It’s fitting that Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha follows Cherríe Moraga in the Women of Color Speaker Series. Tonight the self-identified queer Sri Lankan and Irish-Ukranian writer, spoken word artist and arts educator from Oakland will continue Moraga’s discussion about intersecting identities with her “Grown Woman Show.”
Piepzna-Samarasinha, 21, read Moraga’s “Breakdown of the Bicultural Mind” and credits Moraga with helping to save her life.
“She’s been holding it down during the past 30 to 40 years and made so much possible for so many underground institutions. I wouldn’t have become an artist” without the influence of Moraga and other women of color writers, Piepzna-Samarasinha said.
From women of color artists such as Moraga, Piepzna-Samarasinha learned a revolutionary lesson: She could create her own work without “whitening herself.” She then came to believe in the written and spoken word’s power to “heal, decolonize and change the world.”
A survivor of incest, sexual abuse, racism and sexism, Piepzna-Samarasinha came of age during the mid 1990s in New York City amongst queer, anarchist and student of color organizing. Her spoken word, one-woman show tonight will emphasize the healing around her “long-term incest survivor identity and queer of color love and heartbreak.”
The Grown Woman Show follows last weekend’s Women of Color retreat at the University at which Piepzna- Samarasinha planned to teach women of color how to air their “dirty secrets” in their writing, poetry and performances. According to Piepzna-Samarasinha, queer, transgender and women of color often lack the “space to tell their own stories.” As the co-director of Mangos with Chili, Piepzna-Samarasinha has led North America’s first touring cabaret of queer and transgender performers of color. She seeks to create the space to fill the absent stories.
“Her writing style is literary and passionate,” said Hollie Putnam, public relations coordinator of the Women’s Center. “Cherríe Moraga offered a motivational lecture, whereas this is more of a creative presentation. A large number of the student population has interacted with her work in ‘Colonize This,’ a women’s and gender studies anthology.”
Born in Worcester, Mass., and educated in New York where she learned more from the women of color and queer of color movements than she did attending Eugene Lang Liberal Arts College, Piepzna-Samarasinha moved to Toronto in 1997 in search of other Sri Lankans. There, she found the community she sought and began her activism in supporting the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war, an ongoing conflict on the island nation that began during the summer of 1983.
“Before colonization, it was a harmonious multiracial island,” Piepzna-Samarasinha said. “Then the groups became pitted against each other. It’s a big mess – brutal and dangerous.”
Piepzna-Samarasinha explained that peace and social justice in relation to women’s and queer rights would be essential for Sri Lanka to emerge from its more than 25-year conflict.
On a positive note, Piepzna-Samarasinha expressed her thrill that President Barack Obama immediately removed the Global Gag Rule once in office.
“I don’t think he’s perfect but he’s a sort of feminist of color; he reads books and he doesn’t mispronounce words,” Piepzna-Samarasinha said.
Speaking to the key issues that queer and women of color face in their movements currently, Piepzna-Samarasinha said she hopes society can come to look at violence perpetrated against women in bigger, more global ways. She commends development organizations in place, such as community action strategies, that prevent and combat violence.
“Often (the victims) are being criminalized themselves,” Piepzna-Samarasinha said. “It’s important that communities hold (perpetrators) accountable.”
Piepzna-Samarasinha began Brown Star Girls Productions in Toronto because she believes brown girls star in their everyday lives and should be seen as the center of the universe instead of marginalized.
Widely published in anthologies, Piepzna-Samarasinha contributes regularly to magazines such as “Bitch,” performs and tours regularly throughout North America and anticipates publishing her first memoir, “Dirty River,” and second book of poetry, “Love Cake,” in 2009 and 2010. Additionally, she has taught writing to queer and trans youth in Toronto and co-created the Asian Arts Freedom school in Toronto.
“She creates her own language based off of her identities,” Erin Howe, a Women’s Center intern, said. “She’ll collapse words together to create a new word.”
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