Literary Works

"Such people can say with pride: I never lost a battle. On the other hand, they will never be able to say: I won a battle."

"I am not here to tell you that defeat is part of life: we all know that. Only the defeated know Love. Because it is in the realm of love that we fight our first battles and generally lose. I am here to tell you that there are people who have never been defeated. They are the ones who never fought... They managed to avoid scars, humiliations, a sense of helplessness, as well as those moments when even warriors doubt the existence of God."

"Defeat ends when we launch into another battle. Failure has no end: it is a lifetime choice. Defeat is for those who, despite their fears, live with enthusiasm and faith. Defeat is for the valiant. Only they will know the honour of losing and the joy of winning."

"The defeated are those who never fail... Defeat means that we lose a particular battle or war. Failure does not allow us to go on fighting... Defeat comes when we fail to get something we very much want. Failure does not allow us to dream. Its motto is: ‘Expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed.’"

"The important thing is to get back on your feet. Only he who gives up is defeated. Everyone else is victorious."

"If victory is not theirs this time, it will be the next time. And if not the next time, then the time after that."

"Others, even though they were defeated and feel humiliated by the things the winners are saying about them, will allow themselves to shed a few tears but will never succumb to self-pity. They know that this is a merely a pause in the fighting and that, for the moment, they are at a disadvantage. They try to work out what they did wrong and what they did right. They take advantage of this moment of defeat to rest, heal their wounds, devise new strategies and equip themselves better. Then the day dawns when a new battle knocks on their door. They are still afraid, but they have to act, either that or remain for ever lying on the ground. They get up and face their opponent, remembering the suffering they have endured and which they no longer wish to endure..."

"Ever since he fell in love for the first time and was rejected, he has known that this did not put an end to his ability to love. What is true in love is also true in war. Losing a battle or losing everything we thought we possessed will bring us moments of sadness. But when those moments pass, we will discover the hidden strength that exists in each of us, a strength that will surprise us and increase our self-respect... Only those who fail to recognize that inner strength will say, “I lost,” and be sad."

"Both will pass. One will succeed the other. And the cycle will continue until we liberate ourselves from the flesh and find the Divine Energy."

"The gazelle eats the grass and is devoured by the lion. It isn’t a matter of who is the strongest, but God’s way of showing us the cycle of death and resurrection. And within that cycle there are neither winners nor losers; there are only stages that must be gone through. When the human heart understands this, it is free and able to accept difficult times without being deceived by moments of glory."

"In the cycle of nature there is no such thing as victory or defeat; there is only movement. The winter struggles to reign supreme, but in the end is obliged to accept spring’s victory, which brings with it flowers and happiness."

"Does a young man, rejected by his first love, declare that love does not exist? The young man says to himself: “I’ll find someone better able to understand what I feel. And then I will be happy for the rest of my days.""

"Does a man who spent years preparing to climb the highest mountain in the world feel defeated when, on reaching that mountain, he discovers that nature has cloaked the summit in storm clouds? The man says... "...the weather will change and, one day, I will make it to the top. Meanwhile, you’ll still be here waiting for me.”"

"Does a leaf, when it falls from the tree in winter, feel defeated by the cold? The tree says to the leaf: “That’s the cycle of life. You may think you’re going to die, but you live on in me. It’s thanks to you that I’m alive, because I can breathe. It’s also thanks to you that I have felt loved, because I was able to give shade to the weary traveler. Your sap is in my sap; we are one thing.”"

"You will ask me questions and I will answer them. That is what the teachers of Ancient Greece did; their disciples would ask them questions about problems they had not considered before and the teachers would answer them... We will speak, therefore, about our daily lives, about the difficulties we have had to face. That is all the future will be interested in, because I do not believe very much will change in the next thousand years.’"

"It isn’t the absolute truth about life and death, but the thing that helps us to live and confront the challenges of day-to-day life. It isn’t what we learn from books, which serves only to fuel futile arguments about what happened or will happen; it is the knowledge that lives in the hearts of men and women of good will..."

"As from tomorrow, harmony will become discord. Joy will be replaced by grief. Peace will give way to a war that will last into an unimaginably distant future... They can destroy the city, but they cannot destroy everything the city has taught us, which is why it is vital that this knowledge does not suffer the same fate as our walls, houses and streets."

"Many centuries ago, a man was judged and condemned in this square... On the road to the right, while he was walking towards his death, he passed a group of women. When he saw them weeping, he said: “Weep not for me, weep for Jerusalem.” He prophesied what is happening now."

"This evening, in the same square where, a millennium ago, the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, handed Jesus over to the mob to be crucified, a group of men and women of all ages went to see the Greek, whom we all know as the Copt. He did not seek to join any particular religion, and no one tried to persuade him otherwise. The Copt believes only in the present moment and what he calls Moira - the unknown god, the Divine Energy, responsible for a single law, which, if ever broken, will bring about the end of the world."

