Publishers Weekly
- Publisher's Weekly
The product of a white father and a Mexican mother, playwright Moraga describes herself as a ``mongrel'' and knows ``full well that my mestizaje--my breed blood--is the catalyst of my activism and my art.'' As a radical lesbian feminist, she is alienated from her cousins with their children and pregnant wives. She views the Chicano movement as sexist, stemming from a culture in which rape, incest, battered women and drug abuse are the norm. The dichotomy of her existence is underscored, she believes, by the U.S. role in supporting dictatorships in Latin America. Essays form the bulk of this debut collection, while a few interwoven poems provide a lyrical break from her heavily polemical tone. At its best, her prose contains the same heartfelt revelations that make her poems memorable, as in a sexually explicit account of her first schoolgirl crush. ``In love, color blurs but never wholly disappears,'' she writes in another essay that delineates her lovers by race. Her longing for a day when such a statement will no longer be applicable provides a utopian undercurrent to the collection. Moraga is co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. (Oct.)
Library Journal
A poet, playwright, essayist, and anthologist (she coedited This Bridge Called My Back , Kitchen Table Pr., 1984), Moraga is a Chicana lesbian determinedly resisting assimilation. She longs for the formation of a ``Queer Aztlan,'' an inclusive Chicano tribe in which cooperation is rewarded over competition. ``Written as a prayer''--a visionary prayer honoring the author's belief that ``every writer is a prophet if she only opens her heart and listens''--the poems and essays here celebrate difference while calling for a solidarity of the disenfranchised. It is much to Moraga's credit that her confessional manifesto largely succeeds. Vulnerable and wise, her work sets us yearning with the author ``to be fully known and loved.'' The liberal mixing of English, Spanish, and Spanglish rings just right; cognates, context, and momentum fold the languages into an intelligible and evocative whole.-- Thomas Tavis, San Francisco P.L.
