Transcripts For CSPAN2 Jaquira Diaz Ordinary Girls 20240713

CSPAN2 Jaquira Diaz Ordinary Girls July 13, 2024

Cspan. Org thepresident s to learn about each president and historian featured in order your copy today wherever books and ebooks are sold. Jaquira diaz is with us courtesy of david and noel ray and roseline rocks berg. She was born in puerto rico. Her work has been published in rolling stone, the guardian, and the New York Times style magazine. And included in the best american essays 2016. She is the recipient of two pushcart prizes and Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and fellowships from the kenyon review and the Wisconsin Institute for creative writing. She lives in miami beach with her partner writer lars thorne. Please give a warm savanna welcome to jaquira diaz. [applause] thank you so much. Im so happy to be here, wonderful to see all you booklovers here, thank you savanna for your southern hospitality. I want to thank the savanna book festival and everyone who made this event hospital including sponsors, booksellers. Lets give it up for the indy booksellers in the room. I love you all. Thank you for championing writers and supporting ordinary girls, because of you, i am here so thank you. I want to open with just a little piece that opens the book ordinary girls. It functions kind of like a prologue but not really, it is just a very short section. Girlhood. We were the girls who strolled onto the blacktop on long summer days dribbling past the boys on the courts, we were the girls on the merrygoround laughing and laughing and letting the world end while holding on for our lives, the girls on the swings during our heads back, the wind in our hair, we were the loudmouths, the troublemakers, the practical jokers, we were the party girls hitting the clubs and booty charts and jordans, smoking on the beach, we were the wild girls who loved music and dancing, girls who were black and brown and poor and queer, girls who loved each other. I have been those girls on a greyhound bus, homeless and on the run, girls sleeping on lifeguard stands by a restaurant on a bus stop bench, he had them girl throwing down with boys and girls in their own worst older sisters and the cops, suspended every year for fighting on the first day of school kicked out of music class for throwing a chair at the math teachers son. Kicked out of prealgebra for stealing the teachers gradebook, a girl who got slammed onto a police car by two cops in front of the whole school after a brawl with six of the girls and i have been other girls, girls standing before a judge, girl on a dock the morning after a hurricane looking out at the bays like the end of the world, girl on a rooftop, girl on a ledge, girl plummeting through the air and years later, a woman writing letters to a prisoner on death row. This is the opening of my book and i will talk a little bit about the inspiration and why i rose it. This book took about 12 years to write and it is without a doubt my lifes work. Ordinary girls is about my girlhood and it wasnt in puerto rico in miami beach, surviving depression and violence, it is about love, friendship and family, how action shape us, about losing the people we love, how we are not defined by the worst thing we have ever done and it is about my relationship with my mother. Growing up i was a juvenile offender who spent most of her time on the streets. 11 i attempted suicide for the first time and a few months after that i ran away from home for the first time and then i started getting arrested. I dropped out of high school, kept running away, kept getting arrested, kept fighting in the streets, kept trying to die. I was in the middle of a sexual awakening and would later come out as gay but i couldnt talk about that, not to anyone, not a nearly 90s, not in my neighborhood which was marked by homophobia and transfer be a and targeted attacks on gay people and certainly not to my mother. I spent much of my childhood and adolescence pretending to be someone else especially when it seemed the whole world was trying to erase us. I spent a lot of that time hiding in books looking for myself in stories and after i became a writer i decided to write about people like me. Girls and women who were black and brown and poor and queer and on mother, women like my mother, a white puerto rican women who didnt know how to raise or protect her black children, who would spend her entire life struggling with Mental Illness and addiction. My mother was and is a complicated woman. She was loving and abusive. She held me one minute, then kicked my ass, then held me again. She was and is flawed and vulnerable and confident and strong and lost. My mother was and is deeply deeply homophobic. When i first started writing ordinary girls my mother was a ghost, she really showed up in its pages so i wrote around her avoiding the truth. The truth was painful, the truth was that my mother broke me and she was the single most difficult subject to write about so i wrote about other mothers. A black puerto rican woman who carried me my whole life, carries new still who taught me to pray and cook, to keep house, everything i know about forgiveness. I wrote about a miami beach woman who tortured and murdered her 3yearold son and dumped his body in a neighborhood close to where i grew up and spent most of her life on death row and i wrote about my mothers mother, my grandmother mercy, a white woman who hated the fact that my mother fell in love with and married a black man, that she had his children, better grandchildren were black, she would later die by suicide. I wrote about the mythical woman, legend who took her children from their beds at night, carried them to a nearby river, held them underwater until they drowned and then drowned herself and now her ghost hans bodies of water looking for her ghost children. I wrote about all these other mothers, every mother, any mother except my own until a friend read the manuscript asked, after reading about five chapters, where is your mother, how come you never mentioned her and i had to sit down with the book, take a hard, honest look at the pages, examine my life and all the reasons i had been avoiding writing about my mother. The truth is my mother broke me in the truth is i was afraid to look, to