Description: In this volume, Mai'a Williams shares her experiences working in conflict zones and with liberatory resistance communities as a journalist, human rights worker, and midwife, while mothering her young daughter Aza. She first went to Palestine in 2003 to support Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation. In 2006, she became pregnant in Bethlehem, West Bank. By the time her daughter was three years old, they had already celebrated with Zapatista women in southern Mexico and survived Israeli detention, and during the 2011 Arab Spring they were in the streets of Cairo protesting the Mubarak dictatorship. She watched the Egyptian revolution fall apart and escaped the violence by moving to Europe. But three years later, she and Aza were camping at Standing Rock in protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline. This is a story about Mai'a and other mothers who are doing the work of deep social transformation by creating the resilient networks of care that sustain movements and create revolutions.
Brief description:
Mai'a Williams is a writer, visual artist, and birth worker and has worked and lived in Mexico, Palestine, east Africa, Egypt, Germany, Ecuador, and the U.S. She coedited the anthology Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines and is the author of two books of poetry, No God but Ghosts and Monsters and Other Silent Creatures.
Review Quotes:
"Mai'a's ongoing journey is about mothering as a daily revolution, brought into focus by living and loving at major revolutionary sites of our contemporary world. From Palestine to Egypt, Chiapas, Berlin, and especially the U.S. Midwest, Mai'a shares her experiences of navigating the intimate intergenerational impact of a constant state of political and personal war with detail and a crucial side-eye. This book is an opportunity to see the life you are living, and lives you would never see otherwise, in new and interconnected ways."
--Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of M Archive: After the End of the World
"This is How We Survive redefines revolution beyond the headline grabbing events to the everyday resilience of families living under ever-present threats of bombings, assaults, arrests and disappearances. This book will push you to expand and reimagine your definitions and ideas of revolution."
--Victoria Law, author of Resistance Behind Bars
"Magical, poetic, adventurous, eye-opening tales of global community organizing and resistance. Mai'a breaks the hold of American mind control, despair, and isolation with tales of gatherings around the world of everyday revolutionaries who do not have the privilege to decide whether or not to engage or fight for their lives."
--China Martens, author of The Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends & Others
"I drank down Mai'a Williams' This Is How We Survive like a glass of delicious water hitting me where I was the most thirsty. Williams gives us the story we've been waiting for and deeply needing, about the ways Black, Indigenous, and Brown women and mothers across the globe birth freedom struggle as they open their homes, hold late-night cigarette conversations, and insist that everyone be present to the work of liberation. Her work, and her life's story, is crucial to what will bring us home."
--Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, writer and organizer, author of Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home
"In reading the work of Mai'a Williams, it's hard not to be excited by the sense of possibility."
--Hip Mama