Tag Archives: violence

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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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/.