Bridging: How Gloria Anzaldúa's Life and Work Transformed Our Own

CHAPTER 2. A Letter to Gloria Anzaldúa Written from 30,000 Feet and 25 Years after Her “Speaking In Tongues: A Letter to 3rd-World Women Writers”

Querida Gloria, From 30,000 feet sunset is a nuclear kiss. It takes five hours to cross the continent, five hours to jettison from my home in Florida where I am merely a daughter caring for her parents to Los Angeles where I am poet—refined and adorned with feathers. When we most need them, the words—find us. They marry our ears to the sonic boom of Mother Earth’s heart. It is a revelry to be this high—a dense plastic panel between the hope of swollen clouds and the will of the seat holding the poet erect. In this condensed modern world with its toilets flushing blue, I notice a cross-eyed baby boy gnawing his fist, a sweaty man drowning in his plaid overcoat, a dozen Brazilian tourists in matching sun-bright T-shirts and you—Gloria, floating up here like a bolt of lightning, a phosphorescent bookmark in the middle of these journal pages. Tomorrow I will present my “expertise” on the poet’s life—not just any poet’s life but the womanofcolor poet’s life—to womenofcolor who want to believe that writing is not in vain. I have been invited by Miss Kristina Wong, the bravest performance artist I know. It is an honor to be called to this community center in the Valley (a place I avoided due to my fear of the 405 while I lived in L.A.). I have planned everything, the time I CHAPTER 2 A Letter to Gloria Anzaldúa Written from 30,000 Feet and 25 Years after Her “Speaking In Tongues: A Letter to 3rd-World Women Writers” ariel robello A Letter to Gloria Anzaldúa 27 will spend commuting, my opening remarks, the warm-up exercises, my outfit, and most of all the hope I will try to feign. You see, when your days are spent watching orange chemo drip from hovering medicine bags into your mother’s bruised arms, it can be hard to see the beauty in life, but that is exactly what a poet must do. Gloria, In the night sky you shine and dart like a silver dagger, still, your tenderness makes me outstretch my hands, eager to (caress) the soft layers of feathers, reds and greens worked through a darkest green. You fly alongside me, dancing on the airstreams, the longest of your quetzal feathers streaming behind you. When presenting workshops I like to carry at least two bags of texts written by womenofcolor. I like to carry them as a woman in the marketplace might carry two bags of rice or maíz, one in each hand to balance her walk, or both balanced on her head. Like her, I deliver my family’s diet. These books serve as proof that publishing is possible. They serve as reinforcement when I feel too weary or uncertain to speak. They serve as markers from where we have been to where we might go. But most of all they serve as inspiration. On this trip, however, I have to carry back the last remains of my life in L.A., and so there is no room to bring two bags full of books. The only one with me on this red-eye flight is This Bridge Called My Back published in 1981 by you and Cherríe Moraga, both Libras with a Virgo Cusp. The spine of the book gives way naturally to the essay that first tapped my Chicana consciousness. I have not looked back over the “bridge” that this book became for me since my freshman year of college when I sat on the floor of the student bookstore counting the financial aid money as if it would magically double in front of my eyes. There were so many books I had to buy for classes I had to attend, but I wanted a book that my fingertips chose, so I traced the spines of the masses of books and ended up with a used copy of This Bridge. I sat in that bookstore until closing, reading the essays. I would have swallowed the pages to take them home with me, but in the end I decided that the art history book I had to buy would have to wait, and I went home with the sum of your sweat, your tears, and your love tucked in my backpack. 28 The New Mestizas Gloria...