Author Archives: Fatou Kebe

Dark Moments

‘and I am going to keep telling this if it kills me’ – Audre Lorde, “For the Record”

In this section we go along with Jaquira Diaz through several dark moments. It first begins with her suicidal thoughts and the first attempts she made on her life. This part of the section is hard to read because she starts off when she was eleven years old and attempted to kill herself. Her mother was abusing her and Diaz truly did not feel her life had any importance. She wanted to test how her mother truly felt so she swallowed all her pills and waited in the living room for her. The second time was after her mother threatened Diaz with a steak knife, claiming that Diaz was not her daughter. She finally stopped the attack after telling her own daughter to her face “You are so small I could squash you. You are nobody. You are nothing.” (Diaz, pg 158) After that Diaz swallowed all of her mother’s pills and locked herself in her room. 

The chapter ‘Secrets’ which is located at the end of the section, was the hardest for me to read. She thinks back to after she left the navy and came back to Miami beach, when she got sexually assaulted, presumably raped in an alley. This brings back a secret she had kept all these years for one of her friends in the fourth grade. A girl named ‘Yvonne’ (Diaz swore never to tell her secret so she changed her name) explained to Diaz and their other friend Beba how her stepfather would sneak into her room and sexually assault her, also forcing her to touch him back. Throughout Diaz’s life story she has told us about the multiple times someone had groped, harassed, assaulted, or raped her but how she never told anyone. What Diaz is doing here is explaining through her real-life story how normalized it is for women to get sexually assaulted and for them to also have sexual trauma because they bottled it up, and kept it a secret. Due to how our society is, women who have experienced something horrible are more compelled to keep it to themselves because justice usually is never served in their favor. Before Diaz could even tell the detective what happened, the detective gave her this whole talk about how her “words could put an innocent person behind bars, how [she] could ruin someone’s life.” (Diaz, pg 243) 

Citations

Díaz Jaquira. (2019). Ordinary girls: A memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 

What kind of girl

“What kind of girl, they loved to say. What kind of girl, even as they took what we gave, took what we tried to hold on to. Our voices. Our bodies. We were trying to live, but the world was doing its best to kill us.” (Diaz, pg 124) 

In this week’s assigned section we get a look inside Jaquira Diaz’s adolescent life. She begins to really talk about her mother’s illness to her addiction to cocaine and how it affected their family. She focuses on a very gruesome murder at the beginning of the part, something that stayed with her for life. The murder and dumping of a three year old toddler named Lazaro Figueroa, by his own mother and her girlfriend. There were many reasons elaborated in the section to why Diaz focused on it so much. For one, it happened in South Florida where she lived at the time, and she remembers it being such a huge shock that was on the minds of everyone in the community. Diaz was 11 years old when this horrific crime occurred and she remembers everyone following along to this crime of a young toddler being abused one and a half years until his death when his mother hit him in the head with a baseball bat. Diaz states “An entire city mourning the loss of a boy no one knew. We carried him with us. And even though he belonged to no one, he belonged to us all.” (Diaz, pg 84) The pure violence that surrounded this act is something that truly attached to Diaz because her life had violence involved too. She talks about several different dark and gruesome events in her life like when her brother trapped a mouse and handed her a skillet to smash it, to which she did. Or when her aunt Tanisha started self harming, or when Anthony slammed a door on the said aunt’s pinky and severed it. To when she stabbed her own brother with a steak knife. All these violent things kept happening to Diaz and her family but the one thing that truly scared her was turning out like her mother. She says “My greatest fear, the thing that scared me the most in the world, was my mother. It wasn’t the drugs, or her threats… I was afraid that, eventually, I would turn out just like her.” (Diaz, pg 90)

Baby Lollipops’ Shirt

Citations

Díaz Jaquira. (2019). Ordinary girls: A memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 

Diaz, J. (2018, June 25). Inside brutal baby lollipops murder case that shook south florida. Rolling Stone. From https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/inside-brutal-baby-lollipops-murder-case-that-shook-south-florida-113594/.

Familial Racism

“Over the next few years, Mercy would cut my hair off many times, as if trying to teach me something about who I was, who I was supposed to be: my grandmother was the first person to ever call me nigger.” (Diaz, pg 51) 

From the start of her story, Jaquira Diaz has brought us all along her beginning childhood life in Puerto Rico. She touches on her childhood adventures and her family troubles. From the violence that would creep into her life and her own family issues. Diaz’s father has been a very present person in her story, the first story she shared was of her and her father at catholic church for a funeral of her father’s hero. She constantly references how similar she is and looks to her father. Saying “I was just like Papi, with his wide nose, with dark eyes, tight curls, skin that browned easily after a little bit of sun.”(Diaz, pg 18) She always felt very similar to her father and how he behaved. This explains how hurt and troubled she was with her father’s infidelity, stealing his favorite book and never letting him know that she had it, “I would lay my head on my pillow and feel nothing but the sharp sting of my father’s betrayal.”(Diaz, pg 37) 

Her grandmother Mercy was something that Diaz did not connect with, probably being that she was racist and colorist. Her grandmother constantly made racist remarks about Diaz’s family because her father was black with black features and Mercy outwardly disliked that. Diaz remembers “Our white grandmother, Mercy, hated that my hair was a tangle of dry and frizzy curls like my father’s. Bad hair, she called it.”(Diaz, pg 49) Her white grandmother ended up constantly cutting her hair short into ugly hairstyles then blaming the look on the fact that it was curly, kinky hair. To have a grandmother that blatantly did not like a part of you since you were young must have been horrible and traumatizing that she kept cutting her hair. To the point where Diaz was being bullied in school, people constantly asked her “Why do you look like a boy?” (Diaz, pg 51) I hope that as we continue the book someone stands up to or stops Mercy because that is just cruel. 


