Shayla Lawson is a poet, performance artist and author of How to Live Free in a Dangerous World but what does their decolonial travel memoir teach us about how to embrace every aspect of life?

Hello, I'm Dhruti Shah and this is my podcast Have You Thought About.

I'm a writer who loves to find out about what passions people are pursuing, especially if they managed to blend together skills in unusual ways. In each edition, I'm going to chat with someone I find particularly interesting and who's managed to fit things together in their life or profession that you might not always think of as an obvious match. You're about to hear me chatting with Shayla Lawson, poet, performance artist and the author of decolonial memoir, How to Live Free in a Dangerous World.

I have been a lifelong curious reader. So for me, the story really started to form when I was very young, and I used to read in all sorts of books about other people's travel, I was really obsessed with the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, Josephine Baker ,Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, all these people going out and finding this way broader world outside of living in the United States. And as time went on, I finally got the opportunity to start to build that for myself, and to see the world in all these glorious ways.

And my first iteration of starting to write about that came in poetry. It came in a lot of bursts, I love to do a lot of work with music. And I love just having a lot of musicality and sound thinking about you know, when you're travelling, and you've got your suitcase, you usually have a playlist or something, you know, like, I like, I have songs that I love to listen to, when I'm like rolling my suitcase, through an airport and things like that. And I wanted to have that feeling of this sonic celebration of what it's like to journey, whether it be moving around from city to city, or whether it's just moving around inside of yourself and figuring out things.

And that manifested in this wonderful experiment of how to Live Free in a Dangerous World.

It's very, very lyrical. So how was the editing process?

It's really phenomenal that you ask that because one of the things that I was really excited about this time around was getting to use different tools. So I actually spent a lot of time using Otter AI. I wanted to record a lot of what I was thinking about, because it was also a book that was taking place at a time where I was experiencing these massive changes in my body, I had to even shift my identity drastically from being what I used to talk about as cosplaying like a normal person, like I used to cosplay being a Normie. And then I went into being a full blown like chronically ill disabled person. And in that process, it meant that I was spending a lot of time revisiting how I approached my writing process.

So I was used to my art coming through my fingers. And now I really had to rely on my voice and be able to just sit and close my eyes, and tell myself these stories, and immerse myself in that world. And it really helped to build the sonic resonance in the pieces. Because it's this very refined version of if I was just doing almost like long form spoken word, almost like if you think about the the Iliad or the Odyssey, where they were these poems that were just meant to be recited. That's basically how the book got written. It's this really long form journey that I mostly just recorded while I was sick in bed

But it's so fascinating that you say that because when you read it, it does actually feel that we're coming on the journey with you that we are travelling with you not that you're in bed, or that, you know, even sitting down writing, or creating this. So being able to have that skill to do that, is that something that comes naturally or that you've really had to train yourself to be able to do?

. So I also just love that as kind of a message to people who are feeling like they can't do things. This was my opportunity to figure out at a time when everybody was telling me my career was over that, you know, everybody was looking at me as a lost cause that here is this way that I got to champion and over that by just being patient with myself and figuring out kinder ways to make art.

It did not come naturally, it took some work. But what was wonderful about it is that work also really helped me think about place. So when I'm in a car, you know, thinking about the sound of being in a car and sitting in the backseat in Zimbabwe and hearing my friend turning up the radio dial and the beers sloshing, the little console.

And you know, it really made me immerse myself in the experience because I had to shift thinking about it in a very cerebral visual way, and start thinking about just reembodying that experience almost like a dream state. So what was really helpful is that at the time I was living close to the beach. So the way that I first started was I would open up the windows and I would just listen to the sound of the waves and think about that, as this way of carrying me back into, like being on the beach in Bermuda, and sitting by the waves with my notebook and writing and meeting all of these wonderful liberated women are these ways that it reminded me of just movement in general and the ways that we can transport ourselves through dreams.

So that's a lot of the way that that process worked for me. But it took a good like six months to a year before I felt like I got it down. And then there's parts of the book where it's a really challenging story. So when I start talking about the transitions that my body made, and I start talking about thinking about how Frida Kahlo did her work and things like that there are points, if you go back and actually listen to the recording where I'm crying, or the recording might take three hours to get what ends up being an essay that's only three pages long, and a book because of the long pauses that I'm taking to just make sure that I stay embodied in that experience.

