“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)
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/.
I found this part of book particularly hard to read for many reasons. One being Baby Lollipops, and another being the abuse that happened in the household–from her parents, her brother, and her classmates (and Chris). I feel like there is something that happens in the area where we live that sticks with us for life. Adding on to what you said about her and her brother trapping the mouse, I found it interesting when she said that they were stuck in the game of playing mouse with each other: someone was always trapping the other and hurting them. It seemed as though Anthony was able to do whatever he wanted without consequence, even when they were younger in PR. It begs the question of whether he was treated differently because he was the oldest, because he was a boy, or because he was ‘light-skinned’. It makes me wonder if he got away with things only at home, or if on the street, too, since Diaz doesn’t mention him being arrested and that eventually he had his own family.