Cherríe Moraga on Toni Cade Bambara

“In a uniquely distinct way, Audre Lorde's and Toni Cade Bambara's presence in Bridge also impacted Bridge's success. Audre and Toni were exemplary sister-writers, emblematic of that great surge of Black feminist writing spilling into our hands in 1970s and 80s. As "sisters of the yam"... they stood up in unwavering solidarity with the rest of us "sisters of the rice, sisters of the corn, sisters of the plantain" and that mattered. It helped put Bridge, coedited by two "unknown" Chicana writers, on the political-literary map. All in all, it was a brave moment in feminist history.”

“The writer and activist Toni Cade Bambara, who first introduced This Bridge Called My Back twenty years ago, countered institutionalized amnesia in her own dangerous writings before her untimely death from cancer in 1995. She wrote in her novel Those Bones Are Not My Child: "Maybe you are a crazy woman, but you'd rather embrace madness than amnesia." In this statement resides our shared resistance mission as women-of-color writers and activists living inside the numbing forgetfulness of an "occupied América." Our task is to remember...Toni Cade Bambara believed that we women of color have not forgotten, not in that cave of memory where the freest part of us resides, the basic elements of our lives: the mother-ground that brings sweet sustenance to the world's children; the mother-ground in which we finally lay down our bones and brain to rest. A women-of-color movement is a movement in the act of remembering earth.”

“In her novel The Salt Eaters, published in the year before This Bridge Called My Back, Toni Cade Bambara proffered this question to women of color: "Can you afford to be whole?" It is a question to ask myself, it is a question to ask my country.”