admit, to see how much broken, to see how hard it had been to find my way back to myself, how easily i could be broken again but i finally decided to ask the question and more than that come in to ask the question for myself, to answer it, where is my mother, to write about her, to examine our relationship in a way that was honest, that acknowledged all the ways she was real, the writing from beginning to end took 12 years. I had to step away from the book several times and there were many different versions, to see that the writing of this book drained me, wrecked me, would be an understatement. I gained weight, i lost weight, my hair started falling out. I had the worst insomnia i had in my life. During those 12 years i lost relationships, friendships, my grandmother died by suicide, i often needed time away from the book to take care of myself and make sense of what i was doing, to interrogate different parts of the book, to examine my life as i was living it. Writing nonfiction for me has never been cathartic, quite the opposite. Writing this book is the hardest thing i have ever done. What kept me going . I wanted to write about people who rarely had a home in the literary landscape. I wanted to write about growing up poor in miami and about all the ways queer black puerto rican girls are invisible and hypervisible and about my Community Without losing sight of what mattered most, the people i was writing about were real, that they existed, they lived and loved even if the rest of the world didnt see them. When i started writing this book i thought not just about how to write my story but how my story is and was collected to a larger world is what my place in that world might be. Im here because i found that place thanks to a group of friends who saved me. I was struggling as a girl, as a woman and later as a writer struggling with how to write about Sexual Violence in a way that was honest and artful and not just about my experience but spoke to something larger about girls, how complicated family lives, fights and loves and i wanted to write it without pity or glory or anger. But also more so than any of my girls i am someone who has had access to education, to fellowships and writing conferences. It has taken a lot of hard work with it doesnt erase the fact that ive had access to all of this and girls in my community havent. The world isnt kind to black and brown girls. In the world isnt kind to black and brown women. Especially when they come from workingclass communities or from poverty. These ordinary girls taught me that it is possible to make our own way. Helped me believe in love and friendship and hope, after they had girls of their own, there girls taught me the most important lessons i needed to learn in order to write this book. They helped me to see the girl i have been. They helped me remember there are girls out there just like i was, that my story wasnt unique, all girls, no matter the circumstance are vulnerable. This is something we share, something that transcends borders and ethnicity and race and class, somewhere is a teenage girls mother suffers from Mental Illness and addiction just trying to get through the day, trying to come to terms with her sexuality. I like to imagine may be seeing herself in this book will make her life a little bit easier. Some of the other things i talk about in the book are also things that were very important to me. My father loved books, he was a poet who stopped writing poetry and one of my earliest memories was of my father, he took me to the funeral of a puerto rican protest poet and when i saw everybody gathered in celebrating his life, people who had read his books i thought poets were important and they could change the world and i thought i want that. I also wanted this book to Say Something about access and who gets access to this world, to publishing, who gets to be up here and talk about books. It was important to me because coming from where i came from i always felt i didnt have enough. It was important to me to talk about that and about puerto rican history, puerto rico at history of colonialism and its relationship to the United States and i started thinking about how to include our history in a memoir, something that wasnt a history book and how my story is connected to that story. Being puerto rican, most of us who come from puerto rico feel a connection to the island even after we have left it even if we have never been there which is the truth, there is a lot of Puerto Ricans know of phrase which comes from a poem by i forgot his name but comes from a poem and it means i would be puerto rican even if i was born on the moon. I wanted to reach people who would never read about puerto rico or pick up a history book or didnt have access to that history for whatever reason and make some of that history accessible to the general reader, to a reader who picks up a memoir about girlhood so i tried to talk about the parts of puerto rican history and colonialism but shaped me as a woman and human being and as a writer. And a lot of this influence the kind of writer i became and i was thinking about who i was writing for. In so many ways i felt like this book, even though i intended it to be as open and honest and intended it to be vulnerable i wanted to be in conversation with a specific group of people, girls are like i was, certainly Puerto Ricans, black americans, girls a drop in poverty, for them to understand i wasnt just writing about them. I was writing for them. Something i mentioned in the book is i was a kid who loved to read. I didnt have money for books. I went to the library and asked librarians to give me books and i Read Everything they put in my hands and everything they put in my hands were books that were written about white people and for white people and i thought that to be a writer you needed to be white. And so i wanted them to understand and to see that that wasnt real, but we exist, that this is possible. There were other parts of this book that kind of shape to me but at the time i thought about how they would make sense to the story, one of them was the baby lollipop murder that i talk about which happened in 1990. There was a toddler found in her neighborhood in miami beach and at the time they didnt really know where this topic