"The Muslims are, at this moment, gathered at the Al-Aqsa mosque, the Jews chose to assemble their soldiers in Mihrab Dawud, and the Christians... were charged with defending the southern part of the city... Judging from the enemy’s movements, we assume that they will attack tomorrow morning, spilling our blood in the name of the Pope, the ‘liberation’ of the city and the ‘divine will’."

"A week ago, our commanders held a meeting. The French soldiers are infinitely superior and far better equipped than ours. We were given a choice: to abandon the city or fight to the death, because we will certainly be defeated. Most of us decided to stay."

"Now that I am at the end of my life, I leave for those who come after me everything that I learned while I walked the face of this Earth. May they make good use of it... tomorrow, life will undertake to separate us, and we must each set must each set off in search of our own path, our own destiny or our own way of facing death."

"I met Sir Walter’s son in 1982, at Christmas...We maintained a cordial relationship over the years and...On 30 November 2011, I received a copy of the text that he had mentioned at that first meeting. I transcribe it here."

"Carbon-14 tests (used to determine the age of organic matter) revealed that the document was relatively recent, possibly as late as AD 1307. It was easy enough to trace its origin to the city of Accra, outside Egyptian territory...."

"In 1974, the English archaeologist Sir Walter Wilkinson discovered another manuscript, this time written in three languages: Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin. Conscious of the laws protecting such finds in the region, he sent the text to the Department of Antiquities in the Museum of Cairo. Shortly afterward, back came a response: there were at least 155 copies of the document circulating in the world (three of which belonged to the museum), and they were all practically identical."

"In AD 170, a group of bishops met to decide which texts would form part of the New Testament... books, like those found in Nag Hammadi, were omitted either because they were written by women (for example, the Gospel according to Mary Magdalene) or because they depicted a Jesus who was aware of His divine mission and whose passage through death would, therefore, be less drawn out and painful."

"The papyruses are Greek translations of texts written between the end of the First century BC and AD 180, and they constitute a body of work also known as the Apocryphal Gospels because they are not included in the Bible as we know it today."

"Grassroots feminists continue to be undermined by single-issue liberals who believe that by breaking a class-entitled glass ceiling—'beating the boys at their own game'—there is some kind of "trickle down" effect on the actual lives of workingclass and poor women and children. This is the same "trickle down" of our share of corporate profit, secured by tax benefits for the wealthy, that has yet to land on our kitchen tables, our paychecks, or our children's public school educations. Social change does not occur through tokenism or exceptions to the rule of discrimination, but through the systemic abolishment of the rule itself."

"This book is a manifesto-the 1981 declaration of a new politics 'US Third World Feminism.' No great de-colonial writer, from Fanon, Shaarawi, Blackhawk, or Sartre, to Mountain Wolf Woman, de Beauvoir, Saussure, or Newton could have alone proclaimed this 'politic born of necessity.' This politic denies no truths: its luminosities drive into and through our bodies. Writers and readers alike become shape-shifters, are invited to enter the shaman/witness state, to invoke power differently. 'US Third World Feminism' requires a re-peopling: the creation of planetary citizen-warriors. This book is a guide that directs citizenry shadowed in hate, terror, suffering, disconnection, and pain toward the light of social justice, gender and erotic liberation, peace, and revolutionary love. This Bridge transits our dreams, and brings them to the real."

"The pivotal anthology This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, is replete with painful, searing tales of encounters between feminists of color and Anglo liberationists."

"White feminists have read and taught from the anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, yet often have perceived it simply as an angry attack on the white women's movement. So white feelings remain at the center. And, yes, I need to move outward from the base and center of my feelings, but with a corrective sense that my feelings are not the center of feminism."

"Persephone Press was an important and successful white, lesbian, radical feminist press, founded in 1976 in Watertown, Massachusetts. The publication of This Bridge Called My Back with Persephone was made possible by the support of two key white lesbian feminist writers. Sally Gearhart, the lesbian activist and educator, had published Wanderground with Persephone Press in 1978 and brought This Bridge Called My Back (under a different title at the time) to the press's attention. Sally had been my mentor, teacher, and advisor at San Francisco State when I was in graduate school there. Around the same time, Adrienne Rich had read my essay "La Güera," which I had sent to her as the first essay written for our women-of-color collection. At this time, Rich had just written the foreword to The Coming Out Stories, to be published by Persephone in 1980 and edited by Julia Penelope and Susan Wolfe. She recommended "La Güera" for inclusion in the anthology, and also encouraged Bridge's publication with Persephone. With the support of these two writers, Bridge found a viable publisher with national distribution, and the book was published in 1981. By 1983, however, Persephone abruptly disbanded and was sold to Beacon Press. Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press (which I co-founded with Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Hattie Gossett, and others) was established, in part, to reissue the collection through an autonomous women-of-color enterprise. Since that time and with the closure of Kitchen Table Press, Bridge has gone in and out of print."

