Let's Eat, Let's Dance: Trans Lifeline's "Care On Our Terms" zine

Trans Lifeline and I made a zine together, and it's out now!

“Care on Our Terms” is out now + a black and white edition where you can colour it in yourself! You can download free digital copies at https://translifeline.org/safe-hotlines/zine/ !

Cover for the “Care On Our Terms” zine. An older dark-skinned person with long grey hair done up in a bun, white shirt, and blue jeans is basting salmon steaks over an open fire while talking to a younger brown skilled person with a blonde cropped afro, blue long sleeve shirt and khakis who is sitting on a rusty abandoned cop car, next to a disabled, light skinned hijabi person wearing a green jacket and cargo pants in an electric wheelchair.

I do not claim to know the lived experiences of queer, trans, mad, Black, and Native people on Turtle Island. I am not from Turtle Island. These illustrations are my offerings of gratitude as someone who on the other side of the world benefits from the language, movement, and resistance work by your communities.

I documented my initial thoughts while working on the zine in a previous Substack post called “Thoughts on Extraction”. I didn’t want to name the project and the client until the zine was officially launched, but it felt urgent to me to say the things I said there. Now that the zine is out and about, I’m glad I can write more about the process.

This has truly been my most favourite commission to date, and my best work.

Illustration featured on page 10, which also happens to be my favourite piece. It also features the cover of Mariame Kaba & Kelly Hayes’s book “Let This Radicalise You”, designed and illustrated by Kah Yangni.

During that first call, as we were talking about the zine and abolition, I kept thinking back to the impossible weight of settler colonialism, and how memory is embedded in all of our bodies.

I remembered my grandmother. There is a story that she “went mad” for 2 years, and walked from Jasin, Melaka to Teluk Intan, Perak, a 300+km journey, to find her immediate family. I remembered my father. His siblings swear in his younger years he was very different, that he was kind, but something changed somewhere. I remember how I carry them in my body, along with all my other relatives, both kangani and indentured labourer, policeman and imprisoned. I carry them now as queer, trans person that my government seeks to murder, in a world slipping away under a polycrisis.

And they ask us why we’re ill? Huh.

The abolitionist world that this zine is putting to practice reminded me so much of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable series. As the Earthseed duology is set in the redwood forests of California, it was really important that the visual storytelling centred Indigenous communities whose land the story is set in, and have been doing this work for generations. The Native communities that inform these illustrations are the Yurok, Hoopa, Karuk, Tolowwa, Wiyot, and Chimariko people. Land back is among many pivotal pathways to address these colonial legacies, and being to facilitate the healing we need from it.

Octavia calls it Acorn, talks about the bread Lauren learned to bake with it from her mother, rotating the crops, the cabins they built, the trees they plant at their love one’s graves. Earthseed and Acorn is Black, Native knowledge. I can’t just draw my interpretation idea of Acorn without learning more about the very real people and the very real land that very much exists.

Anything less is extraction. - excerpt from my post, “Thoughts on Extraction”.

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A close up on a detail from the cover art with text that reads “Care On Our Terms: Visual Breakdown”. I made a series of images that briefly explain what I reference with each illustration for my insta, which I’ll be sharing below.

I am big on little moments, and that is true for all of my art. I think it’s in the work of visualising the little moments that help people relate to how possible it all is. I want to show that what many might consider mundane is actually deeply precious, magical, and calling us to defend - to be able to cook with a open fire, to sit with friends and talk through the night, to dance on top of a police car, to catch fish the way your ancestors have always done, to sit in the quiet of the evening scrolling on your phone or reading a book, to look on to the horizon as a condor soars above.

The title font for the zine is by Alec Dunn for the Just Seeds Open Type project, make sure to support them! The rest of the text is supported by Atkinson Hyperlegible.

For the cover, I highlight details like cooking salmon traditionally, having grilled corn and acorn bread on the table, and where the visual of the redwood tree growing over and out of an abandoned police car is from. The imagery of plants overgrowing symbols of policing is inspired by my own abolition series called “1312” and by Richard Oriolo’s cover art for Derecka Purnell’s book, “Becoming Abolitionists”.

The intention for the cover is to feel like a welcome. To me, a welcome looks like lots of good food. We have salmon on sticks, basted with butter and herds. We have acorn bread of course. Can’t forget the grilled corn. And did you know that rusty cop car door actually makes a great laundry rack? Come grab a plate and let’s talk about how we can show up for each other. Don’t forget your iced tea!

