In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured authors are Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Maynard is an award-winning Black feminist scholar-activist based in Toronto, and the author of the national bestseller Policing Black Lives: State violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present. Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Their book is Rehearsals for Living.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Leanne & Robyn: This book weaves together how the overlapping crises of climate catastrophe, carceral violence, and enclosure are bound up in one another, and how they emerge from the broader transnational histories of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. In the opening letter, Robyn writes: “today, the racially uneven environmental catastrophes of the present are inextricably connected to the unfinished catastrophes of 1492––the two genocides at the haert of the Americas, to paraphrase M. NourbeSe Philip, when a death-making commitment to extraction and dispossession took hold on a global scale…As we are confronted with the crisis of the earth’s viability, then, amidst so many crises, I am writing you so we can think together about what it means for us to build livable lives together in the wreckage” Rehearsals for Living doesn’t try to fix or reform the current world of white supremacy, racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy. It asks readers to vision, refuse generativity, and remake our worlds beyond the structures that plunder the planet for the wealth and the comfort of the very few. We are trying here, as Black and Indigenous feminists, to use the letter as a means to think, dream, and commune on what it means to live together differently. To do so, we turn to the archive of past, present, and future Black, Indigenous, anti-colonial and feminist struggles, seeking out glimpses of timelines that could help create a world beyond extractivism, gendered violence, policing, prisons, borders, and empire.
Our book is an invitation to think alongside us, and the communities we live, work and think within.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
Leanne: Affirmation, commune, and joy in struggle. The book is a gathering place and an invitation to think alongside us and our different communities, perhaps in a different register, perhaps not, about how we are going to live together with all living things on this planet.
Robyn: I think about abolitionist and anti-colonial struggle as made up of nodes: each person, collective, organization, be it in the short or longer term, comes together to build – from wherever they are located – more liberatory presents and futures. If anything this book was trying to tap into some of these nodes for a beat. Knowledge production is always collective: it emerges from movements, in conversations, in struggle, it is what happens in commune. In our own small way, here, we are joining forces with broader nodes, constellations and networks of people, globally, who refuse to consign this planet and its inhabitants to senseless destruction, and who demand something more, something new.
In the foreword, “Spectacles,” Ruth Wilson Gilmore wrote that “Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson embody and express how practice makes difference. Nobody has to become them as we become us.” And to me her words, nobody has to become them as we become us, illuminated something: that Leanne and I are not presenting ourselves as holding all of the answers, nor are we laying out, in this text, a ten-point plan (though I think we both appreciate these!). But here, we were trying to show how people every day, around the world, are learning to ask new questions and create more just futures in their own communities. And as Gilmore’s words bring to light, all of us have our own role to play in the futures we are working to build.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
Robyn and Leanne: This project was about building livable worlds – for and with people most often pushed to the outer limits of the European-North American-led colonial project of the last five hundred years: Black, Indigenous, racialized and colonized people here in North America and globally. But we also support the ending of some worlds: the world white supremacy built, the world racial capitalism built, the kind of world that requires dispossession, violently enforced hierarchies, and ceaseless extraction.
We are also, in a sense, trying to push past the ever-present nihilism in our culture that tries to compel us to give up in advance. This text is a rejection of hand-wringing despondence and the notion that it’s too late, that there’s nothing to be done, or that it is not our responsibility. Perhaps Robin DG Kelley said this best in the afterword, which he titled “An Afterwor(l)d:”
“The struggle to hold the land, to block machines of annihilation, to grow food and feed one another––this is life in rehearsal…the work of building the world is no luxury…our very survival depends on turning dreams of decolonization and abolition into action.”
Which intellectuals and/or intellectual movements most inspire your work?
Robyn: There were many bodies of work that inspired my thinking in Rehearsals for Living. Much of it was the intellectual, ethical and political work that was happening around us while we were writing: the historic Black-led uprisings of 2020, in the labor and courage of those on hunger strikes across detention centres, jails and prisons across Canada and North America, the teenagers and parents who worked to get police out of their schools in Hamilton, Vancouver, and across the United States, the survivors of sexual and gendered violence mapping out non-carceral forms of safety, the Black and Indigenous women defending their lands from extraction across North America, South America, the Caribbean, and the African continent. Just as importantly, inspiring the writing and thinking in this book, are the many struggles that came before mine: Ellen Gabriel and the Mohawks who squared off with the military and the Canadian government in the so-called Oka Crisis, current and former political prisoners who paid the ultimate price for their efforts to liberate Black people on Turtle Island and globally, my enslaved ancestors who refused to accept their status as captives, as property. These are some of the political and intellectual traditions and genealogies that inspired this work. But at the same time, this writing was inspired by my admiration and friendship with Leanne, in the openness and vulnerability that we shared as we worked to forge, with these letters back and forth, a new kind of homespace.
Leanne: My Nishnaabeg ancestors structured their collective practice of life as a set of embodied theories and ethics they generated together with the living things, with whom they shared time and space with, for the purpose of propelling life into the future. So that is one source for me. The intellectual work of Dionne Brand, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, Andrea Ritchie, Ellen Gabriel, M. NourbeSe Philip, Natalie Diaz, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and so many others, also figure prominently in the book. The labor of struggle and organizing of Indigenous liberation movements, the Black Radical Tradition, Black and decolonial feminisms, and anti-colonial movements the world over was also a source of insight and inspiration.
Which two books published in the last five years would you recommend to BAR readers? How do you envision engaging these titles in your future work?
Robyn: One of the thinkers we engaged with deeply throughout the text is Ruth Wilson Gilmore: her words –– “abolition is life in rehearsal” –– inspired the title of the book. Her invocation that “where life is precious, life is precious,” was a point of departure and arrival for how to think about land, #landback, and abolition. Her two new books, Abolition Geography and Change Everything, will certainly animate, in important ways, our present and future projects. I think I it's accurate to say that neither of us would be the writers and thinkers that we are without Dionne Brand’s work, and we are eagerly awaiting the publication of Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems. Brand’s short story “100 musicians at Jane and Finch?” helped me to think about what it means to imagine, to really imagine, that our communities deserve much more than the carceral, deadened visions for Black people’s lives proffered by our political leaders, who continue to uphold policing as the solution to every social ill caused by economic and racial inequality– poverty, homelessness, the drug poisoning crisis, etc. She asks us: what else could we do, and gestures toward abundance.
Leanne and Robyn: Some recent books that made us think differently: No More Police: A Case for Abolition, As Black as Resistance, We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, Elite Capture, Rethinking Reparations, The Nation On No Map, Undrowned, A Decolonial Feminism, Dear Science and Other Stories, A Map to the Door of No Return, In the Wake, Lose Your Mother, The Point is to Change the World, Decolonial Marxism, The Undercommons, Border & Rule, Black Marxism, Bla_K, Solitary, Abolition. Feminism. Now. The Fifth Season, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Claudia Jones, Felon, Postcolonial Love Poem, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Noor, Remote Control, The Fifth Season, Becoming Kin.
Roberto Sirvent is editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
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