"I feel This Bridge has that quality of accessibility, also. Many grassroots organizations and people who have used it seem to feel that way too. I think they are very different books because they come out of very different visions. Home Girls was originally a third world women's issue of Conditions magazine. Therefore it had, from its inception, a different, much broader focus than This Bridge, which was conceived as a collection of writing by radical women of color. So they served different kinds of functions."

"I remember that there was some resentment about the success of the book. From women of color...who saw publishing with a white women’s press or publishing and becoming famous in itself is a sort of abandonment."

"On the strength of what happened with This Bridge, I was suddenly credentialed. Suddenly I had the authority to speak about my own life and get paid a lot of money by a university to do so. Because that book had broken into — had been picked up by women’s studies all over the country and was being taught."

"An encouraging number of anthologies of writings by women of color have appeared in recent years, with This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga, leading the way. That development ended decades of invisibility. Now comes Jennifer Browdy's book, offering new reasons to celebrate."

"Cherríe Moraga's first book, co-edited with Gloria Anzaldúa, was This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and it made history when published by Kitchen Table Press in 1981. The two pioneering lesbian authors passionately celebrated relationships between women, and their dream, as they said in their foreword to the second edition, was of "a unified Third World feminist movement in this country." Up until then you heard little, if anything, spoken publicly in Chicana/o circles about feminism, much less lesbianism. Such taboos weakened as Chicana feminism evolved in its varying forms and different camps."

"This Bridge Called My Back, I mean, that was just started by two or three people. You know, and it’s sort of amazing what happened. And who would have predicted it? They didn’t predict it, they just wanted to do it! They wanted to publish something and so they did."

"This Bridge Called My Back, the groundbreaking collection"

"Within Gay culture the same excellent use of separatism is happening with people of color, and people of differing ethnicities. We can thank separately founded institutions such as Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, and various Black journals, Hispanic anthologies, Jewish magazines, and most notably the anthology This Bridge Called My Back for the increasingly strong multicultural voices now gathering and being heard."

"When This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, erupted in feminist circles in 1981, it became a primary text for feminist writers and thinkers of color."

"This Bridge Called My Back...has served as a significant rallying call for women of color for a generation, and this new edition keeps that call alive at a time when divisions prove ever more stubborn and dangerous. A much-cited text, its influence has been visible and broad both in academia and among activists. We owe much of the sound of our present voices to the brave scholars and feminists whose ideas and ideals crowd its pages.'"

"My own book Women, Race and Class was one of many that were published during that era, including, to name only a few, This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga, the work of bell hooks and Michelle Wallace, and the anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies. So behind this concept of intersectionality is a rich history of struggle. A history of conversations among activists within movement formations, and with and among academics as well."

"This Bridge Called My Back...dispels all doubt about the power of a single text to radically transform the terrain of our theory and practice. Twenty years after its publication, we can now see how it helped to untether the production of knowledge from its disciplinary anchors-and not only in the field of women's studies. This Bridge has allowed us to define the promise of research on race, gender, class and sexuality as profoundly linked to collaboration and coalition-building. And perhaps most important, it has offered us strategies for transformative political practice that are as valid today as they were two decades ago."

"Women of color may join together in struggle with white women against their common oppression as women. However, the racism embedded in white women's cultures may operate to silence women of color, to erase, subjugate, colonize their independent voice. The book This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color was, in part, impelled by this reality."

"In an interview, Irena Klepfisz and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz acknowledged that in books such as This Bridge Called My Back, "women of color laid the groundwork" for bringing cultural differences to the forefront of the feminist movement, inspiring Jewish women to explore such topics as anti-Semitism and internal oppression."

"Persephone Press developed an impressive booklist consisting of anthologies, fiction, and poetry. Its 1981 anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa, a groundbreaking collection of writings from Chicanas, black women, and Asian and Native Americans, challenged racism within radical feminism; it remains one of the most cited books of feminist theorizing. Nice Jewish Girls similarly used the anthology format to examine contested issues within feminism, exposing multiple viewpoints of grassroots activists, writers, and scholars. Like Bridge, it enjoyed a breakthrough success, becoming an organizing tool for Jewish lesbian feminists."

"Haciendo Caras is more of a bridge to other racial and ethnic groups and does not address white people or try to educate them as much as Bridge does."

"In a uniquely distinct way, Audre Lorde's and Toni Cade Bambara's presence in Bridge also impacted Bridge's success. Audre and Toni were exemplary sister-writers, emblematic of that great surge of Black feminist writing spilling into our hands in 1970s and 80s. As "sisters of the yam"... they stood up in unwavering solidarity with the rest of us "sisters of the rice, sisters of the corn, sisters of the plantain" and that mattered. It helped put Bridge, coedited by two "unknown" Chicana writers, on the political-literary map. All in all, it was a brave moment in feminist history."

"Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice. Because I must keep the spirit of my revolt and myself alive. Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and hunger. I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you."