In her preface to the fourth edition of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe Moraga, Chicana writer and feminist, announces: “We are ‘third world’ consciousness within the first world. We are…in concert with women across the globe pursuing the same goals: a shared and thriving existence in a world where our leaders have for the most part abandoned us and on a planet on the brink of utter abandonment” (xix-xx). In an article entitled “The Winter Soldier,” on American soldiers in the Vietnam War printed in Up From Under, an anonymous writer declares, “The people dying are Third World, and that has to be brought out” (9). Both Cherríe Moraga, in 2015, and this anonymous writer, in 1971, struggle to define “Third World women”—a term that shaped the Feminist Poetry Movement in the last third of the twentieth century.

This term divides the world into three distinct categories. “Third World,” as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, refers to “The countries of the world, esp. those of Africa and Asia, which are aligned with neither the Communist nor the non-Communist bloc; hence, the underdeveloped or poorer countries of the world, usually those of Africa, Asia, and Latin America” (“Third World”). In “Third World,” ideas about race, wealth, colonialism, imperialism, and origin intertwine. Today, in 2019, this term has largely become as obsolete as Cold War Blocs, and is often replaced with the phrase “developing countries.” However, many Second Wave feminists used Third World to describe women of color in America, emphasizing their lasting connection to countries outside of America (Mohanty, Russo, Torres).

To many white feminists, Third World signaled a perpetual “other”: countries and people who lacked resources, education, and wealth. Nevertheless, Third World feminists focused on the perseverance of Third World women in the face of oppression and used this term to express solidarity with women of color around the world. The tension between these usages informs our modern interpretation of the Feminist Poetry Movement.

Sources:

Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Moraga, Cherríe, editors. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 1st ed., Persephone Press, 1981.

Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Moraga, Cherríe, editors. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 4th ed., State University of New York Press, 2015.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Russo, Ann, and Torres, Lourdes, editors. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Indiana University Press, 1991.

“Third World | third world, n. (and adj.).” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/200854. Accessed 20 November 2019.

Up From Under, vol. 1, no. 4, 1971.

Up From Under, a feminist periodical “by, for, and about women,” published five times between 1970 and 1973, traces the entrance of Third World narratives into the larger Feminist Poetry Movement. Over time, Up From Under included more information about Third World women, though these articles and poems remain scarce. In all five publications, there are only four poems about Third World women; only one of these poems is written by a woman of color. As the white feminist editors of Up From Under included more prose and poetry about Vietnamese and Black women, they often misinterpreted and manipulated these narratives.

Two Robin Morgan poems, boldly addressed “To the Women of Vietnam,” lie in the centerfold of Up From Under, vol. 1, no. 1, published in 1970. In “Guerrilla Woman,” a Vietnamese woman waits for her lover to return from the war while she digs ditches “for the French when they march this path, / beds for the French to sleep in, / graves in the land for the enemy of the land” (lines 4-5, 21-24). In the distance, she hears “the whimpering of children left at home” as her hands become “blood-lotioned, ice-gloved” (5, 12). Similarly, in “The Vigil,” a young pregnant woman waits expectantly as “her husband hunts different prey, in the hills,” fighting in the Vietnam War (4). Hoping for his return, seeing him only “behind closed eyes,” she gives birth and finally realizes that her husband will never return home from the war that has killed him (20). In both poems, written by a white woman, Vietnamese women become living victims whose physical bodies bear the pain of a devastating war. Morgan’s poems are the only mention of the Vietnam War and of non-American women in vol. 1, no. 1 of Up From Under. 

