Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood

by Cherríe Moraga

Overview

In a series of journal entries—some original passages, others revisited and expanded in retrospect—Cherrié Moraga details her experiences with pregnancy, birth, and the early years of lesbian parenting.

The premature birth of her son, when HIV-related mortality rates were at their highest, forced Moraga, a new mother at 40-years-old, to confront the fragile volatility of life and death; in these recorded dreams and reflections, her terror and resilience are made palpable. The particular challenges of queer parenting prove transformative as Moraga navigates her interesecting roles as mother, child, lover, friend, artist, activist, and more.

With an updated introduction and other additions, this 25th anniversary edition of Waiting in the Wings is thoughtful and emotive, with prose that is sharp and beautifully written, from the voice of a beloved and incomparable writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642598780
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	12/27/2022
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Cherrié Moraga is an internationally recognized poet, playwright, essayist, and memorist from Los Angeles, California. She is a co-editor of the avant-garde feminist anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and the author of several books and plays, including: A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios, The Last Generation, The Hungry Woman/Heart of the Earth, and others. She served as Artist in Residence in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford Universityfor twenty years before beginning her tenure as a Professor in the Department of English at the University of California-Santa Barbara.

Table of Contents

Preface Portrait of a Writer ix

Reading Wings xv

Prologue The Long Hard Path xvii

I City of the Angels 1

1993

II Waiting in the Wings 37

Postpartum, 1993

III "You the Mama Now." 69

"An Uncertain Grace" 71

Metamorphosis 83

La Sonámbula 95

Blood Matters 107

Epilogue Messenger of Death 115

Afterword 100 Nights Rafael Angel Moraga 121

Some Character Backstory 125

Sources 126

Acknowledgments 127

Editorial Reviews

Moraga, coeditor of the classic This Bridge Called My Back (1983), has written a memoir of the birth of her son. Through the use of journal entries and other prose styles, Moraga tells the story of her insemination, premature birth, and subsequent medical complications and the effect of her son's birth on her relationship with her lover, Ella. Moraga's prose is clean and riveting, and the story she tells is well craftedso well crafted, in fact, that it loses some immediacy. The power of this work lies more in the life-and-death issues Moraga faced with her child's premature birth than it does in her experiences as a lesbian mother. Nevertheless, Moraga does address the issues that lesbian mothers, both biological and coparent, face. Recommended for all medium and larger libraries and any libraries with lesbian, women's, or Chicana collections.Melodie Frances, Golden Gate Univ. Lib., San Francisco

Library Journal

From the moment Moraga realizes that being a strong lesbian does not exclude her from motherhood ("at the age of thirty, it hit me. I was a woman and, therefore, potentially capable of having children"), she is both exhilarated and cautious about the possibility. She had been painfully hurt when she lost contact with the child of a former lover and almost seems surprised when she acknowledges wanting "a child that would never be taken from me, a child to raise from scratch." Perhaps because she is a poet, not a journalist, Moraga seemed...able to express one of the most confusing aspects of motherhood—the fact that at the same moment you can desperately want to be with your children and, equally desperately, need to be away from them.
—The Women's Review of books

Ramona Hernandez

Cherríe Moraga speaks directly, as a powerful voice of a pivotal generation, a generation that is aging and coming to terms with its urgent, collective story.”
—Joy Harjo

“Cherríe Moraga is a literary giant and spiritual genius whose visionary and courageous work and witness constitutes a prophetic light in our dark times of imperial decay!” 
—Cornel West

“When future generations look back at the first generation of Latino/a literature, Cherríe Moraga's formative work will be one of the cornerstones of what by then will be American Literature. Without her work, many of us would not have felt the solidarity and power or had the critical vocabulary or understanding to give voice to our own stories.” 
—Julia Alvarez

“What Cherríe Moraga brings to Waiting in The Wings is not only her writer's talent for speaking fluently and passionately, but also her enormous courage in speaking what is too often left unspoken—the deeply entwined net of fear and love, despair and exhilaration, that is mothering a child. She makes us feel the terror and beauty of the fragile infant body at threat, the staggering exhaustion of trying to work on too little sleep with never enough time or help. the guilt and despair that drags us down while the work is left undone and we turn to comfort our child. Is it more difficult to be a queer mother? I do not know, but I am strengthened and inspired by the author's open-hearted revelations. I take this book as a gift of love.”
—Dorothy Allison

“Cherríe Moraga's Waiting in The Wings is a powerful meditation on motherhood and creativity. With eloquence and intensity, it grapples with a number of elemental questions that we, as blood-gushing makers of babies and cultura, must face. It is also a passionate lesson on how to make "familia from scratch," rendering a near-death experience and the enlightenment that follows without sentimentality. Just when we feel—as Chicanas/writers/mothers—that the needs of our children in this world "full of enemy" are too overwhelming, they step forward to renew our sense of outrage, rekindle our hope, and remind us, with a profound and refreshing breath, that this life is worth writing. A spiritually inspiring and brutally wise book.”
—Helena Maria Viramontes

“Waiting in the Wings is an honest, introspective memoir of evolving lesbian motherhood.”

—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher