Aurora Levins Morales

"Listen with your body. Let your body speak."

"Outrage silences nuance"

"Skin of our bodies and skin of the world. This is how to understand the land as well as the flesh. To be unsingular, fractured and whole, grieving and proud, in universal solidarity and difficult alliance, never to allow urgency or burning injury to keep us from demanding the whole, intricate, inclusive story."

"For me, the destruction of the land and the poisoning and violation of my body are inseparable, wound together on the spindle of a conquest that from the beginning was narrated as a sexual act."

"My father, an ecologist and fifth-generation radical, taught me this: "When two legitimate needs seem to be in conflict, neither side is asking for enough." We need an economy that saves both trees and people, a sexual culture that honors desire and sovereignty in all humans. Our job is not to discover the single issue that trumps all others, to fight for the priority of what presses on our own skin. It's to seek out the places where those skins rub, the spark-filled junctions where we could find ways to say a bigger yes, where we can add layer upon layer of meaning, rejoice in the complexity of our lives and use it to expand our desires beyond the limits of what we thought possible."

"So much depends on the conditions of the moment we live in. (in Bridges, Spring 2011)"

"in spite of all the things that make my heart sing, in spite of so many shifts of culture and consciousness, so many structural changes, so much intelligence and passion, sexism and racism both saturate daily life, as of course, they do in most places. Which brings me back to the image of a bridge, and makes me question it. Because what I have wanted, in every case, in every situation in which I straddled some gap of understanding, was to bring my whole self to the table, to have every aspect of my being respected, to have every aspect of my liberation embraced by those whose experience did and didn't overlap with mine. The bridge I keep building is meant to link two shores, but it's not who I am, it's what I do. What I am is the many-rippled, living river below. (in Bridges, Spring 2011)"

"he taught us to think long-term...to have a big picture sense of change. And to know that you can't always tell in the moment if you're winning or losing. That, that's something that history determines. And so for me, that has always made it less upsetting when we face defeats. Cause I know that sometimes defeats do lead to victories, and end up sabotaging much bigger ones, and you know, that it's a much bigger and more complex picture than we think. (2022)"

"The Cuban press, every day there were articles about Africa and Latin America and Asia, and people were educated. They knew what the political struggles in different African countries were. They knew about — you know, you’d go through the Daily International page and it was like, in Chad, this is happening. In Burundi, this is happening. In Costa Rica — it was like somebody had pulled back the veils and there was a whole world out there."

"One of my proudest credentials as a writer is to know that my poem “Child of the Americas” was plastered on bathroom walls in a small school in Michigan as graffiti, in an attempt to get people thinking about racism."

"I grew up within the anti-colonial movements of that period. I knew about the Algerian revolution. My father has this amazing mind for history and politics and would tell stories all the time. I knew about the Algerian revolution. I knew about Vietnam. We received Peking Review. I read children’s stories from China, stories from the Cuban Revolution. I had a sense of us being part of a global movement of people with whom I felt a tremendous sense of kinship. I also thought all radicals were Jewish. I was really shocked to discover that Pete Seeger was not Jewish...It was shocking to find out that there were right-wing Jews and that there were so many people who were not Jews who were radicals."

"("Is the racism of the women’s movement dominant in your recollection and experience of the women’s movement?") Yes, but my own ability to think about it clearly didn’t emerge until there were other women of color around. I was a new immigrant as well, and the strangeness of the United States, period, overwhelmed some of the other things that I was thinking about."

"On the strength of what happened with This Bridge Called My Back, I was suddenly credentialed. Suddenly I had the authority to speak about my own life and get paid a lot of money by a university to do so. Because that book had broken into — had been picked up by women’s studies all over the country and was being taught. As a high school dropout I suddenly was an authority, I was an expert, and I was getting called up and asked to come speak about being both Jewish and Puerto Rican, about being an immigrant, about the particular position that I held. And it was a very odd experience to go from complete outsider to academia to being brought in as a lecturer and being paid hundreds of dollars."

"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"

"disability justice is asking a lot of different kinds of questions about the nature of our bodies, and part of what I put forward to disabled student groups is to not settle for fighting for inclusion in existing movements but to really look at the ways in which disabled people have leadership to offer. For instance, our bodies don't comply with the demands of capitalism; what could we bring to the labor movement, which looks for better pay and better working conditions within a structure of work that is highly oppressive? Well, we can question the whole nature of what work is."