The next two publications of Up From Under feature more writing about the Vietnam War, including Betty Thomas Mayhen’s poem “To My Black Sisters,” printed in Up From Under, vol. 1, no. 3, in 1971. In “To My Black Sisters,” the speaker, a white American mother, addresses Black mothers whose sons are also fighting in the Vietnam War, simply stating: “Our sons are dying together / Not here where you and I were always divided, / but in some distant place against another colored people” (1-3). To the speaker, white and Black women, and their children, have always been divided in America, and she acknowledges her own role in this division, admitting that “in my whiteness I looked away from your Black womanhood” (9-10). Finally, she wonders: “How many crimes and corpses must I view to rid myself / of a whiteness not human, / Before I dare reach out and touch your hand” (17-19). As this speaker comes to terms with her own racism, her own mistreatment of Black women and their children, so does Up From Under. Although this poem is written by a white woman, it represents a shift in Up From Under as the editors try to “reach out and touch your hand”—and unite with American women of color (19).

In Ericka Huggins’s “no title poem,” printed in vol. 1, no. 4 of Up From Under in 1971, the speaker writes about the world “if you’re black and poor and female / like my mama / like me and my sisters”—a world that is “ready to rape you / of everything” (28-30, 4-5). Huggins writes this poem from the Niantic Prison in 1970, and her speaker also realizes that “prison can make you look back on a lifetime / of bitterness…” (11-12). This poem appears in a section dedicated to Black women, wedged between essays “Who I Am” and “From One Generation to Another.” The works, grouped together because they are about Black women, demonstrate a larger trend of Up From Under. In each publication, the editors include exactly two, four, or six pages on women of color, including Vietnamese and Black women; clearly, these women are deemed “other” enough to constitute their own sections, separate from the rest of the writing about white women. This formula contributes to the tokenization of women of color throughout all of Up From Under. In this publication, just like the Feminist Poetry Movement, American white women too often minimized women of color and their poetic voices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sources:

Huggins, Ericka. “no title poem.” Up From Under, vol. 1, no. 4, 1971.

Mayhen, Betty Thomas. “To My Black Sisters.” Up From Under, vol. 1, no. 3, January 1971.

Morgan, Robin. “Guerrilla Woman.” Up From Under, vol. 1, no. 1, May 1970.

Morgan, Robin. “The Vigil.” Up From Under, vol. 1, no. 1, May 1970.

Up From Under, vol. 1, no. 1, May 1970.

Up From Under, vol. 1, no. 2, August 1970.

Up From Under, vol. 1, no. 3, January 1971.

Up From Under, vol. 1, no. 4, 1971.

Up From Under, vol. 1, no. 5, 1973.

In Thulani Nkabinde’s “I am Brown,” the speaker, “a child of the third world,” remembers and embodies a centuries-long history of slavery, resistance, and female empowerment (2). She exists both “in this world” as an “illegitimate seed / mishap of the honkies goodtimes” and yet she is “stolen / runaway property”: she exists both in the present and in the past alongside her enslaved ancestors; she is their modern reproduction (6-7, 54-55). In this poem, printed in Third World Women, the speaker explores her heritage, rejecting “the westerner” while embracing her “sister” (24, 41).

The sea—powerful, touching many continents—represents the speaker’s origin and identity. From the start of this poem, the speaker remembers “the sea n my real home” and then embodies that sea, saying that “many rivers flow into my waters” (9, 14). Her origins are as numerous and diverse as the streams that flow into an ocean. She controls this water as she is “rememberin rivers/ rememberin the spells / I cast to make their movement have / meaning” (64-67). Her sister is also “murmurin chantings” as she “gives the rivers their flow” (39-40). Nkabinde likens the power of these women of color to magic—a magic that “the westerner… rich n ignorant” cannot understand because “he aint hip to magic” (24, 26, 28). The speaker’s origins and mystical power converge in her repeated declaration: “I am Nile / Congo / the greatest waters of the earth / the falls they call / Victoria” (49-53). In these lines, she refers to the white colonizers who christened a Zimbabwean waterfall Victoria Falls. Like this body of water, the speaker has been shaped by Africa and re-named by a white society. The speaker personifies the powerful waters of the ocean.

