On ‘Homeless Lives Matter’
“One day I was approached by a clean-cut white gentleman dressed in a dark suit and red tie … He could not understand why a person like me who seemed intelligent was homeless.”
That gentleman was not me, but it could have been. I shared that same man’s shock after meeting Leo Gnawa several years ago, then buying his book. I’ve since shared his story in bar conversations with well-to-do people who wonder aloud the same.
Tackling homelessness is no easy task—either for the governments that seek to control it or the individual under its grasp. It is what policy wonks would call a “wicked problem”; there's no single cause as to why one person ends up homeless over another, just as there is no single solution for it.
Leo is an exception to the typical homelessness experience. Despite working many low-paying jobs (sometimes even below fair labor standards), he is more than capable of hard work. But he was fed up with struggling to save enough money to cover rent, choosing homelessness over paying a landlord.
Leo selling his books outside of a Whole Foods.
Leo Gnawa is a homelessness activist and D.C. native. He educates the world on the trials of homelessness by sharing his own stories of being homeless in his book, "Homeless Lives Matter." Leo has experienced terrible, horrible situations, and there is truly no glory in it. His stories shed light on what it actually means to be homeless: the insecurities, the shame, the inhumanity of it all.
So he chose to work for himself and sell his self-published books on the street for $20 apiece. The fact that he has created something most adults with far more formal education, such as myself, may never produce—a book, let alone several—is cause for celebration. He gets up every day, puts in the work, and his successes and failures live or die on his very shoulders.
Reimagining what Leo’s original experience with that man in the red tie (AI generated image).
Leo only needs to sell one book every working hour to out-earn D.C.'s minimum wage hourly amount. By his own account, he often sells more than that. His book isn't only a record of his personal struggle, it is his testament of how he eventually worked his way out of homelessness, one sale at a time.
Leo’s book shares anecdotes of how people judge and view him. He holds his head high after each moment, sometimes carrying himself with more integrity than those who have judged him.
“My advice to everybody who is not homeless is this … be grateful and considerate a blessing that you have a roof over your head … and don’t have to worry about sleeping outside or go hungry, like the homeless men and women that you pass and scorn day and night … Yes, you may be more fortunate than the homeless man or woman you despise or fail to acknowledge as a human being like you. But you don’t know what can happen to you that can be worse than his or her predicament.”
The work of D.C. authors helps our community flourish, and Leo is a strong part of that. Helping D.C.-native authors grow is important to us. I'm so glad Trove offers Leo another way to get his books to the public, and across the entire nation.
The homeless are easily overlooked, but Leo’s takeaways are clear: He asks all of us to be better neighbors to others, low and high, and to rethink how we could all do better as humans.
That means keeping a few loose dollar bills in my pocket to hand out to the homeless when I'm running errands. It will help them get one dollar closer to a cup of coffee.
Homeless Lives Matter by Leo Gnawa:
A first-hand account of surviving homelessness in the nation's capital — told by a man who lived every page of it.
Rated 4.8 out of 5 stars by online readers, calling it "a necessary read" and "mandatory reading for all."
Leo Gnawa wrote Homeless Lives Matter while he was living on the streets of Washington, D.C. It’s his memoir from inside his experiences with poverty.
Gnawa walks readers through the daily reality of homelessness: the search for a safe place to sleep, the people who help or harm, and the quiet indignities most of us never consider.
Alongside his own story, he weaves in the experiences of others he met living on the street, giving faces and names to a crisis too often reduced to statistics.
The book closes with facts and figures on homelessness in America, grounding one man's story in the scale of a much larger issue.