came from, just that they found his body and he had been tortured and i saw this story on the news. It took over the 24 hour news cycle and at the time, i was 11, i was a kid but because it was on the news and on every newspaper and everybody in my neighborhood was talking about it we all kind of obsessed about this and i are ready imagined myself a writer and so i took notes and thought about this a lot and for weeks i thought about this until they found the babys mother and the story came out in the news they found his mother and her partner and that they had dumped his body and fled. Part of the narrative at the time, part of it was very important to the narrative at the time, the news made it sound like this woman and her partner, these two lesbians killed this baby and ran away and very much made it sound like being a lesbian was part of the crime. That people who talked about this in my neighborhood including teachers and School Security and librarians always talked about this with either implicit or explicit homophobia. So i kept thinking about the story and thinking about it and 20 years later i wrote an essay of being a little girl when the story broke and the essay was published in a magazine called the son and a woman who had been at the time working as an antiDeath Penalty activists visited prisoners on death row, read it and emailed me and i know this woman i wrote about, i have been visiting her in prison, she has been on death row since 1992 and i wrote back to her, asked if we could start a correspondence and she did and eventually i told her i had written about her or had written the story about her after discovering her on the news and she wrote back, she wrote me that is in her first letter she was kind of livid, she was upset that i had written about her and she said you didnt know me, you didnt know my son. What gives you the right to write about me . I wrote back and told her my story, told her who i was and why i had written about it and i wrote about discovering her story on the news and following along with it and i was a child at the time and i told her i would like to hear her story, not what the newspapers said, not what people said but the truth. I include this in the book because it is important for readers to see a writer when writing a memoir, to see the writer implicate themselves and talk about how they are complicit in certain violences. When i asked her to tell me her story she wrote back and said this is not a story, this is my life. She put me in my place and i deserved it. At that moment i started thinking about why i was writing and why i was writing it this way. I went back to the beginning of the book and i started interrogating myself and interrogating why i was telling the story and if i had a right to tell the story considering that i wasnt really a resident anymore and had access to all these things, i was in graduate school and the people i was writing about didnt have access to any of that but she got me to think about seeing all the women im writing about and thinking about the fact that im writing about real people. Theres another woman i mentioned in the book who died by suicide and i thought about her loss. I included her in the book because i thought about her in the same way. At the time i was suffering from major depression and ptsd and anxiety, and thinking about taking my life and thinking of this woman as a story, as a legend and i also wanted to include in the book how i caught myself thinking this way and to remind the readers that these arent just stories, these are real people. And that she was a real woman. In 2017, Ana Maria Cardona got a new trial and i was corresponding with her for several years. I wasnt writing her all the time but i would send an occasional letter and she would write back or she would write 2 or 3 letters and i would write back, and one of the things she asked for after she let me have it because i wrote about her, she did want me to write about her except became very clear she wanted to control the narrative and she wanted me to go to her retrial and i did. She was being tried for murder again but this time the Death Penalty was the table and as i sat in the trial after having this correspondence with her and feeling like there was enough evidence to prove that someone else was partially responsible another woman had confessed i realized that she was lying. She caught caught lying on the stand by prosecutors three times. I included a little bit of that too because i really wanted the reader to think about this idea of her that i had constructed and my head and how that fell apart because i wasnt really thinking of her as a woman. I had been thinking of this as a story i was following as a journalist. There are these other moments in the book that i thought were important, to call myself out. I talk about writing about puerto rico and one of the things i have done over the years his visit puerto rico and go back almost every summer, spend time with family. I still have most of my family there and to drive around and so i drove to taiwan one afternoon and if any of you have been to puerto rico, there is this building called the Puerto Rico Tourism Company which used to be a prison. It used to be a prison where Puerto Ricans were tortured and murdered and somehow the building was purchased and now it is the Puerto Rico Tourism Company and it is a place where you can get trolley maps and there is a gallery and a grand piano and people take selfys and you know. The building still has two jail cells in their original condition where people stop and take photos and when i went back to visit this building, after having written most of this book, almost all of it, i was thinking i knew the history of this place and i went intending to see it for what it had been, a prison where people were tortured and lost their lives and yet when i got there and saw families and tourists, a woman asked me to take a photo of her with her two children, i took her phone and took a picture of them and then i asked her to do the same, take a picture of me in front of this jail cell and it is a moment that even at the time i knew what i was doing was a moment that now fills me with shame because it was like i w

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