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“We Must Save Ourselves”

“There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot protect us, as much as we want them to, or need them to. There comes a time when we realize that we must save ourselves” p. 83

Díaz Jaquira. (2020). Ordinary girls: A memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

This section really shows Jaquira Diaz’s mother’s unraveling and progression of her mental illness. It is abundantly clear that the adults in Diaz’s life are not really capable of caring for her properly. In this section, she tells the readers about a relationship she entered before she was even in high school with a 21 year old. Though she describes the relationship through a mostly positive lens, the seven year age difference is illegal for a reason. A thirteen year old can not consent. She was a child, and Chris was an adult taking advantage of Diaz’s unstable home life and lack of positive adult figures.

On Page 75, Diaz describes her admiration for her mother before her addiction and mental illness took over. She worked hard, but cared for her children and was “exhausted but happy.” At one point, she wished to be like her mother when she got older. This wish later becomes her greatest fear as her mother’s condition worsened. Mami kidnaps Diaz and Alaina, forcing them to stay with her while failing to provide basic necessities. Even when they tried to escape, she “always caught us. Always (p 89).” When this happens, Diaz feels utterly abandoned by her father, who stands by and does not interfere with her mother’s antics. He is completely checked out, and disappoints Diaz again when he fails to protect her from Mami.

Throughout this section, Diaz interweaves the story of Baby Lollipops, the gutwrenching murder of a toddler, Lazaro Figueroa, that gained national media attention during key points in Diaz’s own life. She marks important memories by what was going on in the Baby Lollipops case, and tells the story simultaneously with her own. The side by side comparison and fixation on the fact that the baby’s own mother did such horrible things to him are intentional. Sometimes parents can do horrible things. Prolonged abuse is evident between Mami and Diaz and the correlation to the Lazaro Figueroa case is clear. Parents are supposed to love and protect their children, but when they are incapable of doing so, the responsibility to try to save themselves falls on the children. This was particularly threatening to Diaz because it served as a reminder that parents can be loving one day and monsters another.

Díaz at the 2019 Texas Book Festival, Larry D. Moore

Díaz Jaquira. (2020). Ordinary girls: A memoir. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, April 28). Jaquira Díaz. Wikipedia. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaquira_D%C3%ADaz#/media/File:Jaquira_Diaz_2019_Texas_Book_Festival.jpg.

Happy Sad Mother

“These are the memories I want to keep: my mother, exhausted but happy, how carefree she was, how beautiful. How for those moments, before we knew that she was sick, the whole world seemed possible. How when I looked at her, I hoped that one day,  I would be exactly like her. (pg 90)”

While reading about Diaz’s relationship with her mother and father, I came to a realization that everyone’s life is completely different, even if we are similar in some ways, we will always be different because we don’t go through the same experiences. Not only that but also, it was shocking to me how messed up it was that no matter what Diaz’s mother did, her father never really cared. He was in his own world and when Diaz’s mother threatened to take away his children, he never said anything about it. The way Diaz explained how different her mother was before she was sick felt very real. She described how happy her mother was before she was sick, running around chasing each other laughing, and how she felt like she could accomplish anything. She looked up to her mother and hoped to be like her one day. But after her addiction to drugs, Diaz’s greatest fear was becoming her mother. She didn’t want to grow up like her mother even though she had admired her for so long.

The Illusion of Control

Growing up as a woman of color Diaz was faced with varying forms of oppression from society and her own family, as was seen in the first section of the reading. The second reading began to explore her experiences with violence as a woman and how these experiences made her feel powerless. As Diaz was growing up in an unstable, violent environment she began to take back control with her fists, “just itching for a fight, begging for it…all those years of beat-downs barreling against me” (Diaz 116). Through the years of fighting with her brother and being slapped around by her mother, the anger began to build up and during late middle school, early high school, Diaz began fighting as a way to express her power. This can be seen when J.R. was antagonizing her in the hallway, “I was not and would never be, the kind of person who got bullied or made fun of…” (page 127). Diaz knew that she could not control her mother’s actions, but in that moment of powerlessness, she showed J.R. her power through violence.  

Diaz’s therapist tried to help by explaining that control could not be conquered in all parts of her life, but certain actions, smoking, and skipping, for example, could be controlled on her part. The lack of control that was felt in Diaz’s life was due to the instability of her mother. She describes her and her sister sleeping fully dressed in case an incident occurred. Diaz also feared her mother, “my greatest fear, the thing that scared me the most in the world, was my mother” (Diaz 89). She feared her mother’s sudden outbursts, her violence, the embarrassment of her asking her friends for money, but more than anything else, she feared being like her mother. Going from her father’s house where she was constantly in fistfights with her brother to her mother’s house where she was constantly on edge ultimately left Diaz looking for a way to exert power and gain control and she found this through fighting.

America Is in Crisis. That's Not New for Many of Us | Time
Jaquira Diaz at 14 years old.

Díaz, J. (2020, June 25). America is in crisis. that’s not new for many of Us. Time. Retrieved November 2, 2021, from https://time.com/5859204/america-in-crisis/.

