After much background research and a multitude of previewing activities, I have chosen to read Jaquira Diaz’s acclaimed debut memoir “Ordinary Girls.” The memoir stuck out amongst the three books because it allows for a comparative experience as I am queer myself and dealt with a similarly chaotic home environment with a mentally ill mother. Recently, I also have developed an interest in Latin American cultures and societies, and I will be able to read Diaz’ extremely personal struggle and get a glimpse at what a queer experience looks like outside of Western society. I feel as though reading this book, I will be able to get a much better understanding of the struggles of a black and Puerto Rican queer woman and hope to gain insight about how these factors all came to play in Diaz’ experience growing up in a highly discriminatory and chaotic environment.
From the first assignment, where we examined the cover of the books, “Ordinary Girls” stuck out to me because of the clear connotation of developing sexuality with the red and purple. The cover drew my eye, and the blurb on the back of the book drew me in with it’s description of a “raw” tale of “mapping a way out of despair toward love and hope” throughout her home with a alcoholic father and schizophrenic mother. I personally grew up in an environment with a bipolar mother and while it is not the same, my home life was extremely chaotic and I dealt with many of the things that Diaz dealt with and developed similar tendencies to avoid being able to speak. In my other previewing activities, I saw that Diaz went into more detail about her experiences with her mother.
In “Ghosts” which is another, much shorter memoir by Jaquira Diaz, she recounts her experience escaping her mother by invoking the Baker Act and joining the military. Up to this point, I had learned that Diaz had not been able to express her feelings at all, another fact of my life growing up that I unfortunately also had to deal with. Diaz met another young woman who finally let her speak and she fell in love with her. Although Diaz’ mother was comfortable with physical sexuality (she taught Diaz to masturbate and was frequently nude), being queer and black in 1980s Puerto Rico in a El Caserio was a true struggle and not something that was openly acceptable. After joining the military to escape her mother, she ran into more discrimination being a woman soldier, and had to navigate almost being raped and being sexually harassed on a regular. She found an escape in a very loose type of relationship with her married staff sergeant. Here, she explored bisexuality but also navigating something very wrong. I am really hoping that Diaz touches more on this story in Ordinary Girls, as this happened when she was still very young.
One more factor of the book that I am interested in is Diaz’ experience with racial discrimination. While trying to figure out which book to read, I read “America Is in Crisis. But Some of Us Have Never Known Anything Different”, which is a article Jaquira Diaz wrote for TIME magazine in the wake of the George Floyd protests. In it, she details her experience being black and dealing with police brutality and racial profiling in both Puerto Rico and in Miami. She goes into great detail relating her past and present experiences to how she joined, like many other non-white and non-standard people in the US, an alternate reality separate from the white experience in the United States. I am white myself and although I have heard many stories from acquaintances and friends alike, I will never experience the racism first hand. I am very interested to read about her experience growing up black in both Puerto Rico and Miami, because I haven’t read a writer’s personal perspective with modern racism in many years. It will give me more of an opportunity to get more acquainted with it and expand my understanding of racism in multiple perspectives.
Through my previewing activities and background research, I have gained a desire to read “Ordinary Girls”. Through the various articles Diaz has wrote and interviews with Diaz that I have read, I have gotten more insight on her incredibly interesting journey finding her identity as a black, queer Puerto Rican woman, and how her experiences have left her afraid and living in a reality that I do not experience due to the factors out of her control. I really hope that by reading this book, I will be able to further develop my understanding of the black, queer, and female discriminatory struggles on a perspective that is in and out of Western society. I believe her unique journey will be highly engaging and will have a very lasting impact on me – it’s only natural that such a raw and horrifying recount of a child’s life would do so. I am very interested to see others who have chosen to read Ordinary Girls and their reasons for doing so, and look forward to discussing it soon.
Bibliography:
Díaz, J. (2014). Ghosts. The Kenyon Review, 36(1), 196–209. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24242155
Martin, R. (2019, October 29). In New Memoir ‘Ordinary Girls,’ Jaquira Díaz Searches For Home . Morning Edition. Washington D.C., District of Columbia; National Public Radio.
Díaz, J. (2020, June 25). America is in Crisis. That’s Not New for Many of Us. Time. Retrieved September 13, 2021, from https://time.com/5859204/america-in-crisis/.
