Rehearsals for Living
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating4.5
Amid the overlapping crises of a pandemic, ecological disaster, and global capitalism, two leading Black and Indigenous feminist theorists ask one another: what do liberated lands, minds, and bodies look like? These letters are part debate, part dialogue, and part lively and detailed familial correspondence between two razor-sharp thinkers, sending notes to each other during a stormy present. Featuring a foreword by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and an afterword by Robin D.G. Kelley.
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I don't know how to summarize this except to say that this is a collection of the most extraordinary love letters from Maynard & Betasamosake Simpson to each other, to their communities, and to possible futures. They made space to bear witness to our current world while imagining new ones; two Maynard quotes especially captured each half of this dialectic for me:
"I am exhausted by the notion that the 'age of humans' - and all the violent universality that the term presumes and disguises - is responsible for what is threatening our communities today. It voids the current catastrophe of its politics, of its history. Put otherwise, it is a way of 'All Lives Matter'-ing the climate crisis by erasing both the real authors and the first victims of the crimes enacted on planetary life." (p. 18-19)
"To value collective livinginess, to touch and know life fully, to know a life that is not in some way predicated on and subsidized by the suffering of another: I suspect that is what liberation is." (p. 250).
