The Adventures of a Black Girl

The Adventures of a Black Girl | Part 2

Hey Again, It's Ciara and I am going to continue talking about this book that really inspired me.

Continuing On from.... At the data-analysis company where Eva works, her reticence draws in her co-workers, whose races the reader never learns. Eva never chats or goes to lunch with her colleagues, and, despite their prying, she never tells them anything about her personal life. One of the women in the office is so drawn to Eva that she begins to dress like her. When Eva turns down a fourth invitation to lunch, one of Eva's colleagues says to her, "Just tell people you're a loner. That's what I did, anyway." "Oh," Eva replies, without taking her eyes off her computer screen, " ... I'm not a loner." Eva's colleagues eventually turn on her and deem her uppity and pretentious; one day, someone in the office steals the diary. We never learn who......

By giving us Eva's race and no one else's, Oyeyemi, who was born in Nigeria and was raised in London and published her first novel when she was twenty years old, makes a striking and, I suspect, deliberate point about race in Anglophone literature, where whiteness remains the default demographic, the identity that so often goes unnamed, uncommented upon. Oyeyemi, in her writing, frequently returns to the ways that our physical selves shape how others see us. "I'm interested in any scenario in which something you think you know about someone, based on his or her appearance, ," she told an interviewer in 2014. When reading the story of Eva, one assumes, probably safely, that Eva's co-workers are white. (There are ambiguous clues: one of Eva's colleagues, for instance, has a grandmother who "made it out of a fallen Communist state.") Eva strives to maintain her private self in this otherwise-white space by saying little and protecting her diary.

If Eva didn't lock her diary to keep strangers from reading it, then why did she? Oyeyemi seems to suggest that it's not our business to ask why. Not everything has to be figured out about this black woman—that secrecy is a form of power. What is not yours is not yours.

"If you're trying to understand why a woman would have a locked diary and why she wouldn't want its contents revealed, you have the answer in the diaries of Alice Dunbar Nelson and Ida B. Wells," the English professor Mary Helen Washington told me recently, when I asked her about Oyeyemi's story. Washington wrote the foreword to "The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells," published in 1995. ("Every woman who has ever kept a diary knows that women write in diaries because things are not going right," her foreword begins.) When she began working on the Wells diary, Washington told me, she was interested in the revelations to be found there that weren't in Wells's published writings—her investigative journalism about lynching and her speeches about racism and equality. In her diary, Wells describes her financial difficulties and her romantic missteps. "I think of the diary as something like the Clearing in Black religious culture," Washington writes in the foreword, "a place where, physically and psychologically, Black people felt free to speak in a setting outside the boundaries of the official church, a private sanctuary where one's truer self is affirmed and authorized."

In other words, the boundaries of a black woman's social life are many and varied. Alice Dunbar Nelson, who had been married to the famous black writer Paul Laurence Dunbar, wrote in her diary of her lesbian and other extramarital affairs. One of the fears that many black women writers have historically had is that if they reveal too much of their intimate lives, it could reflect badly, not only on themselves but on the black community. In addition to matters of romance and money, these earlier diaries of black women are filled with confessions about strained familial relationships, and personal demons and insecurities.

Well, Explaining From My Point of View is that this debate has been argued by Patricia Hill Collins and she said that black women resist dehumanization from the dominant culture by learning to define themselves in the face of mental frameworks that would classify them as "the other." This makes them, in many contexts, "," Collins writes. In Oyeyemi's short story, we see how precarious that can be: with her locked diary, Eva protects herself from being pried open and objectified; her co-workers, by plotting to steal her diary, threaten her mind, a more insidious tactic than trying to subjugate her body.

Which I Think is Totally True!!!

Thank You For reading My Story!!