This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

Chapter 6, “El Mundo Zurdo: The Vision,” looks forward, giving contributors the space to express how they envision a Third World feminist future. The section opens and closes on two poems by Chrystos that harken back to her Indigenous traditions and values. “Give Me Back” envisions a return to Chrystos’s ancestral roots and traditions, while “No Rock Scorns Me as Whore” is a nod toward the environmental cost of modern-day capitalist, patriarchal living. Additionally, interview “O.K. Momma, Who the Hell Am I?” with Luisah Teish by Gloria Anzaldúa highlights the spiritual element of Third World feminism and posits a hopeful return to feminine, Third World beliefs. These contributions reveal the depth of oppression affecting even the spiritual aspects of the self. By envisioning a spirituality outside of the patriarchy in the mainstream Anglo white American norms, Chrystos, Teish, and Anzaldua Introduce an alternative, deeply personal, way of moving forward.

“La Prieta” by Gloria Anzaldúa and “Brownness” by Andrea Canaan, give autobiographical musings about the ways their identities intersect within themselves and with others. These pieces provide a comparison, as Anzaldúa is a darker complexioned Chicana and Andrea Canaan is African American. In particular, both women address the ways they’ve seen oppression internalized as self-hatred in their respective communities, manifesting itself through self-deprecating jokes and slights trickling into the subconscious. In discussing this topic, Anzaldúa and Canaan reveal the complexity of grappling with oppression within their communities while also trying to lift their brothers of color. This narrative is important because in mainstream white feminism, women are not simultaneously working to alleviate the oppression of their white male counterparts. These pieces add crucial elements to the understanding of patriarchy when it is intersected with issues of racism and homophobia.

“A Black Feminist Statement” by the Combahee Collective traces the roots of their Black feminist collective and establishes their goals. “Revolution: It’s Not Neat or Pretty or Quick” is a speech by Black lesbian feminist, Pat Parker, at the 1980 “¡Basta! Women’s Conference on Imperialism and Third World War.” It lays out what steps can and should be taken to realize those goals: through revolution. Both of these contributions clearly outline the steps and goals that some groups of women of color are seeking to pursue. While a black feminist statement is providing a framework for black feminist to connect to an act upon, Pat Parker’s speech is more so a direct call to action.

Cherríe Moraga’s poem “The Welder,” as well as Anzaldúa’s “La Prieta,” point out the crucial element of cooperation and exchange among women and Third World groups to overcome oppression. Anzaldúa admits she’s afraid to share that the people she loves in her life include white people because “for the politically correct stance we let color, class, and gender separate us from those who would be kindred spirits. So the walls grow higher, the gulfs between us wider, the silences more profound. There is an enormous contradiction in being a bridge” (206). These two pieces act as a counterweight to the other contributions in this chapter that describe the many differences between women. They aid in closing the book with a consideration for the importance of working with differences rather than despite differences.