Lost girl, liberated
WARNING: This book review discusses rape and other forms of sexual violence.
Thanks to Jackson Heights Books for the paid opportunity to review Tamara Burke’s memoir, Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement.
When Tamara Burke was seven, an older boy from the neighborhood led her to an abandoned apartment building, ordered her to lay on the concrete floor and raped her. Between ages nine and twelve, another older boy raped her regularly, using Polaroid photos of his previous crimes to extort his will.
She told no one.
Burke would endure more sexual violence as an adult before sharing her experiences with other survivors and launching the #metoo movement, a journey she describes with brutal candor in her memoir, Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement (Flatiron Books, September 2021). Part documentary, part exercise in catharsis, Burke applies her empathy as a community organizer and her writing skills as a journalist to reconstruct “that dark place of shame where we keep our stories.” It is an emotionally grueling read.
Early in her story, Burke paints the childhood assaults with painful naivete, mistaking her rapist’s ejaculate for urine. However, as a Black child of the Bronx during its nadir of urban decay, she knew that notifying the police would only expose her family, particularly her caring stepfather, to their harassment and abuse. If she had told her family but not the police, her stepfather would have dispensed his own justice on her rapist and probably would have ended up in prison.
So Burke told no one.
As the years wore on and the violence accrued, her family’s ignorance of it devolved into abandonment and ultimately betrayal. Burke excels at depicting the emotional harm and humiliation as the accumulation of small nicks: her mother’s continuous criticism of her high-school activities, cold words from a gynecologist during her first pelvic exam, financial manipulation by her employer. Subtle gaslighting and brute violence hardened Burke’s personality and devastated her psyche.
The bright side to Burke’s life was her work as a community organizer in Selma, Alabama, where she developed after-school programs for Black girls and teens. But the trauma of rape remained, paralyzing Burke with renewed pain when her young charges needed her the most. Burke concluded that she could not help these vulnerable girls without confronting her own experiences.
During a night of catharsis that Burke sketches as a fever dream, sweat soaked and spinning between sleep and delirium, she reaches for a note pad and scribbles: me too.
Though Burke’s experiences are particular to her, she occasionally connects her pain to that of other survivors of sexual violence, particularly in how the white community does not acknowledge trauma in communities of color. She draws on that connection to gently chide the white women actors who co-opted the #metoo hashtag in 2017 to accuse film producer Harvey Weinstein of rape.
“I thought about how sad it must have been for so many Black women and other women of color to watch as white women took a leap of faith and told their stories,” Burke wrote. “The women in Hollywood had, of course, endured agonizing scrutiny and endless harassment for speaking out—but they did, indeed, speak out. Many of their counterparts couldn’t take that same leap.”
Burke also strings together her life choices to depict how racism corners Black survivors into making certain decisions regarding rape. “The pain of watching folks twist themselves out of shape finding new ways to blame little Black girls for their own abuse plays a part … our legacy of living under the oppressive reach of white supremacy has trained us to take on shame that is not ours to carry” she wrote.
The storytelling in Unbound is most robust and dynamic when Burke reconstructs the assaults blow for blow, but it drags when exploring the banalities of high school and college. Also, the more joyful moments of her life—celebrations of her heritage, career success and personal fulfillment—would benefit from more exposition to connect with the reader beyond trauma and fear. Overall, Unbound is a challenging, sometimes exhausting book that prompts readers to willingly or unwillingly explore their own experiences with sexual violence.
For more academic examinations of racism and feminism, there is Against White Feminism (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021), a collection of essays by journalist Rafia Zakaria, and They Were Her Property (Yale University Press, 2020), a history of white women as slave owners in the US South, by historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers.
Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement by Tarana Burke. Flatiron Books, September 2021; 272 pages.