Rehearsals for Living, Arika Episode 11, 2024

REHEARSALS FOR LIVING

Imperialism and ongoing colonialism have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence, and Indigenous and Black peoples have been building worlds and then rebuilding worlds for as long as we have been in existence. Relentlessly building worlds through unspeakable violence and loss. Building worlds and living in them anyway.
Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

These are some of the first thoughts expressed in Rehearsals for Living, a series of incredible letters Leanne and Robyn wrote to each other during the COVID pandemic. These thoughts emanate from the co-mingled, interinanimation of Indigenous resurgence, the Black Radical Tradition and abolitionist practice. Abolitionist organiser and writer Harsha Walia, described Robyn and Leanne’s letters as their gift of thinking and practice as our future ancestors in the now. The great historian of the Black Radical tradition, Robin D. G. Kelley says of the book, in dissecting the death-drive-disguised-as-worldview of colonial and racial total violence, they help us understand “that the end of the world promises nothing except a chance to make the world anew.”

We think Rehearsals for Living is the most affecting, direct, personal, accessible yet clear eyed and edifying abolitionist text of the last 5 years. For Episode 11, Leanne and Robyn will be joined by one of Scotland’s leading abolitionist voices, the Orcadian poet and writer Harry Josephine Giles, to share, read from and discuss their letters, in depth and in person.

What a pleasure and honor it is to read two such probing and principled minds in conversation and collaboration. Maynard and Simpson dare to confront the most wrenching challenges of our omnicidal times, while finding joy and love along the way. A beacon of a book.
Naomi Klein

Robyn and Leanne embody and express how practice makes different. This necessary book is a model—through the shared process of two brilliant thinkers it gifts us clarity to see rehearsals otherwise and elsewhere.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore

In these letters, Leanne and Robyn constellate our brightest wounds and scars, but refuse to waste their energies of love and imagination on fixing or salvaging the Nation/State. Instead, they reorganize the trajectories and shapes of those constellations—retelling stories again and anew, of who we have been and might yet be again.
Natalie Diaz

Join Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on Friday 15 November at More Than Perfect in conversation with Ailton Krenak, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Geni Núñez and at Glasgow School of Art on Wednesday 13 November for the I am Not a Nation StateStudy Session.