Díaz, J. (2020). Ordinary Girls: A Memoir. Algonquin Books.

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La Llorona, the Mother

La Llorona is a bedtime story that many Hispanic children grow up with. If you don’t listen to your parents, La Llorona will come to get you; if you don’t go to bed, she’ll come get you; if you misbehave, La Llorona will take you. In many ways, she is the boogeyman, or a version of him: a myth/legend that will scare children into doing what you ask, someone who used to be good that became bad and preys on children. Diaz compares her mother to La Llorona multiple times in the section appropriately titled “Monstruo”. In the legend, the mother drowns her kids, then drowns herself. In her own way, Jeanette does the same thing: going on a downward spiral and dragging her kids with her. The drugs and alcohol are a way to keep her pain at bay, but they only cause pain to the girls. Being evicted and moving from place to place—when she wasn’t on the run—left Diaz feeling like she didn’t belong anywhere. The multiple scenes with Jeanette and the men go to show the relationship she had with Jaquira. In some way, she always chose the man over her daughter. Without opposition, Jaquira felt that the one person left to protect her (her mother) was the one causing her pain and the reason she was always on the run where she should feel safe.

La Llorona figurine

Fairest: Choices & Personal Growth

““Your life will be better in America.” “You don’t know that,” I insisted, old enough to understand that Nanay Coro had no idea what America was really like, except for blind faith and colonial brainwashing” (Talusan, 2021, p. 100)

From the pages we read this week, I’ve come to see how Talusan has grown up. She’s made it clear how her understanding of many things has grown and how some of this influences her choices. Though there was one choice that really showed her growth in her understanding of America. At the beginning of the book, we see her fantasizing about going to America and being able to fit in with the people who look like her, in a place where she won’t be considered the different one. However, now that she has the choice to move to America, she doesn’t want to leave her grandmother at all. Nanay Coro comforts her and tells her to go because she will have a better life in America than in the Philippines. Talusan had already reflected upon gazing at the white man who helped them set up their documents, stating that she no longer liked the Americans “who every day decided on the fates of [them] brown people pleading to be let into their country, a situation they themselves created when they conquered [them] against [their] will, used [their] land and [their] hands for free to enrich themselves” (Talusan, 2021, p. 99). This whole piece is important to mention because this is her realization, the conclusion she came to after learning about American history. This is how she views them now, and the reason why she would rather stick with her roots instead of feeling like a traitor and going to America.

Another example of her growth is when she demonstrates how she’s come to understand why her parents act the way they do. Her father’s cruelty in Nanay Coro’s old age was revenge for ruining his life when she forced him to marry Talusan’s mother (Talusan, 2021, p. 91). He resented his mother a lot, and didn’t love the woman he married, which Talusan understood why he was absent in her childhood. On the other hand, with her mother, Talusan already knew her story, but didn’t understand until she got to America that her mother had no choice but to marry her father because she was already pregnant with Talusan, and in a culture “where unmarried mothers were the very symbol of moral failure” made it even harder for her to raise a child as a loving mother is supposed to (Talusan, 2021, p. 118). Although Talusan has come to understand the reasons behind her parents’ actions, it doesn’t change the way she feels about them. She’ll choose to understand them, but not forgive them. I believe that that right there shows her growth from the close-minded Filipino child she was at the beginning of the book to the more open-minded college student in America.

Citations
Talusan, M. (2021). Fairest: A memoir. Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Special=White?

Everyone wants to be somebody special that everyone would like and want to be with. In reality, what makes people special depends on society and its biases. In these chapters of Fairest, Talusan struggles to accept travelling to America with her parents and siblings. She wanted to stay behind and live in the Philippines with her grandmother. Yet, her grandmother is the one to tell her she should go, which sent her down a path that not everyone can go down. While she is similar to other immigrants that travel to America for a chance at a better life, she found an advantage in her white skin.

Talusan was treated special and it shaped path. The first example would be Talusan’s grandmother, when Talusan writes “…who may have loved me regardless but favored me over everyone else because she connected my color to the wealthy, powerful Americans who had conquered our land.” (Talusan, 2020, pp. 91). Anyone would assume that her grandmother’s favoritism was just the matter of her love for Talusan. It is true she loves Talusan, however, she always brought up her skin being fair and beautiful. Her grandmother had believed that the ability to be perceived as white gave her the edge over everyone else. She thought one of the reasons Talusan will prosper is her skin. Her grandmother favored her, told her she’s special, and encouraged her to pursue a life in the U.S. It’s sad to even think that being white was a reason for it. It’s sadder that her grandmother wasn’t entirely wrong. She was seen as white and it helped her avoid discrimination against Asians.

Being treated special shaped Talusan’s decisions. Being praised for her whiteness made her try to be seen as white to everyone. She sometimes seems to forget that she isn’t white, such as when she was at a party and she said to herself “At least I’m not Asian.” (Talusan, 2020, pp. 120). She worked on her accent, her story, and even her clothes and hair to match other white people. She made sure that what her family said (that she would be seen as white) became a reality. It almost seems like she abandoned her old poorer self to be with the rich white Harvard students. This is significant because race has always been controversial and if being white means you’re special, would that make the rest of us not?