In this personification, Nkabinde alludes to Mami Wata, an African water spirit. Usually embodied by a woman, Mami Wata (literally, “Mammy Water”) is fabled to live in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, connecting the coasts of Africa and the Americas and luring voyagers with her beauty and power (“Mami Wata”). At once dangerous, sexual, and a nurturing mother, Mami Wata is the female embodiment of multiple transcontinental origins. The speaker in “I am Brown” is also a mother, “raisin black sons / black rebels,” and also a female sorcerer, “workin voodoo madness” (68-69, 30). She too comes from several places and a history as vast as the sea. Therefore, the speaker acts as a modern Mami Wata who stretches through time and space: through generations, across the continents of the globe.

“I am Brown” symbolizes the larger aims of Third World Women. The editors of this book note that Third World Women “is only a beginning”: published in 1972, it marks the official entrance of women of color into the Feminist Poetry Movement. The speaker in “I am Brown” embodies the mythical traditions of Africa as she grapples with her identity in the modern world. Similarly, the writers and artists featured in Third World Women nod to their diverse ancestors as they insert themselves into a growing movement of American women.

Sources:

“Mami Wata.” Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/mamiwata/intro.html. Accessed 10 December 2019.

Nkabinde, Thulani. “I am Brown.” Third World Women. Third World Communications, 1972.

Third World Women. Third World Communications, 1972.

In Chrystos’s “I Walk in the History of My People,” printed in all four editions of This Bridge Called My Back beginning in 1981, the speaker also embodies the history of her ancestors and the heritage they have passed on to her. Her physical body holds the pain of “my people” who are “prisoners / of a long war” (4th ed., lines 9, 15-16). Though her “joints,” “blood,” “tendons,” “marrow,” and “knee” sting with the pain of these people, she continues to walk, to resist, and to know “How I Am Still Walking” (1, 3, 5, 7, 17, 26).

Specific images of human suffering dwell within the parts of her body. Her “red blood” is “full of those / arrested, in flight, shot” and in her marrow live the “hungry faces who live on land the whites don’t want” (3-4, 7). Women in particular suffer and cause her suffering: women who are “refusing to speak to the police” and  “women who walk 5 miles every day for water” (2, 8). Anger too, subsists in her physical body, as she confesses that “my tendons stretched brittle with anger / do not look like white roots of peace” (5-6). Her tendons, the roots that connect her muscles and tissue, cannot blossom into fruitful “roots of peace” (6). Although her anger prevents her from finding or creating peace, she indicates that “anger is my crutch” which allows her to “hold myself upright” and continue to walk (22, 23). Her anger both pains and supports her.

The interpretations of history in “I Walk in the History of My People” and “I am Brown” diverge. In “I am Brown,” the speaker derives a mystical power from the history of her ancestors, while the speaker in “I Walk in the History of My People” likens the past to an “infection” that “has gone on for at least 300 years” and “oozes from every pore” (18, 19). The speaker lives in spite of, not in union with, this history of pain and violence. She refers to colonialism, at the root of this infection, which has existed in the Americas since the seventeenth century, approximately 300 years before the publication of this poem in This Bridge Called My Back. 

In four editions published between 1981 and 2015, This Bridge Called My Back has honored the struggles of women like the speaker in “I Walk in the History of My People” for decades. This anthology of “writings by radical women of color” honors these experiences and calls for women of color to resist their oppressors and march on, just like the speaker in this poem.

Sources:

Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Moraga, Cherríe, editors. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 4th ed., State University of New York Press, 2015.

Chrystos. “I Walk in the History of My People.” Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Moraga, Cherríe, editors. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 4th ed., State University of New York Press, 2015.

In “Where Will You Be?” the speaker warns her audience that “the crusade has begun” and calls on them to resist this new war (4). “They will come,” the speaker explains, to “remove the evil, / the queerness, / the faggotry, / the perverseness / from their midst” (52, 26-30). Like “I am Brown” and “I Walk in the History of My People,” “Where Will You Be?” compares historical events to the present. However, “Where Will You Be?” replaces first-person statements with a direct call to action, as the speaker asks again and again, “Where will you be / when they come?” (19-20).