"If trauma damages our resilience...what does the cultivation of solidarity between us create? Can we create an inheritable resilience? Can we harness the resilience in our bodies and leave it to be passed along?... I mean, we need everything! My brother talks about climate change, and is it the end of the world?...Are we past the point of no return? We don't know. There are a lot of different versions of that answer. But it seems likely that a lot of people are going to die. It seems likely that the next stage of our presence on the planet is going to involve really huge changes,... so I feel like our job is to put together the absolute best tool kit for our descendants that we can, to create the most resilient culture, the most resilient ways of thinking about things, the best tools... to give them the best shot. And dismantling as much as we can about the oppressive structures that have created the problems."

"When I lose the individual isolation and remember that I'm connecting to the entire web, I can feel what's going on in the web, I can feel my connections to everything, and then, how is it possible not to belong anywhere? Because there is only this one web that encompasses the planet."

"There's the nitty gritty of surviving the now, but the difference between a Band-Aid and a step is "does it open up more possibility?"...The small actions that we take-their importance is how they change us, how they change how we think. And so for any individual or small-scale action, my questions are, "Does it increase empowerment? Does it increase solidarity? Does it increase connection? Does it increase clarity about the nature of reality? Does it pull away the masking? Or does it let people feel like they've done their part and can relax and reinforce passivity?""

"I think healing justice is about understanding our bodies as historically constructed, full of trauma, resistance, resilience, innovation, epigenetic scars, and epigenetic resources; [about] understanding that you can't do politics that doesn't include that and then really thinking about how we assess the impact of trauma on the work that we do."

"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."

"An essay on Lebanon, written just after the invasion of that country by Israeli troops in 1982, by the Jewish-Puerto Rican writer Aurora Morales came closest to expressing my own rage and grief."

"Aurora’s writing is itself alchemy, balancing emotional nuance with rich historical context, simultaneously speaking in an intimate personal voice and for a collective we. She offers us vulnerable, power-filled lyricism that moves the audience to new understandings of their own lives as she claims her body’s pleasures and pain. Her writing moves me like no other.”"

"As Aurora Levins Morales teaches us, "The stories we tell about our suffering define what we can imagine doing about it." Currently the prevailing story told about sexual violence is that our suffering can be fixed by the criminal legal system. Legal remedies such as restraining orders and criminal charges are the primary forms of redress offered to survivors of violence and harm. This limited range of remedies frequently forecloses our consideration of other possible ways to address sexual harm. Abolition is the praxis that gives us room for new visions and allows us to write new stories-together. But it is hard, hard work."

"disability justice. It’s a framework that embraces abolition. And that is to say, it demands nothing less than the overthrow of all forms of ableism, you know, and the structures that support it. So, the difference between disability justice and disability rights is that disability justice says, you know, we’ve got to deal with racism, sexism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, that these are the forms of oppression that make even disability differential. And so, if you think about the way that we responded to the COVID-19 crisis, for example, and to this day how we’re still responding to it, that disabled people who are Black and Brown and poor, undocumented, Indigenous, queer, gender nonconforming, they’re the ones that end up getting differential care, sometimes less care, sometimes inhumane care. They’re the ones who end up incarcerated, end up homeless, end up jobless, housing insecure. And that’s what disability justice tells us. And for me, I was forced to really come to terms with it by a number of folks who really were involved in the disability justice movement, who really forced me to think deeper about, like, what is a radical freedom dream, you know? Aurora Levins Morales, for example, is one who’s a really important disability justice activist who really kind of pulled my coattails on this."

"Twenty years ago I first read Medicine Stories and had my mind blown by the elegant, virtuosic way Aurora Levins Morales imagined a theory interweaving childhood sexual abuse survival, Indigenous sovereignty, anticlassism, and deep Latinx queer anticolonial ecological justice. Twenty years later, her analysis is even more rich and full of fruit, revising and expanding her work to encompass Standing Rock and the global fight for water and land liberation, survivorhood, and disability justice."

"Aurora Levins Morales's work should absolutely be supported. She has an impeccable progressive and visionary politic. Her prose has the literary eloquence of a pure poetry."