Moody, J. (2021). In fall 2019, 82% of accepted students enrolled at Harvard University in Massachusetts [Photograph]. U.S.News. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/universities-colleges-where-students-are-eager-to-enroll

Talusan, M. (2020). Fairest: A Memoir (pp. 83-149). Penguin Books.

Universities, Colleges Where Students Are Eager to Enroll | Best Colleges | US News

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/.

Manipulative Liar

The night Kamala Lackey told me her secrets, I promised I’d never sexually violate or sexually abuse any woman or girl on earth. The existence of that promise was enough to excuse myself for lying to Abby Claremont and any other girl who wanted to have sex with me.

Laymon, 2018, 103

This particular section was a lot to take on. Laymon discusses his relationships with women and how he treats them.  In the quote above, he touches on his promise to never secually abuse/violate women or girls. Throughout “Hulk” Laymon brings up all of the situations where the girls around him would want to have sexual intercourse while they were drunk and how uncomfortable it made him, “Usually, I said no because my body told me it was wrong” (94). His understanding of consent and how the lines get blurry when one is drunk made Laymon disregard all of the advances women made towards him while intoxicated. I wonder if a part of this came to be because of the things he saw occurring at Beulah Beauford’s house. While he was mindful of keeping his hands to himself during these moments, it didn’t stop him from hurting women in other ways.

Although Laymon promises to never hurt women sexually, he still allows himself to hurt them by becoming a liar. I feel like the most unnerving part about him lying was that he took pleasure in it. When Laymon is crying over Abby, he tells his mother that it’s because her and his father didn’t try to make it work. When she begins to cry and apologize, it makes him “smile and tell more lies” (98).  Now he’s lying to his mother and all the other women and girls in his life. He is being encased in toxicity and gets pleasure from it. Since no one knew the truth about what he was doing he was still allowed to be and looked at as a “good guy” (103). It’s shocking that he is only sixteen years old and doing all of this. The contrast between 12-year-old Kiese and 16-year-old Kiese is staggering. The signs of being a liar have always been there since he was young, back then he would lie to save himself from trauma and I think that his trauma is still shaping his actions at this stage, however, it doesn’t excuse the pain he is and will cause to others.

I don’t know what Laymon was trying to convey by explaining that he wouldn’t take advantage of women sexually, but that he was also a liar. I think that in a way this is to show that at the end of the day he is just a human who has flaws. He isn’t a superhero like Hulk, there will be many things that he does that are wrong from a moral standpoint. Also, since he is writing this memoir as a letter to his mother, it might serve as an exposé of sorts. He’s letting her know all of the harm that he caused people because he enjoyed lying to women. I wonder how long he will continue to thrive off of being a manipulative liar throughout this memoir.

HEAVY: Blog Post 1

After reading the first 62 pages of the memoir “Heavy” many things have stood out to me. For example, the whole memoir is being spoken to Kiese’s mother who he expresses as “you”. Being that Kiese writes about his trauma and pain in this book it can be foreshadowed that he never confide himself with his mother. Therefore, he is writing this story to her. I found it very interesting that in the beginning Kiese said that “I wanted to write a lie (page 1). He did not want to say what he truly wanted to say however, he does. Kiese’s relationship with his mother is a complicated one to interpret. In some points of the the reading it can easily be shown the love she has for him however, that love seems to vanish during some points. On page 4 Kiese even says “I realized that day we didn’t simply love each other, but I was your child”. While his mother’s love might not come from affection and kindness, she shows her care and love of her son in preparing him for the harsh realities of life the best way she knew. This being education and making sure Kiese has a laboratory to work with words.

Kiese’s relationship with his grandmother is very different than the one he has with his mother. She is much more caring and does not beat Kiese. He is able to speak and ask his grandma many questions which shows his comfortability to confide in her. Throughout all the trauma and pain he experiences as a child it can be said that his grandmother is his rock and helps him feel better.

Blog Post 1

Blog Post 1

Blog Post 1

Kiese Laymon begins by telling stories regarding his childhood experiences with his family members. Especially the ones with his mother with whom he shared a complicated relationship. As a direct result of him loving his mother unconditionally despite her continuously abusing him. One of Kiese Laymon’s initial quotes was “I did not want to write to you, I wanted to write a lie” in which he was referring to his mother. I was not expecting Kiese Laymon to start his memoir with such heartbreaking details regarding his relationship with his mother. I found it difficult to read some parts of the memoir without creating an image in my head. As I continued reading the memoir I began growing a significant level of appreciation towards Laymon for including this specific line. Reading this part of the memoir also made me reflect on the personal relationship I share with my own mother. Realizing how fortunate I am for sharing a healthy relationship with my mother till this present day. Moving forward with the memoir, I’m anticipating that Laymon includes more lines from his mothers perspective. For the duration of Kiese Laymon dissecting the unfortunate events of his adolescents. As of this moment Kiese Laymon has not disappointed.