Díaz Jaquira. (2019). Ordinary girls: A memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Pick a Book – Ordinary Girls: A Memior

Fatou Kebe

ENGL 21002

09/20/21

Option 3: Jaquira Diaz and Sandra Cisneros

Ordinary Girls: A Memoir is the book that I have chosen to read for our book club. It’s a narrative autobiography written by Jaquira Diaz about the obstacles she had to face growing up with family struggles, poverty, mental illnesses, and her own sexuality. The book covers Diaz’s violence-riddled childhood in the projects in Puerto Rico to her rocky adolescence in the housing projects of Miami. It is a coming-of-age story that depicts girlhood in its rawest form. Doing research and assignments on this memoir reminded me of another female writer that wrote a book that also shows the reality of growing up as a woman. Sandra Cisneros is the author who wrote one of my favorite books, The House on Mango Street. That book is a modern fiction piece that details the story of young Esperanza and her desire to find her place in the world. It tackles identity, womanhood, family, and friendship. The significance of names and the power in language are themes of this literature and it connects to who Cisneros is. To me the topics that both Diaz and Cisneros highlight in their stories are similar in the fact that it connects back to girlhood and the lives women live. Cisneros even commented on Ordinary Girls: A Memoir saying “Jaquira Díaz writes about ordinary girls living extraordinary lives. And Díaz is no ordinary observer. She is a wondrous survivor, a woman who has claimed her own voice, a writer who writes for those who have no voice, for the black and brown girls ‘who never saw themselves in books.’ Jaquira Díaz writes about them with love. How extraordinary is that!” Here she clearly states her admiration for Diaz and the importance of writing her life story.

Jaquira Diaz is a Puerto Rican writer that was raised in Miami, Florida. She is also an essayist, journalist, critic, and contributor to many notable periodicals. She was born in Puerto Rico to a family that lived in the housing projects. The neighborhood was known as a violent place with a lot of crimes occurring. When she grew older into her adolescence phase, her family moved out to Miami where they struggled with similar problems. They faced obstacles with their financial situation and poverty, with Diaz’s mother and her mental illness, with being queer in a neighborhood that was not open to LGBTQ+ people, and growing up being biracial with a white mother. As Diaz grew older writing became such an outlet for her to express herself and her dealings with identity, drugs, and self-harm. 

Sandra Cisneros is a Mexican-American writer from Chicago, Illinois. She is a novelist, poet, short-story writer, performer, and artist that has also been teaching professionally for years now. She was born in the USA and she also holds dual-citizenship with Mexico due to the frequent times her family would go back to Mexico City during her childhood and adolescence. After her parents got married they settled in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. Soon after when she would turn 11 her family was able to put a down payment on a house in a Puerto Rican neighborhood on the east side of Chicago. This neighborhood and its people would be the inspiration for Cisneros when she wrote The House on Mango Street. As she grew older due to all of the moving back and forth from Mexico City and Chicago, her six only siblings [all brothers] soon departed the household leaving Cisneros to experience and call herself the isolated one. 

Diaz and Cisneros are both Hispanic authors who wrote phenomenal work that I admire. Both writers produce pieces that are showing the importance of finding one’s own identity and the path and courage it takes to do so. In Diaz’s case, she writes in nonfiction about her own voyage to self-discovery and becoming the woman she is. For Cisneros, she wrote about a girl who wanted to escape more than anything, and during her girlhood, she found who she was inside. Both of these women write so that girls, especially those of color, can resonate and know that there are others who go through the same things, that they are not alone. That being a woman is a challenge of its own, never mind how we are treated in society. They both write to be a voice in addition. To let these stories be known to the public about the struggles and barriers women face while growing up. With this comes my deepest commendation because this is not an easy thing to do. To come out with personal stories of suicide, sexual assault, and mental illnesses, is a very brave and courageous thing to do. When I met Sandra Cisneros back in 2018 when she visited my high school, she quoted Plato and said “Courage is knowing what not to fear,” and I will never forget that. 

Citations:

Cisneros, S. (1984). The House on Mango Street. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, April 28). Jaquira Díaz. Wikipedia. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquira_D%C3%ADaz.

Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, September 20). Sandra Cisneros. Wikipedia. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Cisneros. 

Understanding Jaquira Diaz

“I Avoided Facing My Mental Illness for Decades. The Pandemic Changed That” by Jaquira Diaz is the article I found that helped me expand my understanding of who she is. This article is a narrative autobiography about Diaz’s mental health and how she was confronted with it due to being quarantined. In this piece Diaz talks about her first episode of substance-induced psychosis. It was during her mid-20’s when her father and her stepmother found her experiencing paranoid delusions, she believed that someone tried to poison her and that they were after her. After being taken to the doctors, Diaz went through more hallucinations and had to be sedated. She started writing Ordinary Girls soon after this episode, due to her getting the treatment that she needed. Writing about her previous obstacles in the memoir actually contributed to Diaz finding herself again. Throughout reading this article, I got to grasp the significance of the mental experiences Diaz has been through and how it’s what builds her writing. Her ability to write is what truly helps Diaz find herself and meaning to keep living. I believe this is a reliable source because it is written directly by Jaquira Diaz and was published recently in March of this year. 

Díaz, J. (2021, March 3). I Avoided Facing My Mental Illness for Decades. The Pandemic Changed That. Time. from https://time.com/5942112/mental-illness-covid-19-jaquira-diaz/.