Women of color ‘Sing’ with pride, poignancy
All the Women in My Family Sing (Nothing But the Truth, 361 pp., ★★★☆) is a vivid ode to American identity in all its shades.
The essay collection, edited by Deborah Santana, features the words of 69 women of color who write stories that are sometimes spare, at times witty and often pungent to chronicle their feelings about their places in the world.
The essayists’ diversity extends beyond ethnicity. They are budding writers and celebrated novelists, incarcerated grandmothers and icons of social justice. The collection carries the voices of indigenous Americans as well as those of the global diaspora that many believe is America’s glory.
There are reflections on bigotry and otherness. In Klansville, USA, Camille Hayes recounts how she, a black child, and her white parents (she doesn’t say whether she was adopted) were barred from a public pool in Virginia because, as an employee explained, Hayes was “very brown.” Similarly, the family’s decision to move to North Carolina left Hayes with emotional wounds that fester still.
Other writers explore the limitations of labels and the straitjacket of stereotype. Janine Shiota has an uneasy rela- tionship with the expression “woman of color,” then ultimately embraces it by giving it her own meaning. Eliana Ramage remarks on the people who “sometimes ask, ‘what kinds of Indian things do you do?’ … hoping for proof of something they don’t understand.”
But in other stories, race and gender are prisms through which to view experiences that are universal, from a child’s desire to have hair like a movie star to the struggles of a parent raising children with special needs.
Maria Ramos-Chertok riffs about her sometimes frustrating search for a place to belong. Music producer Deborah McDuffie offers a remembrance of her friend Luther Vandross, the legendary balladeer, who died in 2005. Educator Terezita Romo offers a scholarly take on the condescension too often shown artists of color by museums and academics.
And there are heartrending stories, like Samina Ali’sLabor of Love, which recounts her journey to learn to walk and write again after suffering a grand mal seizure and brain damage while giving birth to her son. Another essay, by small-business owner Tammy Thea, is more straightforward, but her meditation on gratitude, having survived the Cambodian killing fields and starting a family in the USA that includes two autistic sons, is no less poignant.
We are in a time when the words “me too” have become a hashtag that signals solidarity among women who have suffered the trauma of sexual harassment and abuse. But All the Women in My
Family Sing illustrates how that phrase encompasses so much more.
In their common pursuits of acceptance, friendship and social justice, these writers demonstrate there are truths and desires that transcend lines of color, sexuality and class. In sounding common chords of humanity, their voices, together, create a mighty chorus.