“The work: To make revolution irresistible.”
My coworker has been reading this book for several months now, off and on, and keeps mentioning different passages to me. It is a book that somehow escaped me through my studies, even though I tried to focus on writings by women of color who are politically inclined. Now that I have it in my hands, I'm wondering how it never ended up on any of my reading lists. It is the best collection of essays and poems I have read so far, period. I've been silently wishing for a writing mentor in this neck of the woods. Perhaps this book is close enough, even if I can't speak to any of these women in person.
It is called This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Fourth Edition and is edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua.
Rather than leaving you to the flap copy, which is more than a little dry, or attempt to create my own, I want to excerpt a portion of the foreward because I think it captures the conversational voice and tone that I deeply appreciate.
"Quite frankly, This Bridge needs no Foreward. It is the Afterward that'll count. The coalitions of women determined to be a danger to our enemies, as June Jordan would put it. The will to be dangerous....And the contracts we creative combatants will make to mutually care and cure each other into wholesomeness. And blue-prints we will draw up of the new order we will make manifest. And the personal unction we will discover in the mirror, in the dreams, or on the path across This Bridge. The work: To make revolution irresistible."
- Toni Cade Bambara (paperback edition, XXXI)
I encourage you to read the title poem linked here.
Then, I encourage you to read the whole book.