Girl's Guide

It took me awhile to formulate this. After finishing the reading on Sunday I was profoundly impacted by the many parallels within the author's story and my own. There are three primary themes that were particularly salient for me:

  1. The dehumanization of black women by a system 
  2. The dehumanization of black women by other people 
  3. The complexity of holding multiple identities simultaneously, particularly identities that have been constructed as diametrically opposed in the US (black and white)
Knowing the history of modern gynecology as well as the story of Henrietta Lacks - the way in which medical research, responses and knowledge about an illness that disproportionately impacts black women is not necessarily surprising but in a world that has repeatedly reinforced the fact that black lives and particularly the black lives of women do not matter this was a blatant reminder. In a world where current medical residents at Johns Hopkins believe that black people have a higher tolerance for pain and that those same doctors matriculate to become doctors this text provides window into how absolutely dehumanizing these levels of inequity coalesce upon the body. Black women experience higher premature birth rates than any other group, even when you control for education, socio-economic factors and other health conditions. The daily and inter-generational trauma that black women carry around can be suffocating. 

I think a lot about what it means to be seen, fully, as a complex, complete human being deserving of nurturing, consideration, prioritization and how rarely black women are allowed that experience. How my own experience with chronic, acute, debilitating nerve pain from a back injury was not treated in the same manner as others. How the first solution for a woman who is fat and black is to "lose weight" and "wait and see" how I lost 55lbs and it got worse. How when my period was inconsistent so I sought a pregnancy test at the on campus clinic the doctor questioned whether or not I was "intentionally trying to get pregnant" and why i wasn't "being more careful" - I was 27, in graduate school and in a relationship -  no pregnancies and no children by that point in my life made me an old maid by midwestern standards yet to her I couldn't possibly be responsible enough to have a child. 

I think about how the protagonist's boyfriend was so gentle with her, how he sought solutions to her pain how she wished he could instead read her mind, how she pushed him away but still he insisted on taking care of her body. He had no idea she needed to tend to her spirit. 

The way in which she was forced to carry her fibroids around like a visible but "benign" burden the way in which black womanhood is anything but a burden but is indeed one of the most powerful and resilient forces on this planet and as such one of the most feared. And as such one of the most ignored, undermined and co-opted. 

The craft of this is firmly situated in it's duality and juxtaposition - the narration of both her internal thoughts and movement through time and space both forwards and backwards. The way in which the knowledge she's gleaning is interspersed, presented as fact with commentary. The repetition of delivery over the course of the story. The imagery of the profound weight of both the present experiences and that which occured in the past and that which has yet to occur or never will. It is all woven together in what could be chaotic but is so intentionally placed I can't imagine any parts of it missing. You learn so much about who she is and who she is not in this way, who she wishes to be or feels she *should* be. 

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