“Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss that one an identity, the end of safety”. (Laymon 2018)
This passage in the book stands out out to me because this seems to be one of the center points of the book as well as this section of the book. We have followed laymon’s story as a person of color who has lived in a toxic environment most of his life and a world that makes it feel impossible to strive. We see him constantly trying to change the world he lives in, to the point where he had to misdirect the people around him of who he is. This warps around full circle top beginning of book of him telling us that he wanted to write a lie. Writing a lie would be much safer than tackling the problems of systematic oppression like he did in Millsaps, which cause him to get literal death threats.
Laymon, Kiese. (2018). Heavy. New York, NY: Scribne
While reading the first part of Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz there was a recurring idea of belonging. Diaz explored her feelings of belonging in childhood through telling stories in relation to gender and race. The lack of belonging that Diaz felt in her family occurred when she was compared to her brother. In comparison with her brother, she often felt isolated because she felt that he was often favorited due to his gender. The connection that she felt with her father during childhood was complicated by the secret trips her father would take her brother on to La Plaza. He would not allow her to go to La Plaza because she was a girl and this reasoning caused a fit of anger and left her, “longing for something to lift this burden of girlhood” (Diaz 9). The strong bond that she felt with her father was hindered due to his beliefs about what girls should and should not do.
The lack of belonging in her family was also felt because of her race. Diaz often felt disconnected from the stories she read and the movies she saw. “I’d lie in my own bed, imagining myself in those movies, writing revisions of them that included characters like me” (Diaz 42). The characters in the stories were people that did not look like her and therefore she struggled to see herself in the stories and connect. This feeling was reinforced by the racist comments that were consistently made by her grandmother. When giving her a haircut, her grandmother cut her hair short like her father’s hair and antagonized her with comments about not being able to look like her white mother. “It wasn’t the haircut, she said, chuckling, it was my bad hair…Your father’s fault. Your father and his black family” (page 50). While her Abuela proudly displayed her darker skin tone and hair, her grandmother put her down and made her feel like she was less than. Diaz’s lack of belonging has a strong connection to the intersection of multiple forms of oppression, and in this section specifically, it was sexism and racism.
Citations
Díaz, J. (2020). Ordinary Girls: A Memoir. Algonquin Books.
Grande, R. (2019, October 29). Abused, Addicted, Biracial and Queer: Jaquira Díaz Is Anything but
‘Ordinary.’ The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/books/review/ordinary-girls-jaquira-diaz.html
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