Aurora Levins Morales Quotes (1954-)

“Every vital social movement immediately begins to generate art-songs, poetry, posters, murals, novels-an outpouring of the creativity that people will create from even the smallest crumbs of hope.”

“What dishonors my relatives is the fact of checkpoints in their names, of mass arrests, collective punishment, home demolitions, the theft of territory and resources, to rid the land of Palestinian people, so it can be farmed and built on by Israeli Jewish settlers. I am one of many Jews who believe only justice will bring peace, and who face tremendous pressure and personal attacks for saying so. Today, my Jewish kin who believe repression is the price of survival are acting on old fears of standing alone against terrible threats.”

“What dishonors my relatives is the fact of checkpoints in their names, of mass arrests, collective punishment, home demolitions, the theft of territory and resources, to rid the land of Palestinian people, so it can be farmed and built on by Israeli Jewish settlers. I am one of many Jews who believe only justice will bring peace, and who face tremendous pressure and personal attacks for saying so. Today, my Jewish kin who believe repression is the price of survival are acting on old fears of standing alone against terrible threats.”

“the great extent to which the prosperity of the Swiss economy is based on riches accumulated through collaboration with Nazi Germany and the appropriation of Jewish bank accounts gives Swiss bankers and other members of the Swiss elite a strong stake in denying many portions of documented Holocaust history. Considerable pressure had to be brought to bear on the profit-making abilities of the Swiss banks, pressure generated by Jews who were themselves wealthy and influential within the world of international banking, before there was any acknowledgment that Swiss bankers and lawyers had stolen hundreds of millions of dollars from Jewish depositors. The origins of Swiss affluence have been normalized, and business as usual depends on that normalization.”

“we became involved in the Black Panther Defense Committee. My parents were doing various kinds of support activities for the Panthers. They lent them the car for the breakfast program and various things. My dad was teaching history class to the Young Lords…the Panthers themselves were very young. They were teenagers. I’m trying to remember — Bobby Rush — Fred Hampton was 21 when he was killed. You know, they were all very young and so they were kind of, you know, these strutting, macho boys who were coming into a kind of political power that they had not had access to before. So there were all kinds of dynamics that were icky about it, but you know, I don’t remember the details of what we did with them, as it wasn’t for that long of a period.”

“I am fighting for an end to the recycling of pain. I am fighting for my own deepest source of hope, the belief in human solidarity, in our ability to decide that we will expand our hearts and our sense of kinship to include each other and resist the urge to contract in fear, to huddle and bare our teeth and lash out. When I speak out for the humanity of Palestine I am defending the humanity of everyone, including all Jews. When I stand firmly against the hidden reservoirs of antisemitism that bubble up when the ruling class needs them to, when I tell my gentile friends not to get distracted from the white Christian male 1 percent, to stay the course and stay clear, I am standing for accuracy, for clarity, for revealing the structures of domination that crush our world, including the people of Palestine.”

“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."”

“we could be allies, the Arabs and we, two persecuted peoples rooted in the same land, the same customs, food, language...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.”

“I remember that there was some resentment about the success of the book. From women of color...who saw publishing with a white women’s press or publishing and becoming famous in itself is a sort of abandonment.”

“A century ago Puerto Rican feminist Luisa Capetillo said, "If you don't want women to sell themselves for bread, give them bread.'”

“Some time in that period also I discovered the writing of Nicolás Guillén from Cuba and there was a permission to write the way my neighbors spoke.”

“I am the child of a bilingual family that delights in tongue acrobatics of mixed syntax and vocabulary. We write as we speak, in run-on sentences (if Faulkner could do it and be called great, why can't we?)”

“If the personal is political, so is the political personal. If it is true, as Che Guevara so eloquently said, that a revolutionary commitment to human liberation is fueled by love, then how can we not be heartbroken by oppression?”

“When Rafael Correa, former president of Ecuador, said he would resign sooner than legalize abortion, he was refusing to recognize that when we can't yet have it all, we must choose the path that most expands our capacity to get it all in the future.”

“Judith Ortiz Cofer, in her autobiography in prose poetry, Silent Dancing, uses the double vision of her nomadic life between Puerto Rico and New Jersey to explore the dangers and delights, bitterness and confusion of female sexuality in Puerto Rican culture.”

“Trump...is an unstable, reckless and irrational extremist who is not bound by the rule of any law, and is eager to dismantle all constraints on the looting of the planet. If he wins again, he will be even less constrained. Some of his actions will be catastrophically irreversible.”

“When Emma Goldman declared, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution," she was talking about the necessity of joy. Joy, hope, love, healing, are powerful forces. Just because at times these ideas have been manipulated to reinforce individualism doesn't make them sentimental distractions.”

“Cherríe and I — for about, I don’t know, a year or two — were a two-woman writing support group. We just got together and shared our work, which was wonderful. So that I was somebody who was in her life when she and Gloria [Anzaldúa] got together and talked about putting out This Bridge Called My Back.”

“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.”