Cherríe Moraga quotes

Oppression does not make for hearts as big as all outdoors. Oppression makes us big and small. Expressive and silenced. Deep and dead. (Cherríe Moraga)
In 1984, I turned to theater in the hopes of finding a more direct form of communication between me and my people. View quote
Cherríe Moraga
When you are not physically starving, you have the luxury to realize psychic and emotional starvation. View quote
Cherríe Moraga
I am the daughter of a Chicana and anglo. I think most days I am an embarrassment to both groups. I sometimes hate the white in me so viciously that I long to forget the commitment my skin has imposed upon my life. View quote
Cherríe Moraga
Silence is like starvation. View quote
Cherríe Moraga
I keep wanting to repeat over and over and over again, the pain and shock of difference, the joy of commonness, the exhilaration of meeting through incredible odds against it. View quote
Cherríe Moraga
I think: what is my responsibility to my roots-both white and brown, Spanish-speaking and English? I am a woman with a foot in both worlds; and I refuse the split. I feel the necessity for dialogue. Sometimes I feel it urgently. View quote
Cherríe Moraga
Coming to terms with the suffering of others has never meant looking away from our own. View quote
Cherríe Moraga
to change the world, we have to change ourselves-even sometimes out most cherished, block-hard convictions. I must confess I hate the thought of this. Change don't come easy. For anyone. But this state of war we live in, this world on fire, provides us with no other choice. View quote
Cherríe Moraga
My real politicization began, not through the Chicano Movement but through the bold recognition of my lesbianism. View quote
Cherríe Moraga
my deepest sense of myself has not quite "caught up" with my "woman-identified" politics. (Cherríe Moraga)
Both my essays and plays attempt to explore a political question or contradiction through the mind or the heart. By that I mean, both genres require analysis and a heart-felt honesty. But the essay is fundamentally one-voiced perspective, my own... View quote
Cherríe Moraga
...It's more that the conventionality of the model makes it a domesticized view of desire and also that really what we want is the same things as heterosexuals: the nuclear family, marriage; all of these components which from a feminist perspective we've already critiqued. Not every lesbian is a feminist, but if every lesbian were a feminist they shouldn't want this either, because it really contradicts a whole movement that critiqued the nuclear family and the hierarchy of the nuclear family... View quote
Cherríe Moraga
I still believe in a Chicano literature that is hungry for change, that has the courage to name the sources of our discontent both from within our raza and without, that challenges us to envision a world where poverty, crack, and pesticide poisoning are not endemic to people with dark skin and Spanish surnames. View quote
Cherríe Moraga
Within the context of the late 1970s utterly white-middleclass-dominated genre of feminist writings. View quote
Cherríe Moraga
What grew from from that discussion was the realization that in order for him to create an authentic alliance with me, he must deal with the primary source of his own sense of oppression. He must, first, emotionally come to terms with what it feels like to be a victim. If he-or anyone-were to truly do this, it would be impossible to discount the oppression of others, except by again forgetting how we have been hurt. And yet, oppressed groups are forgetting all the time. There are instances of this in the rising Black middle class, and certainly an obvious trend of such "unconsciousness" among white gay men. Because to remember may mean giving up whatever privileges we have managed to squeeze out of this society by virtue of our gender, race, class, or sexuality. View quote
Cherríe Moraga
But it is not really difference the oppressor fears so much as similarity. He fears he will discover in himself the same aches, the same longings as those of the people he has shitted on. He fears the immobilization threatened by his own own incipient guilt. He fears he will have to change his life once he has seen himself in the bodies of the people he has called different. He fears the hatred, anger, and vengeance of those he has hurt. View quote
Cherríe Moraga
I am not talking here about some lazy faith, where we resign ourselves to the tragic splittings in our lives with an upward turn of the hands or a vicious beating of our breasts. I am talking about believing that we have the power to actually transform our experience, change our lives, save our lives. Otherwise, why this book? It is the faith of activists I am talking about. View quote
Cherríe Moraga