Last week I introduced Chela Sandoval’s article US Third World feminism Differential Movement by reading an excerpt from Donna Kate Rushin’s poem “This Bridge” published in the anthology of prose and poem The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Colour (1981). These texts by Black, Latina, Asian, and Native American women acted as a catalyst for visibility and change at the dawn of the postmodern era. This document was a platform on which women of color joined their voices to express loudly and clearly the deficiencies of a hegemonic “sisterhood” proposed by white feminist scholars which negates dividing factors such as class, gender, race, and sexuality. On this matter Rushin wrote:
I’m sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody…
I explain my mother to my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother my brother to the white feminists
The white feminist to the Black church folks the Black church folks
To the ex-hippies the ex-hippies to the Black separatists
The Black separatists to the artists the artists to my friend’s parents…
Then
I’ve got to explain myself
To everybody
Through her writing the poet speaks to a peculiar position that informs the ever-changing and complex social position she occupies and the weight that comes with an intersectional identity. Rushin’s poem illustrates how the multiple factors of systematic and institutional modes of oppression can play out in one’s daily interactions. Navigating and moving between ideologies, feminists of color were trading conditional privileges and spaces driven by the desire to be recognized, to be heard, to be understood, and ultimately to form a coalition of resistance that would reach across political geographies. Sandoval says that “both in spite of and because they represent varying internally colonized communities, US third world feminists generate a common speech, a theoretical structure that remained just outside of 1970’s feminist theory, functioning within it but only as the unimaginable”. (42) Her article follows the same stream of goals, it aims to deconstruct, reset, and rebuilt the feminist movement so that marginalized discourses are acknowledged and function as an inclusive part of a global solidarity that extends beyond classification and frames instituted by white feminism agendas. Sandoval works with academic methodologies introduced by her predecessors in order to investigate the possibility of a fifth differential dimension that would challenge the secured western feminist waves. In her study, the academician highlights four oppositional consciousness representing driving forces within 1960’s and 1970’s human rights movements “ equal rights”, “revolutionary”, “supremacists” , and “separatists”. Sandoval uses these categories to recontextualize Alison Jaggar’s description of 20th century feminist waves. This method permits to delineate tactics and strategies used to push feminist advancements through time but it also suggests that this time line silenced the potentiality for an overlapping pluritemporal framework. The kaleidoscope analogy performs as a threshold to understand the postmodern cultural condition, its contradictions, and even possible clashes. Sandoval’s academic intervention has been inspired by Louis Althusser’s theory of “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus” which asks to function beyond the demands of dominant ideology (Sandoval, 43). Thus, the author activates this alternative narrative by initiating a temporal navigation that would chart within a topographic lens the multiple markers of resistance.Donna Kate Rushin’s poem “This Bridge” is a great example of a voiced desire to resist, to reframe, and reject roles that are not suitable to a productive feminism. A role that is too heavy to bear when one is constrained within the margins of a rigid ideological realm. By breaking the “ideology” Sandoval organizes opposing ideologies and consciousness under new dynamics that could possibly transform feminism from restrictive theory to fluid energy.
Here is the full poem:
The Bridge Poem
Donna Kate Rushin
I’ve had enough
I’m sick of seeing and touching
Both sides of things
Sick of being the damn bridge for everybody
Nobody
Can talk to anybody
Without me
Right?
I explain my mother to my father my father to my little sister
My little sister to my brother my brother to the white feminists
The white feminists to the Black church folks the Black church folks
To the ex-hippies the ex-hippies to the Black separatists the
Black separatists to the artists the artists to my friends’ parents. . .
Then
I’ve got to explain myself
To everybody
I do more translating
Than the Gawdamn U.N.
Forget it
I’m sick of it
I’m sick of filling in your gaps
Sick of being your insurance against
The isolation of your self-imposed limitations
Sick of being the crazy at your holiday dinners
Sick of being the odd one at your Sunday Brunches
Sick of being the sole Black friend to 34 individual white people
Find another connection to the rest of the world
Find something else to make you legitimate
Find some other way to be political and hip
Donna Kate Rushin
I will not be the bridge to your womanhood
Your manhood
Your human-ness
I’m sick of reminding you not to
Close off too tight for too long
I’m sick of mediating with your worst self
On behalf of your better selves
I am sick
Of having to remind you
To breathe
Before you suffocate
Your own fool self
Forget it
Stretch or drown
Evolve or die
The bridge I must be
Is the bridge to my own power
I must translate
My own fears
Mediate
My own weaknesses
I must be the bridge to nowhere
But my true self
And then
I will be useful
It is possible to access the book online :
Rushin, Donna Kate, ” The Bridge Poem” This Bridge Called my Back; Writings by Radical Women of Color.Eds. Moraga, Cherrie, Anzaldua, Gloria. New York; Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1981. xxi-xxii
Sandoval, Chela. “U.S Third World Feminism: Differential Social Movement I” Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 40-63
Dialogues in Feminism and Technology 