These possible futures come from the ceaseless organising and movement building in our present lives such as Black Lives Matter, No More Stolen Sisters, Defend The Sacred, Free Palestine, Land Back, queer and trans justice, police, prison, and psychiatric abolition, among many others. Our lives are interdependent and intersectional, and I wanted every scene to remind us of this and acknowledge the work behind it.

Featuring traditional sweathouses and dancing was my way of threading existing communal practices into this futurist vision. I also wanted to acknowledge that cultural erasure remains one of the major forms of violence against Native communities. As a non-Native, I do not have permission to illustrate sacred and closed practices. My intention here is to have that same angin of joy, defiance, and remembrance held the same here.

I wanted to bring through the sentiment that when we say our lives are interdependent, I mean it in an international sense too. Poppies represent resistance in many cultures and I wanted to root that into other movements that come to mind such as Defend The Sacred, Black Lives Matter, and Free Palestine, which are all in the badges on the backpack. I also wanted to shout-out Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, which features Kah Yangni’s cover art for their book, “Let This Radicalize You”. The next illustration features traditional dip-net fishing by the Klamath River, as practised by the Karuk Tribe. Food sovereignty is an integral part of land back.

I take Toni Cade Bambara’s charge to make the revolution irresistible to heart. I’ve written more about this in an old Substack post called “What Does “Irresistible” Mean To You?”, and I still think that while “irresistible” is defined through practicing oppression, it cannot help but give way to the joy of the oppressed.

What would a world that nurtured people to heal each other and express what is innate to them through making things together without extracting from each other look like? - excerpt from my post, “What Does “Irresistible” Mean To You?”

Ending the zine with the image of an elder and a condor flying ahead was my way to “tutup panggung”, given that condors in many Native communities represent death and renewal, and for the elder sitting by the mouth of the Klamath river look ahead to be a callback to my Free Palestine piece that also had two older women sitting in different waters that flow into each other, one in an oil palm plantation in Malaysia, the other on a Gazan beach.

This is the list of resources that helped me to create the illustrations in the zine. I am grateful for every person here. Thank you for the work that you do.

The Yurok People: The Klamath Tribe - History, Culture and Affiliations | Jaguar Bird

Restoring The River with the Yurok, Hupa and Karuk | Tending Nature | Season 2, Episode 3 | KCET

Restoring the Klamath River: Inside the world’s largest dam removal project | An ABC10+Special

First Descent: Kayaking the Klamath River after the largest dam removal in U.S. history | Oregon Public Broadcasting

Redwoods Shouldn't Be So Tall. Here's Why They Are | PBS Terra

Redwoods: The Tallest Trees | National Geographic

Our Sacred Earth | Mother Nature Ep. 5 | Earthrise

Heart of the World: How the Arhuaco Women Are Reconnecting with Sacred Land | Mother Nature Ep. 4 | Earthrise

Blackfoot Strive to Reintroduce Buffalo After 100-Year Absence | Full Documentary | PBS

History of Native California | Cal Poly Humboldt PBLC

Broken Treaties (Full documentary) | Oregon Experience | OPB

How This Native American Elder Reclaimed Sacred Land in the Bay Area | KQED Truly CA

Native American History | CrashCourse

Stories | California Native Plant Society

Endemic Plants | NPS.org

Calflora

Rare Serpentine Endemic Plants of the Klamath-Siskiyou Bioregion | Forest Service U.S. Department of Agriculture

Imperiled Species of the Klamath-Siskiyou | KS Wild

Collections | Sípnuuk Digital Library

Common Native Plants | Redwood National and State Parks

The Yurok Tribe | Facebook

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And an additional special shoutout to Mariame Kaba, Kelly Hayes, the book they wrote together, “Let This Radicalise You”, and the artist behind the cover, Kah Yangni. Your work is transformational, and I hope the illustration that features the book honours you.

I think, what makes these illustrations feel so alive, is finding the shared angin. Angin in grief, angin in joy, angin in the refusal to throw each other away - the same angin that moves Lauren to write Earthseed and a new imagined community. And so this zine is very much what I see her Acorn to be - A cop car reclaimed by a redwood tree, a perfect clothesline. Freshly caught salmon roasting in an open fire, almost done. We are glad everyone could make it. Let’s eat, let’s dance, let’s sit together, let’s hold each other.

The last illustration which makes the back page of the zine.