this midnight oil / Rewriting Cherríe Moraga

we write letters to each other / incessantly / across a kitchen table / third wrld feminist strategy / is plotted.

we tlk long hours / into the night / it is when this midnight oil is burning /inthoseafterhours / that we secretly reclaim our goddesses / and our female-identified / cultural tradition

“i got myself home, / lit me some candles / … / put on sum

dinah and / aretha” (rushin)

In “Between the Lines: On Culture, Class, and Homophobia” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherríe Moraga describes the limitations of a strictly racialized reading of a woman’s experience. In this passage, Moraga describes the act of turning towards each other for “strength and sustenance” (102) as we search for our desire to have “all [our] sisters of color actively identified and involved as feminists” (102). Adopting Shange’s poetic style of writing, I chose this passage to emphasize the act of coming together through mediums of letters, music, or the spoken word. By deconstructing the original structure, including the quote by Rushin, I can now read Moraga and Rushin’s writing in the way it makes me feel; the words now dance and move and pause in a way that expresses a collectiveness, a warmth inherent in what we desire “third wrld feminist strategy” to be. It is “to write letters / to tlk long hours / put on sum dinah and / aretha” that we move past fractured images of the self, where our “whole” identities can meld into a single movement that acknowledges and is fueled by this “midnight oil,” this difference, that is learned through these mediums.