Cherríe L. Moraga

A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.

Fundamentally, I started writing to save my life. Yes, my own life first. I see the same impulse in my students-the dark, the queer, the mixed-blood, the violated-turning to the written page with a relentless passion, a drive to avenge their own silence, invisibility, and erasure as living, innately expressive human beings.

The very act of writing then, conjuring/coming to 'see', what has yet to be recorded in history is to bring into consciousness what only the body knows to be true. The body - that site which houses the intuitive, the unspoken, the viscera of our being - this is the revolutionary promise of "theory in the flesh

The political writer, then is the ultimate optimist, believing people are capable of change and using words as one way to try and penetrate the privatism of our lives.

I don't recognize her. This is not the woman I knew so round and made-up with her hair always a wavy jet black! I stay back until she opens her arms to me - this strange and familiar woman - her voice hoarse, "¡Ay mi'jita!" Instinctively, I run into her arms, still holding back my insides. "Don't cry. Don't cry", I remember. "Whatever you do, no llores." But my tía had not warned me about the smell, the unmistakable smell of the woman, mi mamá, el olor de aceite y jabón and comfort and home. "Mi mamá." And when I catch the smell I am lost in tears, deep long tears that come when you have held your breath for centuries.