Tag Archives: Diaz

The Ghosts Return

Throughout the novel, Diaz, and many people in her life struggle with suicidal thoughts and many including herself have attempted suicide. After Mercy committed suicide Diaz began to reflect on how many people in her family have committed suicide or have tried to, “and then there is this: suicide was our family legacy” (Diaz 259). The last section was highlighted with happy and relieving moments from the later part of Diaz’s life. She talks about her graduation, “I can’t stop smiling. I am overwhelmed with happiness, with love, with hope” (Diaz 278). But even with these moments of immense pride and happiness Diaz still found herself struggling with depression and suicidal thoughts. “One night after not sleeping for days, I find myself sitting on the kitchen floor with a knife, not remembering how I got there, but trying to build up enough courage to slit my own wrists” (Diaz 286). This brings to light the question of whether Diaz will ever be able to fully move past the things that happened in her childhood.

Throughout the chapter “Returning,” Diaz returns to Puerto Rico and Miami several times. She thinks about her childhood and her teenage years. She loses friends from childhood during this time, reconnects with childhood friends, watches them raise kids and get married, and watches the health of her mother decline. Although Diaz is older, she is still trapped in the cycle of caring for her mother, self-destructing, and trying to find ways to cope. Except, as an adult, she finds a passion for writing, puts herself through school, and then graduates. Diaz will always have her past and therefore she will always have to deal with the ghosts of her past, but she has found purpose and she has friends that she cares for deeply.

A picture of a ghost representing the feelings of Diaz when returning to the places of her childhood.

Citations

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

McGrath, Patrick. “‘Ghosts: A Natural History,’ by Roger Clarke.” The New York Times, 24 Oct. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/books/review/ghosts-a-natural-history-by-roger-clarke.html.

Reflections and Legacies

“How do we keep living in the world when everything we built is gone? How do we even go on?” (Diaz, 310)

The last section of the book Ordinary Girls speaks a lot on legacies. The things that change based on what you lived through, who you were and how that formed who you are. This section was a lot of reflection while also narrating new aspects of Diaz’s life. For example, during the Halloween party, she reflects on her friendships with China and Flaca while also touching on them aging and gaining new friends. When she was in Puerto Rico she reflected on her life when she lived there, and on the rich history that has been erased by centuries of colonialism. She mentioned that La Princesa, a prison in San Juan that held many Nationalists, including Pedro Albizu Campos, is now a tourist attraction. After Hurricane Maria, she goes back to where she grew up, and sees everything her family built gone. The house her grandmother lived in, the store her father built and kept running, swept away and damaged by the storm.

In the last two pages of the book, she says who she writes for. She writes for those who didn’t make it—her friends that had passed away and couldn’t tell their own stories. She writes for the girls who grew up in circumstances like hers, for those who grew up feeling like they weren’t represented in the media. She writes this book as a legacy, her mark on the world saying that she is here, she matters, and she sees you.

La Princesa as a prison (Prior to 1993 when it was renamed)
Present Day– Puerto Rico Tourism Company (AKA El Paseo de la Princesa)

The Dangers of a Child’s Love

And while my parents yelled at each other and my mother threw the rotating table fan across the room and threatened to leave, I would lay my head on my pillow and feel nothing but the sharp sting of my father’s betrayal.

(Diaz, 2019, P. 51)

In the first section of our reading for Ordinary Girls, Diaz touches on a number of very heavy topics in her early life. Like many children, one parent is favorited over the other – in the case of Diaz, this is her father. Her father was like an idol to her, and she did everything to try and be like him and saw him almost like a hero. While her mother was unstable and ready to lash out, and her brother bullied her and belittled her because of her looks and gender, Diaz’s father stuck out as a source of comfort for Diaz. Diaz spent many nights with him while he read to her and she would always try and read his books so that he could understand his secrets and be more like him. However, as she grew older, the idolization began to fail. She found her father selling drugs in the plaza at a vey young age, he was a womanizer and constantly betrayed her mother with women in and out of their apartment complex, and ultimately, he left one day and didn’t come back for a very long time. Over time as well he began to belittle her for her gender as well, and not stick up for his daughter and refused to take ownership of his transgressions – leading to the quote I selected above from the reading.

In many ways, I can relate to Diaz’s experience with her family. As a very young child, there is the tendency in our minds to idolize or demonize things, to work in extremes. I hate her because she stole my toy. My dad is the best and I love him very much. After having pizza for the first time, pizza is my favorite food in the whole world and I want to eat it for the rest of my life. This extreme way of thinking is natural when we are small children, but as we grow older we begin to grow out of it. However, sometimes in toxic, abusive, and chaotic homes, this process can be delayed or end up not happening at all. With all the extremes and prejudice Diaz otherwise experienced (about her looks, her gender, the extremes of sexuality from her mother before even hitting puberty, the fights and drama of the home and neighborhood), I don’t find it all too surprising that she wasn’t in the headspace to stop the idolization until much later – until she had her heart directly pierced by her father and he turned her mother on her for something he did. While I did not face nearly as many instabilities outside of home, my the home instabilities led to a similar experience for me. We think so many things are normal that really aren’t, as Diaz states when she reflects on her violent games that she played as a child. Only later do we realize how insanely messed up our experiences were, and how it all makes sense that we ended up behaving the way we did later on. The way we think about ourselves, the way we treat others, and our wellbeing is deeply tied to our childhood experiences – and in an environment like this, it’s only natural that the idolization a child feels can turn into something incredibly dangerous even decades into their life, for themselves and everyone around them. It’s very likely that Diaz’s mother’s experience with abuse in her own family led to her growing mental health issues with age as she ignored the effects and was thrust into an underage marriage in an extremely unstable environment.

America Is in Crisis. That's Not New for Many of Us | Time

Díaz, J. (2019). Ordinary girls: a memoir. First edition. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

Ordinary Girls Day 1

From the first few pages of Ordinary Girls is clear that Diaz’s father is important to her. She romanticizes his college days and association with the independentistas, his love for literature and poetry, and it influenced Diaz’s love for books as well. On page 3, she says, “I was sure of one thing that I wanted everything my father wanted.” She later details a disgusting, “horrifying” man, looking for her father, who exposed himself to her when she was a child. Despite her father putting her and her family in obvious danger, in the next breath, she says “I adored my father.” She loved her father with all of his complexities, even if it meant hardship for her. 

The issue of gender construct is brought up early in the book, when Diaz laments about how her brother gets to go wherever he wants, but Diaz is forbidden from some places because of her gender. She calls it the “burden of girlhood” on page 9. Even when playing cops and robbers as a child, the boys knew they could make Diaz play the role of robber, internalizing misogyny, as girls couldn’t possibly know how to defend themselves. 

The way our parents interact with us has such a great impact on our psyche. Diaz describes her mother’s worsening schizophrenia throughout the story, and several instances that might have escalated her condition. When Diaz’s father tells her she is crazy, or imagining things after accusing him of cheating with la otra, this gaslighting could not have had a positive impact on Mami. 

Lastly, poverty weaves its way through the entire storyline of this section. Diaz’s father would not need to sell drugs, the family would not need to uproot frequently, and Diaz wouldn’t need to deal with being “empty fridge poor” with better opportunities and more support.  A big reason for the lack of support, not that it’s much better in the states, is a lack of funding for  small businesses.