The speaker in “Where Will You Be?” uses images of religious persecution, linking queer people of the late twentieth century to the victims of the Crusades and World War II. This comparison begins the poem, as the speaker describes: “Once again flags of Christ / are unfurled in the dawn / and cries of soul saviors / sign apocalyptic on air waves” (5-8). However, the speaker argues that the perpetrators of this war will appear in a different way, and “They will not come / clothed in brown, / and swastikas, or / bearing chest heavy with / gleaming cross. The time and need / for ruses are over” (31-37). During both the Crusades and World War II, religious people were targeted and killed; in this next war, queer people become the next victims. In this poem, the speaker condemns religious people as “soul saviors” who wave “flags of Christ” and attack queer people (7, 5). Therefore, religious people become persecutors instead of the persecuted, and the speaker uses images of religious wars to reverse these roles.

Once again, a speaker reflects upon her own oppression and grounds these reflections in historical events. In “Where Will You Be?” the speaker asks her audience to change these reflections and their shared oppression into concrete action. Like other periodicals of the Feminist Poetry Movement, conditions: five—the 1979 Black women’s edition of conditions which includes “Where Will You Be?”—prompted dialogue among women of color and resistance to their oppressors. Poems like “Where Will You Be?” guided the tangible resistance of Second Wave Feminism—another type of war fought at the end of the twentieth century. In “I am Brown,” “I Walk in the History of My People,” and “Where Will You Be?” Third World women embrace their personal histories and embrace each other as they enter a feminist narrative usually dominated by the voices of white women.

Sources:

conditions: five, vol. 1, no. 5, 1979.

Parker, Pat. “Where Will You Be?”. conditions: five, vol. 1, no. 5, 1979.

Printed in all four editions of This Bridge Called My Back, beginning in 1981, Jo Carrillo’s “And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures With You” exemplifies the tension between Third World and white feminists as they search for a common movement. The speaker condemns “Our white sisters/ radical friends” who “love to own pictures of us”—who love to own pictures of Third World women (4th ed., lines 1-2, 3). Although the speaker does not directly address these white feminists in the body of the poem, she does directly address them in the title: “And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures With You,” the speaker calls out, as if dividing assets after a divorce, as if expelling white women from the feminist movement she reclaims.

Although these white women are the speaker’s “sisters,” they manipulate the physical bodies of women of color through trapping them in their picture frames (1). These women remain frozen, locked in frames, forever “holding brown yellow black red children / reading books from literacy campaigns / holding machine guns bayonets bombs knives” (7-9). Here, the speaker groups together the “brown yellow black red children,” not separated by commas or punctuation of any kind, to demonstrate that many white feminists view these children as one unified group, ignoring their diverse histories and origins (7). Similarly, the speaker continues to show the implicit prejudices of these women, who keep photographs of women “with straw hat on head if brown / bandana if black” (18-19). Again, all “brown” and “black” women are grouped together: women of color, and their hats and appearances, must fit these white womens’ stereotypes in order to warrant a spot on their walls (18-19).

Up From Under also uses photographs of Third World women in this way. In the 1970 and 1971 publications of Up From Under, Vietnamese women tend to their “brown yellow black red children” in the “fields in hot sun” (7, 17). They cradle these children—many of them not their own—against the pockmarked, war-torn ruins that lie behind them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Likewise, an image of two Vietnamese women “holding…bayonets” takes up almost an entire page of Up From Under, vol. 1, no. 2 (9). Dressed in formal military attire, but walking barefoot on a beach, they seem ready to enter battle and yet oddly relaxed.

