Entry tags:

a: moraga cherrie, ed: anzaldua gloria, ed: moraga cherrie

"From Inside The First World," Cherrie Moraga
Because there was interest in Moraga's new Foreword for the 2002 edition of This Bridge Called My Back, I'm pulling an excerpt from near the beginning of the essay. In my initial attempts to pick and choose short bits that I especially loved, I realized that I was probably introducing screwy editorial biases, so I'm making it a long, uninterrupted excerpt.

I know that a three-page excerpt from an eighteen-page essay is pushing Fair Use, but this edition is both out of print and moderately hard to find. However, if folks think I made the wrong call, I'll delete the post.

Before she discusses 9/11, she talks some about how her understanding of "Third World women" in the US has changed, and explicitly notes who was given space in Bridge, and who was not:

Noticeably absent in the Bridge of 1981, however, is a full portrait of the ever-expanding demographics of who we are as women of color in the United States today: Dominican women combating AIDS in New York City; Haitian refugee women making home in a hostile Miami, Florida; Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian immigrants who at the turn of the 21st Century came of age as women of color in the United States; the descendents of the Quiché and Pipil peoples living in the Mission District of San Francisco, having fled the civil wars of Central America; the voices of Puerto Rican women political prisoners, many of whom now have been released and have returned to their native Puerto Rico; native Hawai'ian women activists working for the political and cultural sovereignty of their islands and people; South East Asian feminist immigrant rights workers; and, as we fear a full-scale (un)holy war against the Muslim world, the perspective of Arab-American women on this "terrorist" war against "terrorism" and its impact on the lives of women and children in this war zone.

A little later, what appear to be her first reactions to 9/11 (bits after this have successively later dates on them):

...My children, leaving their morning oatmeal, run to the TV set. I watch their eyes, mesmerized. The scene is right out of an action thriller. "This is really happening," I say. I am, I believe, afraid, but of what? In the futuristic action film that is now our lives, the "bad (foreign-looking) guys" blow down the World Trade Center and "good (whitish-looking) guys" bring out the big guns to defend the US against the assault. But this scenario can produce nothing but pure hopelessness because terrorism will never be defeated by big guns, only by big minds and hearts and a mass collective reckoning with the United States' own history of global economic terrorism. As a South East Asian sister has called it, "the fundamentalism of free enterprise."

Individuals govern the United States at the highest level, a ruling corporate-government elite who personally wields political power for profit. These individuals have, at an unprecedented rate in the last generation, destroyed the lives, livelihoods, and environment of those areas around the globe where the greatest profits can be made with the least amount of resistance, for the most part , the Third World. As a result, individuals have, at an unprecedented rate in the last generation, destroyed the lives, livelihoods, and environment of those areas around the globe where the greatest profits can be made with the least amount of resistance, for the most part, the Third World. As a result, individuals were killed en masse on September 11, for the most part, the wrong individuals. But, in the opinion of those suicide jet bombers, somebody gotta and gonna pay for CorporateAmerika's cultural arrogance. Lamentably, the only lesson that Amerika, as represented by our "selected" government officials and defended by the US military, will learn from this disaster is to devise ever more aggressive means to protect the "freedom" of its ability to make profit and expense of the Third World. This position will only serve to further endanger the lives and threaten the well being of the peoples of the US.

By 4 o'clock of the Eleventh, my idea of the necessary politics of our times - what I envision for a future of radical activism - has shifted as dramatically as the collapsing spine of the World Trade Center. I must confess, I am shocked and horrified by the disaster, but I am not surprised. There resides in me, as in so many others, a deep sense of the inevitablity of the United States' demise. The position of the greatest power, like those twin towers which once stood sentinel, shadowing "the gane to the new world," as news anchor, Peter Jennings, described the Statue of Liberty, also occupies the location of the greatest vulnerability. As members of a global citizenry, we are forced to acknowledge that the United States has appropriated well more than its share of world's resources, and as such becomes, rightfully, the most visible target for the world's discontent. The bigger you are, the harder you fall. I speak in chiché or are these phrases, which now rise to the surface of our daily discussions, simply tried and true axioms that this country has forgotten?

