Aurora Levins Morales Quotes

Land and blood. Mystical powers that never change their identity so that a speck of Mississippi mud and an individual red blood cell are both seen as carrying unalterable identity, permanent membership in human cultures. This is the mysticism that allows fascist movements to call up images of long-dispersed and -recombined ancestral peoples like the ancient Aryans and Romans, or entirely mythic genetic strains like White Race, and then scream for genocide to return them to a state of purity. The reality is that people circulate like dust, intermingling and re-forming, all of us equally ancient on this Earth, all equally made of the fragments of long-exploded stars, and if, by some unlikely miracle, a branch of our ancestors has lived in the same place for a thousand years, this does not make them more real than the ones who have continued circulating for that same millennium. All of us have been here since people were people. All of us belong on Earth.

There are people who move into the cultures of others with such grace and respect that the friction of foreignness virtually disappears, who can un-self-consciously love the unfamiliar as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

If disability is defined as people who, because of variations in our body-minds, can't be efficiently exploited, the last thing we need is better access to exploitation, greater integration into a profit-driven society that is driving thousands of species toward mass extinction and making the planet uninhabitable for humans. The last thing we need is more opportunities to do our part in keeping the interlocking wheels of class, white supremacy, heteromale supremacy, and imperialism turning. This doesn't mean that we don't fight for what we need in order to survive, that we don't fight for the crappy job or inadequate benefits that will keep us alive for now. Life jackets keep us from drowning, but the only lasting access is universal inclusion, which means universal justice. ("The Truths Our Bodies Tell")

Full inclusion requires us to root out all the ways in which we have been tricked into collusion with the oppression of others, and all of us have. It requires us to move beyond our comfort zones. I once heard Bernice Reagon say that being in coalition meant working with people we didn't much like, and we might need to vomit over it for a while, but we had to do it anyway.

Just as the individual recovering from abuse must reconstruct the story of her undeserved suffering in a way that gives it new meaning, and herself a rebuilt and invulnerable sense of worth, the victims of collective abuse need ways to reconstruct history that restore a sense of our inherent value as human beings and immunize us against the elite mythology that our only worth is in our ability to make them rich.

There's a difference between imposing a meaning on someone's life, and saying it arises from their life, and having an interpretation that you own as your own that arises from your own life. And it should be full of questions, not just statements.

I know I have dreamt this dream: Jews and Arabs moving in unison, dispossessing the warriors, building new villages on the sites of the old, changing the face of the land, the shape of history, the look of the future.

abuse is the local eruption of systemic oppression, and oppression the accumulation of millions of small systematic abuses.

The structures of unequal power are many-layered and complex in the ways they function in the world. But at its root, oppression is really quite simple. It's about looting. The rest is made up of the rules and institutions, rituals and agreements, mythologies, rationales and overt bullying by means of which small groups of people keep a firm grasp on way more than their share of the world's resources.

I understood that excavating and revealing the truth about my experiences of abuse, and the sense of empowerment and release that process brought me, was the same process as excavating and telling the truth about the centuries of invasion, enslavement, patriarchal rule, accommodation, collaboration and resistance. The healing came from the same source.

Racism is like a millstone, a crushing weight that relentlessly presses down on people intended to be a permanent underclass. Its purpose is to press profit from us, right to the edge of extermination and beyond. The oppression of Jews is a conjuring trick, a pressure valve, a shunt that redirects the rage of working people away from the 1 percent, a hidden mechanism, a set-up that works by misdirection, that uses privilege to hide the gears. Unlike racism, at least some of its targets must be seen to prosper, must be well paid and highly visible. The goal is not to crush us; it's to have us available for crushing.

One element of imperial history is that events tend to be seen as caused by extraordinary personalities acting on one another without showing us the social roots and contexts of those actions. For example, many of the great discoveries and inventions we are taught about in elementary and high school were being pursued by many people at once, but the individual who received the patent is described as a lone explorer rather than part of a group effort. Rosa Parks didn't "get tired" one day and start the Montgomery bus boycott. She was a trained organizer, and her role, as well as the time and place of the boycott, was the result of careful planning by a group of civil rights activists. Just as medicinal history must restore individuality to anonymous masses of people, it must also restore social context to individuals singled out as the actors of history.

It was not until 1978 that I found my first community of women of color writers. A group of us had all taken summer jobs interviewing randomly selected women in San Francisco on their experiences of sexual assault, and we were the interviewers sent into the Mission District, Chinatown, Filmore. In protesting the racism within the project, in sharing the stories we were gathering, and their weight on our hearts, we found each other. Cherríe Moraga, Kitty Tsui, Luisah Teish, Luz Guerra. Each of us led to others. Finally, I began having the conversations I hungered for most. I remember us laughing until our sides hurt, gathered around a potluck of our favorite home foods, about all the lies we had been told about ourselves and each other's people, a healing cleansing laughter that fed our poetry.

Only through mourning can we reconnect to the love in our lives and lose our fascination with the ones who harmed us.

the writing coincided very closely with, was always tied up with, survival...Writing is magic. Writing is a form of spell-casting. It is a form of healing. And self-witnessing...I saw writing as a tool of problem-solving and inquiry and exploration from the time I was very small