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Aurora Levins Morales

170 quotes

“We are so vulnerable in our pleasures and desires.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the seductiveness of the victim role; the thin satisfactions that come from a permanent attitude of outrage...Victimhood absolves us from having to decide to have good lives. It allows us to stay small and wounded instead of spacious, powerful and whole. We don't have to face up to our own responsibility for taking charge of things, for changing the world and ourselves. We can place our choices about being vulnerable and intimate and effective in the hands of our abusers. We can stay powerless and send them the bill.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the writing of U.S. women of color, a handful of clear-headed white women, mostly Jewish, a few men who engage gender, mostly gay, that sustains me and gives me context.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This tribe called "women of color" is not an ethnicity. It is one of the inventions of solidarity, an alliance, a political necessity that is not the given name of every female with dark skin and a colonized tongue, but rather a choice about how to resist and with whom.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Feminism has nearly as long a history in Puerto Rico as in the United States, but colonialism has prevented the full-grown development of movements, cultures, and communities of resistance that have been possible for women in the United States,”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“this is how it comes home. That not only does my sense of myself cross many national boundaries, but my sense of Puerto Rico has also opened up, multiplied, shed mythology, and become itself international.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I grew up within a legacy of joyous border crossings, of knowing we have the right to love anyone, to learn any language and speak it, to offer ourselves wherever we choose.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To listen to the other is the beginning of possibility.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is nothing as sustaining as legacy, as fore-mothers on whose lives we can build.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I hope that future generations of women writers will have lives so much easier than mine that they will instantly perceive barbarities of my situation I don't see, because I can't imagine their absence.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our bodies are in the mix of everything we call political. (p 10)”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are turning the world out of prehistory into that morning that will be ours, when everyone on earth will wake up unafraid. (p 29)”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there was widespread recognition that many people are depressed because oppression makes us miserable, and that large numbers of people are getting sick because of the reckless use of toxic chemicals for profit, more of us might become inspired to organize, and resist the policies that make us sick and sad. (In the article "some thoughts on environmental illness")”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Listen with your body. Let your body speak.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Outrage silences nuance”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So much depends on the conditions of the moment we live in. (in Bridges, Spring 2011)”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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)”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“("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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“now it seems to me that Zionism asks too little, not too much! They have traded in that City of the vision for a cramped fortress tower, believing that Jews will always be persecuted, hunted. That most of humanity couldn't care less if it happened again. Would let it happen. Knowing some of humanity would even applaud. Believing there is no other way for Jews to survive. I want to shout it at them from the rooftops, to cry it out loud: you have never asked for enough! Zionism, at least as it's lived today, accepts anti-Semitism, says it's permanent in the world: As long as there are Jews, there will be Jew-haters, Jew-killers, so we'll build a wall of bodies around us and live behind it, a menace to our neighbors, trying to feel safe. I stand here and cry out to you: "Come out of the trenches! Ask for it all! I demand for myself, and my children who will also be Jews, and for you, too, my soldiering kin, a world where fortresses are unknown and unnecessary.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I want to see a flowering of Arab and Jewish cultures in a country without racism or anti-Semitism, without rich or poor or spat-upon: everyone beneath the vine and fig tree living in peace and unafraid. A homeland for each and every one of us between the mountains and the sea. A multilingual, multireligious, many-colored and peopled land where the orange tree blooms for all. I will not surrender this vision for any lesser compromise. No separate-but-equal armed camps turning their backs on each other across a pitted buffer zone. No Palestinian exile burning with dreams of return, injustice embittering generations of children who yearn always for the place of their ancestors: next year in the Galilee. No graveyard the size of a nation, Palestinian blood burning the ground and steaming up each morning, reeking of death. No fortress-state of Jews against all the rest of the world, generations of children growing up soldiers, believing themselves holy, believing there is no one outside the walls, believing fear is the only force that binds people together. I will accept nothing less than freedom.