So those in and of themselves are an interesting art piece, I would say. But I love how in the concentration of how to put this together as a book, my editor, that tiny reparation, were so supportive of the idea of really just honouring the story as it came and listening to it so it doesn't lose that raw quality. And I love that that still shines in what we see in the final product.

It's definitely a very, very raw vulnerable piece of writing. But now you live with and tell me if I'm pronouncing this incorrectly is Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and you're quite unflinching, and you're quite unflinching about it in the memoir, but what is the condition? And can you just give a little bit of insight into how it affects your life?

Absolutely. Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and that's as close a pronunciation that I have as well. I think some people pronounce it slightly differently. Well what I have because there's about 13 different forms of Ehlers-Danlos. And it can attack any part of your body. So it could be vascular, it could be a wide range of things. I have a version that is a joint tissue connected disorder, which means that everywhere I have joint tissue, it has the ability to disintegrate or break or bend at will. So it reminds me a lot of like just being silly putty or being gumby, where parts of myself I'll wake up in the morning and something will be like stretched out in some weird way. I remember that strange movie Death Becomes Her where like at the end of it Meryl Streep's head is like turned backwards. And that is often and that's often like what's happening with my body, it will do very strange things. But it's a very underrecognized condition.

I did not know I had it until about two years ago, when it started to really disrupt my life. Part of my mission has also become to build awareness for chronically ill people in general, but also people who are suffering from rather rare conditions that people might ignore, or treat as if it's something that they're making up. Because for decades, I went through this experience of doctors telling me, this isn't real, you're making this up, this couldn't possibly be happening, it's not medically possible.

A lot of my travels as well were focused on me looking for alternative means to start dealng with it. So when I was losing my legs, I decided to go to Bermuda, to see if I could work with some holistic practitioners to try and rebuild my body. And doing that kind of work. also helped me build out this meditative practice that then once I finally found doctors who knew what I was going through, they noticed that a lot of the tools that they teach people I've already learned by just searching the globe for more holistic answers, I tend to get anywhere from three to six surgeries a year on my different joints. And it means a lot of like healing and recovery is a process that I'm constantly struggling with.

But you do go into a lot of detail in the book in terms of experiences, and it feels like there's nothing you actually shy away from, you know, you talk about the nuances of your relationships, of racism, of sexuality, of sensuality, this chronic illness. Was there anything at one point when you thought, Oh, should I go ahead with each other? Not go ahead with it? And then really push through and felt comfortable with what you've given to the world as it were.

One of the things that this book really helped me to do is re examine some of my heroes and recontextualize them. So in the process of thinking about travel, so I start the book, I was born in Minnesota, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where Prince became famous, you know, and I think about people like Prince and then in the process of becoming disabled. I started thinking about Sammy Davis Jr, who my dog is also named after and I think about Frida Kahlo, as I mentioned, how she had to paint in bed, and when I started thinking about the things that they offered us in this world, as disabled misfits, it made me start thinking about what could I also offer at this time, you know, what, how much of myself could I be willing to give?

And it's part of why the book is called, you know How To Live Free in a Dangerous World because we do live in a society where people are being burned to the idea of sharing this much of yourself of sharing, your multiplicity becomes very dangerous. But that's also why I think it's so incredibly important because we are free people, you know, we are meant to be free thinking free living individuals. And it is scary. As I think about how are people going to receive this? How are they going to receive me learning all of this information?

You know, you know, I think about the fact that there's a line in the book where I've talked about ass licking. And there are times where I talk about like, having sex as a disabled person and putting on my prosthetic neck brace or my leg braces as part of the turn on. And I am curious about how culture is going to receive this kind of story. And I also know that the story is so important, because there are people who are building salvation out of these wonderfully inventive private lives. And that's travelling to, and I just felt the only way to tell that story authentically, was to share my own experience is a travel memoir.

But there is that very, very deep raw exploration of your own identity, but amongst a much wider socio political picture, there is an exploration of your own sense of belonging, or at least that's my interpretation of it. So that process of curating yourself against this huge backdrop, did you ever get overwhelmed? And how did you navigate through that?

This was a liberation for me, because for so long, I have allowed societal structures to put me in a very specific box. Living as an African American in the United States, whiteness is such a pervasive concept. And in the process of this book, in trying to remove the framework of myself juxtaposed against a white background, I wanted to start to think about what it is to just inhabit myself fully, and inhabit the full breadth of what that means.

