories but also the question of cultural amnesia you know among among mexican americans in the united states and and also the questions of the you know the land that was underneath our house two blocks away from the mission which is you know the poem the last you know these are not is not a rhetorical question of these are really something viscerally i remember as a child and i had to return to you have a great line in the book where you say you wonder whether your mother was demented or just mexican of the world i think that's a large question about just you know the response to the monoculturalism of the united states i mean it's like you just when you're raised you know within of your race and the culture that you know is not the mainstream culture you're raised with a set of values are raised two ways of looking at what's important in the world why you wake up every morning you know you think about the values of the general notion of what we're supposed to want as americans which is competition which is always looking to the future never look back you know build build build construct make more do that you  know and when you're so when you're raised in a culture that that counters that sort of on a daily basis which is you also belong to a people and not that there isn't something to critique and all of those things which is certainly as a as a young lesbian i had to do that right it's almost like it is the you know the double consciousness you know that we've talked over so long that that and you you realize particularly when i saw that my mother returned since short term memory goes st long term memory laughs she began to speak completely in spanish in her last years because that's her original lang right and also those ways of being history old resentments old clarities and that's why in the book when she said you know that when like yes i into is like you know this is you know forbidden almost among many mexicans in terms of denial they're in indigenous heritage so that's what i mean is that the mencia or is that illumination right and i think that i always hope the people you know because it you know so many families are doing with this in their own you know in their own lives and to to really listen to what some people think of crazy your vision in eighty one you talked a little bit about visions but specifically the bridge what bridge were you talking about and what's the state of that bridge i'm not sure you know i think that that we were specifically in one thousand nine hundred and one going on for lou and i initially our idea for the book in seventy nine was really to respond to white feminism you know that both been involved in the in the movement the early stages of the movement and and that we probably some of the strongest lessons i learned about race and class came from the white women's movement of experience incredibly and bred classism and racism and that radicalized me tremendously but the book ended up being that was just one chapter the racism the way women's move in the rest really became about relations among women of color and across culture across class across immigration status i mean all of this and i think that you know it's always that combined he recollected statement that made it you know so clear to me that if black women were free you know nobody else is going to be free because you know black women you know were on the bottom cycle of oppression right meaning internationally so now i look at a resurgence of the of the feminist movement people read in the conclave a collective again i think i mean so there's a lot i mean there's a lot of growing consciousness absolutely i think i still have some of the same critiques i always have trouble even trumps name but trump selection and you're looking at i'm still and i'm you know various cities and you're still saying yes there's a women of color leadership happening in there but it's not it's not it's really still the vision is still single t shoot there's still is a fundamental thing going on that has to do that it comes out of middle class and white feminism but don't people talk a lot about intersectional only talk a lot about it yeah but i think the living practice of it is different because what happens is that it's like you walk into a situation i think there's still about oh if we have people of color in the room then we're good but then you look at who are the people of color like right now i'm talking in translation you know i'm saying like i've learned very well how to talk to lots of different kinds of people lots of different classes etc but when people don't know the translating tongue right you're not really allowed in the room and that's an issue of class you know really so so one thing is to have you know upper middle class or middle class people not that there isn't racism in those internet interactions but the real question is you know is there really allowance for more than one language for liberation you know among women right and to what degree do class biases and race biases still  cultural biases still inform our understanding of liberation for women so coming to a place and to the themes that we think about a lot on our show yes there's a lot of pain in history in each of our histories i'm more of a novice not all the same but there's something else there too and you bring that very strongly in your book to talk a little bit about that and how going back to that history has fed you as well as remind you of some of the more painful legacies you know some people have asked me was a book very violent and people would say well that was a side of trauma you know i don't use those words right and partly i don't use them as a writer because i feel like they can blanket sometimes they open and that's what we need to understand the difference between language that opens us and once a kind of blank is it conveniently like a word like our lives you know like so sometimes you know humans when figure out lays right and you kind of that well yes but you know why don't you go home and look at your own stuff before you decide you're going to be an ally you know and i think that's the point of that of the book very much is that my sense that that we can't really be fully effective in the world unless we go home you have to look at what forms you good and bad and this is goes from the poorest to the riches you know that you really i mean i i always i teach writing this way i always tell my friends at the go home and the kids of color are going to do that in the white kids think they don't have to like all non o especially you you guys go home we need you to go home figure that out you know and then there's that then the we becomes much more grounded it's not a a superficial way that will break the st time there's a contradiction like we need to live in paradox and contradiction that's what we have in front of us up that crossing it's when you least expect that they'll call you what they leave out of the snarl of blackberry bush and flashes across the roadway you nearly hit him but then he gets away with it meet between his teeth and you wonder if you imagine the memory of his appearance the amazing efficacy of patriarchy is that it is a covert operation it is  man and woman sister and brother father and daughter queer and not so queer it takes place behind closed doors inside losey end and back there in the slave quarters i fiber of our lives that to pull it that dangling thread of inequity is to rip open an entire life if you're familiar with this program you're familiar with adrian marie brown she's been on before but she was back not long ago for the release of a book pleasure activism there's an us before the wound there's an us before oppression and that to me pleasure is a way t were always free to begin