‘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.