And so I started thinking about the cosmos that this beautiful universe is built on this black background. And also, if I started to use that, as the canvas on which I started curating who I could be, that language is expansive. And the more that I can share that with people, the more that we can also start to remove ourselves from the frame of who we're supposed to be. And think about who we are genuinely on the inside. It's one of the things that motivated me to transition my pronouns, because for so long, I just associated pronoun usage with how people perceived my external body. But then when I started thinking about how Malcolm X use the X as a transition from Malcolm Little, into the name that he took on when he became a full member of the Muslim community, that it's a transition phase for me as well.

It's a spiritual state of the transitory where I'm also accepting the internal balance, where I'm accepting my ancestral heritage, or I'm just starting to think way bigger, about what it means to have a body and stop letting people cram the entirety of who I am and how I feel into a space that makes them comfortable. That's a revolutionary task that I'm really ready to take on. I think becoming a disabled person was the point where I realised that the world will make you as small as you let it, and I have a big vision for how I want to live in this world. And I just want to share that in as many ways as possible. Even, you know, to the to the detriment of what might be social graces, we shall see.

I don't know, I'm not sure about that. Like - there's no such thing as social graces.

Thank you! Needless

Do what you need to do but there is that there is that evolving as you move through the book, through the journey that you're on? And as I keep going back to, you know, that rawness of it, but how did you make sure or how are you making sure that you are keeping a sense of self and not everything has been given to the reader, to the world? That Shalya is still Shayla for Shayla's sake, not for whatever, the reader will make Shayla to be.

Thank you. That's a wonderful question. I have cultivated so much a beautiful stationary world that is full of art, and love and support. And having that quietness around me gives me all of this creative energy to share with other people. And my great hope is that this book will be the catalyst for me to continue to move in that way where I can build a structure of support around myself very much like what I talked about in the chapter on liberation where having this community of people where we forge together and we conspire together and we support each other in making art and having vision.

That is a world that travel has allowed me to build, I've been able to find my people. And now I get to share a little bit of who they are as well with the world. So since I have that at my back, I also have my my fairy minion, Sammy Davis, Jr, and my back and all time. So I have a world in which like, there's so much love and support that I feel ready to share this much.

I'm going to pick up on that, like, it does feel like you've got a collective that we're bringing people along with us and and it's like, Oh, I know some of these characters now. And what really stood out is it you're willing to have uncomfortable conversations with people that you are coming across, or have had close relationships with? And you're then taking that insight and helping the reader to figure out I guess, their own place and the conversations that they're having, with what you've included in the book? Was there a degree of poetic licence, or is it all very, very factually based?

There's a line in one of the opening paragraphs that says something to the effect 'everything here is true, and what's not is even more truthful'. And I think that is definitely the spirit of the book. It's very authentic. It's definitely creative nonfiction, it's actually not really heavy on the creative part outside of lyrical. But there are definitely places where I have to push and pull for the sake of, of protection, of narrative tension, all the different things, but definitely, while keeping the integrity of the experiences and the people that I've gotten the opportunity to share space with.

Because we are at a time in which there's so much more cross cultural intimacy, that being able to see what it looks like to be able to have some of these private conversations on paper, I think will be just so useful to those of us who are part of this global village, which really is everyone, you know, it's everyone who wants to participate in that kind of living.

And when you start living that way, when you start involving yourself in this cross cultural inheritance, you have to kind of rub up against each other uncomfortably, you have to start asking, and challenging the ways that certain people view the world in order to better understand how we eat, you know, sometimes it's so easy to just throw ourselves into the algorithm of what makes us entirely comfortable. But travel is really about going beyond that. It's not the Instagram shot, like perfectly curated, it's sitting down and having these cups of coffee, with people who have completely different viewpoints, different ages, entirely different mindsets. And then seeing what of that you can start to integrate into what you know, and how it makes you new.

I remember reading it and it took me a little while to process if I'm perfectly fine with it. It's one of those books where each chapter I had to put it down, it was like, Oh, my brain hurts. Like I have to really sit there and think about what you've put there. And actually, I would go away and and I talked to some of my friends, I was like, Oh, just read this memoir. And, you know, we've got to be careful about the way we talk to people. There was one particular incident where there was a DVD player. And it was like the privilege of having a DVD player, which I hadn't ever had to think about. It is a privilege, having certain access to technology is a privilege. But as you were writing it, did you think that was going to be the case? Were you writing it for you?

