{"id":2508,"date":"2019-11-06T14:42:45","date_gmt":"2019-11-06T19:42:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/?p=2508"},"modified":"2019-11-06T14:48:57","modified_gmt":"2019-11-06T19:48:57","slug":"taylor-post-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/?p=2508","title":{"rendered":"Taylor Post #6"},"content":{"rendered":"

From This Bridge Called My Back,\u00a0Writing\u00a0By Radical Women Of Color,\u00a0<\/em>Cherri\u00e9 Moraga writing a letter to Barbara Smith about Moraga\u2019s experience at an Ntozake Shange concert:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere, everything exploded for me. She was speaking a language that I knew\u2014in the deepest parts of me\u2014existed, and that I had ignored\u2026 What Ntozake caught in me is the realization that in my development as a poet, I have, in many ways, denied the voice of my brown mother\u2014the brown in me. I have acclimated to the sound of a white language which, as my father represents it, does not speak to the emotions in my poems\u2026.The reading had forced me to remember that I knew things from my roots\u2026 I knew that then, sitting in that Oakland Theatre (as I know in my Poetry) the only thing worth writing about is what seems to be unknown and therefore fearful (Cherri\u00e9 Moraga, 31)\u201d<\/p>\n

I think that this reading really tied together a lot of moving parts I have been negotiating in our class. For my post I\u2019d like to facilitate a sort of close read of this quote and connect it to some other parts of our assignment for this week as well as the preceding assignments we have had this semester.<\/p>\n

Of course it is important to recognize that centrally this quote by Cherri\u00e9 Moraga, co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back (This Bridge), <\/em>is speaking directly to the subject of our study, Ntozake Shange. Moraga goes to an Shange concert and is moved<\/em>. Moraga talks about this movement as something that comes from the \u201cdeepest parts\u201d of her, from her \u201croots\u201d \u2014the way the comment is framed makes me understand that roots and deepest parts simultaneously have to do with the literal deepest parts of her psychic self and also from the roots that constitute her mother and aunts, and perhaps her ancestors.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This brought up for me, the content of \u201cFor the Color of My Mother\u201d an essay that opens This Bridge <\/em>by Moraga. In the poem, Moraga speaks of a dream she has in which her mother\u2019s head is being passed around a circle of brown women. To me, based on the way the essay\/poem is crafted, it tells me that the dream may have been about the responsibility of birthing into the world what only a brown girl can. It was about rupture and the need to make what spills from that rupture be something that can combat the silencing of brown women globally. It is a responsibility that does not come out of nowhere, it comes from her mother, it comes from her roots.<\/p>\n

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What spills from that rupture, that combats the silence, may in fact be Moraga\u2019s own voice which she says she denied from her brown mother, her brown self. What follows this comment is the idea that she had only claimed the white language from her father and that she needs to pick up the brown poetic language of her mother. This reminded me of the way that Audre Lorde constructs the idea of the\u201cwhite father who:<\/p>\n