Printed in a periodical created by and about American white women, these images enter the memories—the mental picture frames—of white readers across America. Although white readers might gladly glance at these photographs, or hold them in their hands and own them when they buy a copy of Up From Under, when Third World women appear “in the flesh / not as a picture they own, / they are not quite as sure / if / they like us as much” (4-38). As the speaker concludes, “We’re not as happy as we look / on / their / wall” (39-42). In describing “their / wall”—a singular wall—the speaker groups together white women, who remain perpetually in contrast with an undefined “we”: the Third World women who exist only in their pictures. The speaker suggests that these two groupings of women should separate. One principal question drives this poem: can Third World and white feminists ever unite and build a shared community?

Sources:

Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Moraga, Cherríe, editors. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 4th ed., State University of New York Press, 2015.

Carrillo, Jo. “And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures With You.” Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Moraga, Cherríe, editors. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 4th ed., State University of New York Press, 2015.

Up From Under, vol. 1, no. 2, August 1970.

Up From Under, vol. 1, no. 4, 1971.

Both Lorraine Bethel in “What Chou Mean We, White Girl?”, printed in 1979, and Charlotte Bunch in her 1985 essay “Going beyond Boundaries” respond to this question of how to build community as they consider the burden of education often placed on Third World women. In Bethel’s poem “What Chou Mean We, White Girl?” printed in conditions: five, the speaker criticizes the “so-called radical white lesbian / feminist(s)” who invite her to their conferences and panels “because they want to represent Third World women and lesbians / on their feminist criticism panel” and as “THE BLACK / LESBIAN / FEMINIST / CRITIC” she is “such a convenient package” (8-9, 7, 10). The speaker shows how these white feminists have simplified and grouped together her intersectional identities, inviting one woman who must represent the diverse perspectives of many women. The speaker mimics white women who seem to say, “Don’t come as you are, / but as we’d like you to be; our worst fantasy / primal nightmare, our best dream” (31-32). Just like in Carrillo’s “And When You Leave, Take Your Pictures With You,” these white feminists do not accept Third World women outside of their picture frames, outside of their preconceived notions of what they should be.

In her 1985 essay “Going beyond Boundaries,” delivered six years after the publication of conditions: five, Bunch echos this critism as a white feminist. Bunch, like Bethel, argues that women of color often have to explain their daily sufferings to white women who coldly treat them as living primary sources, not as fellow women. To ameliorate this problem, Bunch calls for the complete elimination of the terms “Third World,” “developed,” and “developing,” rejecting the “condescending notion that the Western industrialized world is ‘developed’” which comes from “a strictly industrialized interpretation of that word” (Bunch, p. 151-152).

In 1979, Third World women marched in Boston to protest the murders of Black women, clutching a sign that read “3rd World Women, We Cannot Live Without Our Lives.” Exactly forty years later, in 2019, another protest took place in Boston, and women and men of all ages and heritages marched together as part of the global Women’s March. Even as feminist movements expand to include more people, I, a young white woman in 2019, continue to wrestle with two central questions. How can we, in the twenty-first century, learn about Third World Women—and their diverse histories, heritages, and forms of resistance—without tokenizing them? How can we speak about and remember the Feminist Poetry Movement in an inclusive way?

Sources:

Bethel, Lorraine. “What Chou Mean We, White Girl?”. conditions: five, vol. 1, no. 5, 1979.

Bunch, Charlotte. “Going beyond Boundaries.” The American Women’s Movement, 1945-2000, edited by Nancy MacLean, Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2009, p. 149-154.

conditions: five, vol. 1, no. 5, 1979.

Goodman, Donna. “The Untold Side of Second Wave Feminism: A Multinational, Politically Diverse Movement.” Liberation School, 21 March 2019, https://liberationschool.org/feminism-and-the-mass-movements-1960-1990/. Accessed 10 December 2019.

“2019 Boston Women’s March is Saturday, Jan. 19th.” BosGuy.com, 13 January 2019, https://bosguy.com/2019/01/13/2019-boston-womens-march/. Accessed 10 December 2019.