You know, I've been as a professor and educator for the past 20 years. So I've had the wonderful privilege of getting to have so many conversations with people of multiple generations, both higher and lower than me. And specifically when I think about this book, I think of it as a survival guide for Gen Z, I think of it. And I think about the difficult conversations we've had in the classroom, the way that they've made me challenge my conception of personhood, the ways that they are challenging us to examine some of the ways that we use language and that we the things that we take for granted. And I wanted to provide them a text that said, I heard you know, I was listening. And here are the hard knock lessons that I've had to learn when it comes to my own privilege and my own arrogance and the ways that I might think of myself. So what's nice too is because I have that system of checks and balances.

It provides me with this sense of not building an ego around it, I had a gorgeous experience this summer in Senegal, getting to spend time at a really international dance studio and one of the students and looking at some, my earlier work was asking, you know, it's very nice that you spent a lot of time writing about African Americans. But do you think about black people across the diaspora? Are you writing those stories? Have you figured out how, and it's just really wonderful to be able to answer this young person and say, yes, I have heard you, I am listening. And now I have done that. And I'm doing it from the experience of being in many cases like the ugly American and the person who is like imputing their class differences and their ideas into these international situations, and then seeing how I come out better for understanding culture differently than the way that it has been designed to make me think that I'm at the top and everything else is the product of that.

It's one of the reasons why that chapter in which I talk about the DVD player matters to me so much, because I had using it in a very different context, the wonderful privilege of getting to work at a refugee centre. And just seeing how in the context of being in the Netherlands, I was a foreigner, I was a dark skinned foreigner. So I was dealing with all sorts of prejudice on my own end, but then looking at people who had all of the features and being my family members, but who were in a state of crisis, who were living in these asylum centre, with very few resources coming from incredible backgrounds. So you know, the same woman who couldn't have afforded a DVD player, because she was a refugee in this particular context, had come out of a family where her father was a political journalist, you know, and she had to watch him be burned, because of the things that he was sharing that the government didn't want him to share, you know, and then to come into this context, and be a person saying, you know, Oh, if only you had a DVD player without even thinking about the whole of her story, and how she ended up in the situation that she did, I really wanted us to be able to start re examining the saviourism that we associate with borders. And the idea that one border over another keeps us safe, and really realise that we're a very advanced civilization. And that is not a hierarchy that is devoted to a few cities, or a few states or a few nations. You know, we're very intellectual, and vast people. And it's really important for us to be thinking about immersing ourselves in those stories differently as we meet each other face to face.

Pretty intense. One thing that I wanted to go to you was, it strikes really nicely, that balance between the more difficult stories, and also embracing and celebrating yourself and celebrating your heritage and your future. And one thing that came out, because this is Have You thought About and what makes you you - this passion for hula hooping?

Yeah, it's wild, because now I am, I'm fairly crippled. So I actually use a walker and different devices to get around. But I even noticed now so the hula hooping actually, it fits into that in a lot of ways and that the flip side of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and like its superhero context, is that I've always had very hypermobile joints. So I was an amateur circus arts performer for a while and finding these really, grounding creative activities became a huge part of my identity.

So dancing within the frame of a hoop becoming like this really advanced hula Hooper was one of my favourite things, and I still love to take it out every now and then just even just to think about like, having that circular, you know, root chakra and grounding happening and what it means to hold yourself in place in that part of your body is still something that I really work with internally, even though I'm so much more sedentary. But yeah, hula hooping just changed my world in so many ways, because it opened me up to thinking about in the corniest way, like, how do I atune myself to the rhythm of life? You know, how do I keep this thing in balance? You know, and I've never thought about that hula hooping as a little kid, I just always looked at it as like, Oh, this is something I can't do. I'm just not good at. But it was because I was listening to the wrong things. And I love thinking about that when it comes to any talent that you want to take,on any bit of creativity. Like, is it that you're bad at it? Or is it that your model of what good is or your model of like what listening is has to change so that it fits you? And hula hooping taught me that a lot, plus I got to beat a sex worker in a hula hooping contest in Jamaica, which is an amazing thing to be able to say, ha ha hah.

That was the inspiring Shayla Lawson who brings both vulnerability and power to everything that they do. Do you have an interdisciplinary life because I would love to hear from you and maybe we can chat on this podcast that goes with my newsletter, which is called Have You Thought about and can be found via www.dhrutishah.com.

Please join me next time for a fascinating conversation with another guest who likes to mix up lots of things in their life. Listen to past episodes and rate and review the podcast if you've enjoyed it. And thank you to Rian Shah for the music