"I Am Always Met at the River": Revisiting This Bridge Called My Back

Abstract:This essay is both a personal meditation upon This Bridge Called My Back's significance in my life and a theoretical proposition for a new way of reading the text. Following the work of Marissa K. López, I propose a speculative reading of This Bridge as an event. I argue that This Bridge is not a stable representation of the past; instead, every reading of This Bridge is an encounter with an unstable object in the process of becoming. Pursuing a speculative reading of entries by Cherríe Moraga, Toni Cade Bambara, hattie gossett, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Kate Rushin reveals the ways in which This Bridge continues to theorize about the nature of collectivity. I turn to Wai Chee Dimock's work to elaborate the interactions between reader and text that render This Bridge an everchanging object. If This Bridge is read as an event, I insist that the time of This Bridge is always now.