Cherríe L. Moraga > Quotes

“Sometimes a breakdown can be the beginning of a kind of breakthrough, a way of living in advance through a trauma that prepares you for a future of radical transformation.”
― Cherrie Moraga

“I am a woman with a foot in both worlds; and I refuse the split. I feel the necessity for dialogue. Sometimes I feel it urgently.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first. I see the same impulse in my students-the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated-turning to the written page with a relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings.”
― Cherrie Moraga

“A theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives — our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings — all fuse to create a politic born of necessity.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“Don't let the past steal your present.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga

“The real power, as you and I well know, is collective. I can’t afford to be afraid of you, nor you of me. If it takes head-on collisions, let’s do it: this polite timidity is killing us.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“I am what I am and you can't take it away with all the words and sneers at your command.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“Think of it in terms of men's and women's cultures: women live in male systems, know male rules, speak male language when around men, etc. But what do men really know about women? Only screwed up myths concocted to perpetuate the power imbalance. It is the same situation when it comes to dominant and non-dominant or colonizing and colonized cultures/ countries/ people. As a bilingual/bicultural woman whose native culture is not American, I live in an American system, abide by American rules of conduct, speak English when around English speakers, etc., only to be confronted with utter ignorance or concocted myths and stereotypes about my own culture.

-- Judit Moschkovich - "--But I Know You, American Woman”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“It’s the Poverty.

I lack imagination you say

No. I lack language.
The language to clarify
my resistance to the literate.
Words are a war to me.
They threaten my family.

To gain the word
to describe the loss
I risk losing everything.
I may create a monster
the word’s length and body
swelling up colorful and thrilling
looming over my mother, characterized.
Her voice in the distance
unintelligible illiterate.
These are the monster’s words.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, Loving in the War Years

“Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage.
Naomi Littlebear”
― Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.”
― Cherrie Moraga

“We are challenging white feminists to be accountable for their racism because at the base we still want to believe that they really want freedom for all of us.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga Gloria Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“When you are not physically starving, you have the luxury to realize psychic and emotional starvation.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga

“I think of how, even as a feminist lesbian, I have so wanted to ignore my own homophobia, my own hatred of myself for being queer. I have not wanted to admit that my deepest personal sense of myself has not quite "caught up" with my "woman-identified" politics. I have been afraid to criticize lesbian writers who choose to "skip over" these issues in the name of feminism. In 1979, we talk of "old gay" and "butch and femme" roles as if they were ancient history. We toss them aside as merely patriarchal notions. And yet, the truth of the matter is that I have sometimes taken society's fear and hatred of lesbians to bed with me. I have sometimes hated my lover for loving me. I have sometimes felt "not woman enough" for her. I have sometimes felt "not man enough." For a lesbian trying to survive in a heterosexist society, there is no easy way around these emotions. Similarly, in a white-dominated world, there is little getting around racism and our own internalization of it. It's always there, embodied in someone we least expect to rub up against.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“The real power, as you and I well know, is collective. I can't afford to be afraid of you, nor your of me. It takes head-on collisions, let's do it" this polite timidity is killing us.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“In this country, lesbianism is a poverty-as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor. The danger lies in ranking the oppressions. The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression. The danger lies in attempting to deal with oppression purely from a theoretical base. Without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside of us, no authentic, non-hierarchical connection among oppressed groups can take place.

When the going gets rough, will we abandon our so-called comrades in a flurry of racist/heterosexist/what-have-you panic? To whose camp, then, should the lesbian of color retreat? Her very presence violates the ranking and abstraction of oppression. Do we merely live hand to mouth? Do we merely struggle with the "ism" that's sitting on top of our heads?

The answer is: yes, I think first we do; and we must do so thoroughly and deeply. But to fail to move out from there will only isolate us in our own oppression- will only insulate, rather than radicalize us.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, Loving in the War Years

“The political writer, then is the ultimate optimist, believing people are capable of change and using words as one way to try and penetrate the privatism of our lives.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga Gloria Anzaldua

“When entering a room full of soldiers who fear hearts
you put your heart in your back pocket.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga

“Mujeres, a no dejar que el peligro del viaje y la inmensidad del territorio nos asuste-- a mirar hacia adelante y a abrir paso en el monte”
― Cherríe L. Moraga Gloria Anzaldua

“The amazing efficacy of patriarchy is that it is a covert operation. It is entre nos, just between us - man and woman, sister and brother, father and daughter, queer and not so queer. It takes place behind closed doors, inside la hacienda and back there in the slave quarters. It is so seamlessly woven into the fiber of our lives that to pull at that dangling thread of inequity is to rip open an entire life.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir

“The very act of writing then, conjuring/coming to 'see', what has yet to be recorded in history is to bring into consciousness what only the body knows to be true. The body - that site which houses the intuitive, the unspoken, the viscera of our being - this is the revolutionary promise of "theory in the flesh”
― Cherríe Moraga

“for each of us in some way has been
both oppressed and the oppressor. We are afraid to look at how we
have failed each other. We are afraid to see how we have taken the
values of our oppressor into our hearts and turned them against our-
selves and one another. We are afraid to admit how deeply "the man's"
words have been ingrained in us.”
― Cherrie Moraga

“I have had to confront the fact that
much of what I value about being Chicana, about my family, has been
subverted by anglo culture and my own cooperation with it.”
― Cherrie Moraga

“And I know nothing about psychology or the "pedagogy of the opressed." I know nothing about the origins of guilt 'cept Adam and Eve, and my feminism is a good ten years down the road, and my buddhism another twenty, and unlocking the sad shame of Elvira will take another forty; but I do know that my sister and I were just plain guilty for being female, perhaps simply being females with hope; for feeling that we had a right to hope.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir

“I keep wanting to repeat over and over and over again, the pain and shock of difference, the joy of commonness, the exhilaration of meeting through incredible odds against it.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“Ayudar a las mujeres que todavía viven en la jaula dar nuevos pasos y a romper barreras antiguas.”
― Cherrie Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“I have sometimes
hated my lover for loving me. I have sometimes felt "not woman
enough" for her. I have sometimes felt "not man enough.”
― Cherrie Moraga

“To assess the damage is a dangerous act.”
― Cherrie Moraga

“the man is always putting down herbal remedies because they’re too available to everybody. Because if you find out you can heal yourself on your own, without him, he’s out of the job.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

“This is how all nights begin and end.”
― Cherríe L. Moraga, The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea & Heart of the Earth: A Popul Vuh Story