Upon the news of the attack, major network television ran images of the Palestinians dancing in the streets. Although there was no credible evidence to confirm that the filming in fact occurred after the World Trade and Pentagon attacks (which raised serious questions regarding the US media's role in manipulating US anti-Arab sentiment), the images struck me with a profound sense of awe, as they forced the Amerikan public to recognize how thoroughly the United States is hated by the victims of its policies. The Palestinian people have watched their sons and daughters and elders die opposing the Israeli occupation of their land for more than fifty years. Bombs dropped on Palestine civilians bear the United States insignia. Is not four billion dollars a year to support the Israeli state a form of terrorism against Palestinian people? Are their children, mothers, fathers, and elders, any less deserving a viable life than any citizen of the United States is?

I do not believe in the "terrorists" cause or their methods. I condemn the murderous acts of September 11 with the same outrage in which I condemn the murder of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis by the US military to "defend" US oil interests in Kuwait. George Bush, senior, executed that war in 1991. Ten years later, it's Junior's turn. Our current President may not have been driving the plane that crashed into the World Trade Center, but he is the most recent pilot of this turn-of-the-century disaster, who promises to drive the United States into an increasingly vulnerable world position by its collective refusal to acknowledge its history of cultural and economic genocide. As hard as it is for this nation to admit, the "terrorists" were not "cowards," as Bush refers to them, but people who believed so fundamentally in their cause that they were willing to kill and die for it. In the same way, many of our sons and daughters will be willing to kill and die in this impending world war in order to protect the freedom of enterprise in the Western World, erroneously called "Democracy."

When my son asks me why the people as brown as him are celebrating in the streets of Palestine, I respond: "We are not the good guys." Why is this so difficult for the US to acknowledge? Do we really believe the Hollywood version of our story? We are always the good guys; they, those "others," always the bad. The speeches for National Day of Rememberance on September 17 reflected exactly this kind of national egocentrism, where speakers, for the most part, espoused a chest-pounding self-aggrandizing moral superiority over the "uncivilived" Muslim world. If the truth be told, all the token gestures made toward US Muslim communities since September 11 are just that - token, and belie a profound xenophobic distrust and disdain of cultures that elude the obsessive individualism of Western thought.

The United States is the only country in the world that feels entitled not to suffer the consequences of its actions. This country constructed through acts of thievery and invasion imagines it will never be robbed or invaded. Even Western Europe of the Twentieth Century endured the bombing of its cities and countryside. Pearl Harbor was only a tiny taste of the assault against the United States, but one that instigated a revenge unparallelled in world history: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To be sure, the United States "won" that war and, by its perverse ethnocentric definition, it will surely "win" the war it currently wages against the Muslim fundamentalist world, but at what price? It is unthinkable.

In my recurring dream of a different América, just as in the replays on the network news, the World Trade Center, along with the Pentagon surely fall to the ground in defeat; but, in my dream, there are not 20,000 workers inside. In my dream, we, the workers, are not fodder for the US crimes of greed. In my dream, the profiteers pay, not us. As I told a friend, "If Indigenous América had blown up the Pentagon, I'd be dancing in the streets, too." Is it heresy to state this? But that is just a dream. In real life, I sit at the kitchen table and shake my head in despair, in full knowledge of the deaths to come. And they will surely come to our communities: barrio boy turned soldier as dead and as brown as any Afghan.

My child of eight is frightened. "Will they bomb here?" he asks, eyes glued to the TV screen; and I realize in all honesty, I cannot answer, "no, not here," as I would have before September 11. Because we live on the edge of the ocean, on the borderline of this nation-state; we live in a major metropolitan city, in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge and the Transamerica Building; we are the symbol of greed and arrogance that is Amerika on the West Coast. "I don't know," I answer. How do you teach a child a politic where there is no facile "us and them," where the "us" who is his ostensive protector against bombing of his city, his home, is at the same time the "them" who brought the bombs down upon this soil.

That's a fairly natural place to stop: the next line is a new section, dated "September Twenty-Five."

She talks about so very much in the following pages, and so very well, that I'm not going to try to summarize it. If you can get your hands on a copy of this edition, that foreword alone is worth it. Or so I think.