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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")”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the eighteen years since I wrote "The Tribe of Guarayamín," there have been significant changes in in the politics of indigenous identity in the Americas. Most powerful among them is the resurgence of Latin American sovereignty, with a strong core of indigenous leadership, much of it female. Evo Morales, an Aymara man, is president of Bolivia, with a new Constitution that renames it as a plurinational state, in recognition of its indigenous nations. Universities, radio stations, courtrooms carry on their business in indigenous languages, and long idle lands of latifundista families have been reclaimed and distributed to campesinxs, some of whom have become, under the new indigenous autonomy laws, self-governing communities for the first time in five hundred years. ("Taíno Citizenship")”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A real assessment of the history of Puerto Rican-Jewish relations has to begin by examining the relationships already in place among Christian, Muslim, and Jewish residents of Iberia long before 1492. It must consider the Jews of North Africa, from Egypt to Morocco. It must take into account the Jewish seafaring merchants of Majorca, conquered by Aragon in 1344, and the school of mostly Jewish cartographers and cosmographers, now at the service of Christian aristocrats, whose maps, charts, and compasses made possible the seizure of the Canary Islands, in what became the dress rehearsal for both American genocides and plantation slavery. ("Puerto Ricans and Jews")”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We can't surrender whiteness or maleness, heterosexuality, or the reality of having been born into money, but we can dismantle the lies we have been taught about what those things mean, consciously build relationships of equality and respect with people who are not privileged where we are, assume they know more about that piece of the social landscape than we do, and learn from them. How to acknowledge the injury privilege does to those who have it as well as those who lack it, how to make it clear, to ourselves and to those who have what we do not, that relying on each other instead of our unearned extras is ultimately joyful and deeply rewarding, that the real losses happened long ago, when the privilege was accepted-these are fundamental questions for a much needed theory of solidarity, of how to reweave the torn fabric of our interdependence. ("Class Privilege and Loss")”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Last word: Nowadays there is a lot of talk of the patria grande, the greater American homeland, and the unifying dreams of Bolívar, but I have never trusted that word patria. Nations emerged when the obedience and loyalty once sworn to individual aristocrats had to be transferred to an entire class, and it's not a coincidence that patria comes from the same root as "patriarch," "patrimony," "patriarchy." The loyalty I swear is not to nations or governments. My loyalty is to a far broader and deeper integration. I am faithful to the web of vital connections between all that lives, and being faithful to that web requires practicing ecological ethics, requires defending whoever needs it, requires interweaving intimate and communal sovereignties in what could perhaps be called the matria, from the same root as matriz, "womb," the reestablishment of kinship. Only so, spinning and weaving that fine, strong, relational gauze, will we be able to bind our wounds, mine, those of my people, and those of my planet. ("Histerimonia" p203)”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Radical collective memory is a major threat to the status quo. Those of us who are elders need to take seriously our soil-building responsibilities, not by lecturing the young but by engaging in deep conversations, listening to their burning concerns, questions, and confusions and offering up our segment of the long road for consideration. In a time of geographic mobility, fractured memory, and the instant media reshaping of events, many of the younger radicals I talk with are hungry for intergenerational relationships. They need access to our experience, not as a set of instructions but as a mineral-rich environment in which to grow. ("Building Radical Soil")”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The work of identifying and removing the invasive and parasitic beliefs about each other that we have been deliberately infected with can be painful and mortifying, but it is also joyful beyond measure. When the fog is burned off, what remains is an illuminated social landscape, where the entire geology of our lives is laid bare. This is the landscape of solidarity, where no life is a distraction, where we move in and out of our necessary home spaces, continually expanding the area of the liberated commons, that world-in-creation where all of our identities simultaneously mean everything and nothing because every excuse for injustice is gone.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“consider the almost hallucinatory fantasies of wealthy members of Congress that teenage African-American welfare mothers, a small minority of the welfare-receiving population, and consuming a minuscule fraction of the public budget, are responsible for bankrupting the economy, growing rich at public expense by having babies in order to pad their AFDC checks. Excluded from decent employment and denied the most basic necessities so as not to slow down the astronomical rise in income of the top 10 percent, these young women are held publicly accountable for the pillaging of our common resources by the greedy.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Memory, individual and collective, is one of the most important sites of social struggle. The "false memory" movement of the 1990s that sought to deny authority over memory to sexual abuse survivors; escalating attacks on teaching the history and literature of indigenous people and People of Color, that frame sharing any information about oppression or the cultures of the oppressed as violence against "Western civilization"; Holocaust denial that pretends the attempted Nazi genocide against primarily European Jews, Roma, lesbian, gay, and disabled people never took place; the bizarre pseudoscience of misogynist politicians claiming that pregnancy results only from consensual sex-these are all examples of the attempted erasure of collective memory and knowledge and represent backlashes against powerful popular movements attempting to wrest control of history from the ruling class.