Piecing Me Together
Summary:
Jade attends a private high school through a scholarship programme; she comes from a ‘bad’ neighbourhood, and feels like an outsider in her mostly white, very privileged school. Jade often feels like she is split into many pieces, by all the different parts of her experience, the hopes her mother puts on her, and all the things that break her each day. Jade is tired of people making assumptions about her based on her race and where she lives. This is particularly clear to her when she is invited to take part in the Woman-to-Woman mentorship programme, for ‘at risk’ girls, and especially when Jade often feels more worldly wise than her mentor, Maxine, a young, Black wealthy woman a few years older than her. Through her art – collage and photography – Jade finds a way to navigate a difficult and trying world in a way that feels true to her real self.
Edited by: Dublin City University
Comment:
This is an introspective novel that probes and explores multiple facets of Jade’s experience as a young Black girl, from a socio-economically disadvantaged area of Portland, Oregon. She experiences continually conflict in her identity: railing against the well-meaning teachers who offer her ‘opportunities’, though not the opportunities she wants, and against the narrative of needing to be saved, while at the same time wanting to prove the negative stereotypes about “girls like me”, wrong. In a poignant and insightful moment, Jade wonders if “there’s ever a way for a girl like me to feel whole”. The stereotype of “those girls” runs through the novel; the girls who the adults in Jade’s life desperately do not want her to be like, but in whom Jade recognises part of her own lived experience. The theme of fragmentation is also apparent in Jade’s art practice: she makes collages, cutting and tearing everyday things and making them into complex and uncompromising wholes.