with brown the author of pleasure activism the politics of feeling good right now we're sitting in blue stockings bookstore which is forever i used to live in new york i was here for like ten years was talking has always been a beloved bookstore for me so i'm really excited to be here tonight we're doing our new york premiere event for pleasure activism we have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves our deepest cravings but once recognized those which do not enhanced our future lose their power and can be altered the fear of our desires keeps them suspect indiscriminately powerful or to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond in dur the use of the erotic as a foundational text for pleasure activism and i feel like what she was saying to us when she was teaching us so much was that pleasure in the erotic the awakening the erotic awakening is a way that we actually reclaim our whole selves our real selves our true when did i learn pleasure when i look back it's like others an ancestral unlearning of pleasure a way that black women on this country have been trained to be in service with our bodies rather to be in pleasure in our bodies i realize that we're not the only ones that almost every human on earth in some way has been disconnected from their natural relationship to the planet from their natural a ship themselves from our natural issues to each other and that pleasure is one of the ways we know god i'm in a chair oh god i'm with my healing i asked against oppression become integral was so motivated empowered from within in touch with the erotic i become less willing to accept powerlessness or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me such as resignation despair so forth basement depression and self denial  was i boom here it is and i'm like oh just like i missed it there might be other people who still are missing it who are still not getting this part of being a survivor myself and part of being in communities with survivors is recognizing that even when we get to good evil we're like ok i'm not in total trouble and there's still a lot of our lives that are like i have to earn pleasure i have to earn rest i have to do more for my community to get something good for myself that's to me the natural mythologies of capitalism that's all we have bought into together is like i have to earn education after earn home i have to earn food like no like i was part of a community that should all be part of what i receive i also think pleasures to me at the same level as those things so like when i'm like what  need to survive and octavia you know show that over and over again octavia butler in her novels and her work so what do we actually need to survive it's not enough to just have food if you're miserable and shelter for totally hating each other there's something else in every texas she has her characters who are surviving apocalypse have lovers they have symbiotic communities that are giving and taking care of each other i think we're the same way that we have to be doing that is a part of what survival even mea and how that connects to political work for me is there's this quote from grace lee biogs who is one of my mentors that's transform yourself to transform the world that every oppression all these systems are constructed inside of us and when we when we often person radical responsibility is like those four lives are inside of us and so again it ties in i'm like oh the front line is inside of me for pleasure like if i want all black women to access pleasure it really matters that i'm experiencing pleasure and actually that's been an interesting thing as i've been touring this book is showing up to events and i'm just like in a deeply fully satisfied life and it shows and you can feel it and keep that's the reflection of you back when he was like wow it's just amazing to be around a black woman like  about her feeling like that's our government that you know to me that is a huge portion of my political work is to be a satisfied black woman for people to see that i'm like yes i get angry yes i'm sad yes i feel before range of emotion but fundamentally when you asked good i'm good because i made myself good i made i'm good because i found the right community to be around me because i've somehow dodged the bullet of like getting my life tied in with some patriarchal like you down fall of man and like i'm just like i'm good i'm happy i feel like a lot of people need to witness that and be that in their own communities and i do i like the idea of echo chambers of transformation that is like if mind sets off yours just like mine was set off by someone else just like someone else to help her and the blue stockings we had a moment to look around for the posh twenty years this bookstore slash activist center has established itself as a hub of radical thought on the lower east side how can a space run collectively of our bookshelves look like they could be an academic syllabus for the black atlantic and queer history some of our cells are full of beans children's and young adult books we realize that people encounter radical thought there are a variety of ways and that thinking seriously about ideas has always been a part of how we get organized and our exams are really popular here and i think it's just a really cool mix of having community organizations like the dollar projects having their practical support and s sharing information that people might need to know about their health to just having a scene full of like weird how a rd job so it's a really fun mix and they're really popular part of what we sell here we enco you know you know i know bookstores in our name but i think being able to have this community hub for groups across the boroughs really has been a critical part of our work for a very long time since our store started in one thousand nine hundred and nine we have been here on the lower east side and it's precisely in those past two decades that we have seen so many changes in the neighborhood surrounding us and so the fact that blue stockings has managed to stay a strong powerful bookstore an activist center in this space is really something to celebrate i think people are surprisingly find out that we stay stable as a bookstore through selling books we'd still make our money through selling soap bags or through selling our coffee and i think we make a really powerful case for books or is across the country that people read books and you can sell books and people will come and search for those spaces i have seen so many of the spaces that our beloved smee close and so many of my loved ones have to this place is important to so many people to so many of the artists and creator is an activist of the city and to be able to show up for the people who have made the suggest what it is we need that's ability and we think the best way to be accountable to the communities that come into the states every day is to have community funded grassroots people who can and want to show up to the store in this way sustaining the store on a base level so that we can have a safety net if we're always on the defensive and if we're always wondering what's going to happen if the yoga studio upstairs leaks if our air conditioner breaks down we can't to what our communities really need us to do which is to dream big about how can the space continue to grow we don't want to stay static we don't want to do the same thing we've been doing for twenty years part of our politics is being able to really dream about and manifest what can the future look like  especially important to have physical spaces that are making sure that marginalized people feel safer that they feel like they have a community surrounding them i think that's what we intend to try and keep doing with our