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We tolerate and accept for children a level of disenfranchisement that we would protest for any other constituency. Childhood is the standard for acceptable powerlessness. "They're just like children" is the classic statement of paternalistic racism and patriarchy. "Don't treat me like a child" is the outraged cry of the disrespected. We talk about the ways in which various groups are not admitted to full adulthood, how women were, and in many places still are, permanent legal minors, how the colonized are considered naïve, not ready for self-governance, deprived of sovereignty with the same air of protectiveness we extend to children.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the arguments against the enfranchisement of children are identical to those used to oppose suffrage for women, immigrants, former slaves, the illiterate, and the poor in general. "They are innocent and cannot understand politics. They will be taken advantage of and manipulated by the political interests of those more sophisticated than they. They aren't ready for the responsibility." But what readies people for responsibility is being allowed to take some. People become informed and savvy about those areas of life where they can exercise some power. It is powerlessness that creates passivity. When children are treated with respect, given choices, and expected to have opinions that matter, they develop opinions and make choices. I wonder what it must have been like, what dignity it must have conferred on children of the Iroquois Confederacy that any child over three was welcome to speak about matters of group importance in the tribal council. One of the most politicizing experiences of my life was the summer I spent in Cuba when I was fourteen. Overnight I found myself in a country in which fourteen-year-olds could make major life decisions-for instance, to join the merchant marine, drill with the militia, or choose special vocational training without parental permission.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All solidarity movements must work hard to counteract the pull to think for the constituencies they ally themselves with. Those with privilege often have a hard time abandoning the conviction that they are more competent than those they want to support. As adults, we need to listen to children more than we talk to them. We must back the initiative of children themselves, secure resources and share skills, respect their right and ability to lead themselves, and learn to let them lead us. This process, more than anything, will bring into our awareness and let us begin to repair the disempowerments of our own childhoods. As we do so, we will begin dismantling one of the most powerful ways that oppression reproduces itself.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we write from necessity, that our writing is a form of cultural and spiritual self-defense. To live surrounded by a popular culture in which we do not appear is a form of spiritual erasure that leaves us vulnerable to all the assaults a society can commit against those it does not recognize. Not to be recognized, not to find oneself in history or in film or on television or in books or in popular songs or in what is studied at school leads to the psychic disaster of ceasing to recognize oneself. Our literature is documentation of an existence that doesn't matter a damn to those in charge. And like the forged passports of my paternal Jewish relatives, from time to time it saves our lives.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is why we write: to see ourselves on the page. To confirm our presence. To clear a space where we can examine the lives we live, not as the sexy girlfriends, petty crooks, and crime victims of TV cop shows, and not as statistical profiles in which hardship, bravery, and resourcefulness lose all personality, but in our own physical and emotional reality. Where we can pull apart and explore this complex relationship we have with the island of our origins and kinship and this vast many-peopled country in which we are writing a new chapter of Puerto-Ricanhood. This necessity gives shape to our literature, to our urgent poetry of the streets, our ever so autobiographical fiction, our legends of collective identity. Most of what we write, we write under pressure.”
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“in the public discourses of anti-semitism, losing relatives to the Nazis is often wielded as a kind of moral authority that exempts us from the challenge to think critically. I have been accused of betraying the Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis because, like the past six generations of my family, I believe our safety lies in the solidarity of working people, and not in a Zionist state. I have been accused of being a retroactive Nazi collaborator by people who claim that dead children accuse me. I am at peace with my ghosts. In none of my lineages do my ancestors demand that I build gated homelands. They say Protect all the people, cherish every land, build freedom for everyone.”
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“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am a native of an occupied colony being systematically stripped of everything that supports life, and I know exactly what I am looking at in Palestine. I too am a thirsty resident in a land of privatized water, of massive land grabs, toxic waste disposal, a majority of my people unable to live in my country, citizen of a continent famous for invasions, occupations, death squads. I am familiar with the pornographic distortions of marketing through which oppression is sanitized, with shiny brochures that proclaim Puerto Rico to be paradise and Israel the home and hearth of freedom. I am a Latin American, so when I see soldiers shooting at children and calling them terrorists, I know what that is. I once wrote, "I am a colonial subject with a stone in my hand when I watch the news. I am a fierce Puerto Rican Jew holding out a rose to Palestine.”
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“Jews fleeing the hardships of Christian Europe could have built something quite different in a place with centuries of coexistence, could have come as respectful migrants, to be neighbors, not conquerors. But whatever it could have been, what we have now is this devastation, which, along with everything else, is also bloody reenactment: the grandchildren of ghettoized Jews patrol the borders of Gaza and build walls, descendants of pogrom survivors carry out collective punishments and random executions, and Jews privileged by what they have built speak of "dirty Arabs" in the exact same tone of voice in which the Christians of Europe said "dirty Jews.”
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