Book Review: For Black Girls Like Me
By Mariama J Lockington, Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2019
Review by Kayla Harr
Mariama J. Lockington’s “For Black Girls Like Me” offers a rich, lyrical portrait of a young girl striving to assert her own voice while navigating the myriad ways race, adoption and mental illness impact her identity and family. Keda, Lockington’s 11-year-old protagonist, narrates with a voice that evokes a kaleidoscope of shifting possibilities and emotions. Keda is vibrant, curious and thoughtful. She collects words, writes songs and loves maps, and she treasures a deep bond with her best friend, Lena, with whom she shares aspirations, dissects crushes and bemoans parents’ tendency to just not get it. But most significant — among all the things Lena and Keda have in common — is that they both know how it feels to be “an adopted mismatched girl.” The shared experience of being Black children raised by white adoptive parents lies at the center of the novel and its title, which names a need for community. That need also resounds in the title Keda chooses for the blog she and Lena use to write each other letters: “Questions I Have for Black Girls Like Me.”
The novel opens in the wake of a destabilizing change for Keda’s family and for her friendship with Lena. After Keda’s father, Daniel, takes a new job with a symphony across the country, the family must relocate from Baltimore, Maryland, to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Keda’s parents both play string instruments professionally and her mother, Anna, reflects with both nostalgia and bitterness on the years she spent traveling the world as a concert violinist in her youth — a promising career that she left behind to have a family. Keda’s sister, Eve, is Anna and Daniel’s biological child, older than Keda by three years and newly enamored with teenage interests that leave Keda frustrated by the widening distance between them. Spanning the spring, summer and fall following the move, “For Black Girls Like Me” charts successive seasons of tension, decline and reconciliation for the family.
Alongside Keda’s patterns of bright intensity lie shadowed patches of pain and loss. She feels like the Black question mark in a white family and longs for the guidance of Black women to help her understand and love herself. Keda’s parents see her as their beloved child, but they are also prone to problematic behavior and are ill-equipped to help Keda respond to and process racism. When confronted with prejudice, Keda’s mother tends to weep and rage, bemoaning the world’s inability to see past skin color. This both hurts and confuses Keda; the racism happened to her, yet it’s her mother’s feelings about it that take priority. Keda finds herself trapped in a contradictory dynamic: In their efforts to express their love for Keda and identify her as part of themselves, her parents minimize her difference, leaving Keda to wonder if they really see her or recognize the struggles she faces. Yet the rest of the world marks her race constantly, assailing her with challenging stares and both implicitly and expressly accusing her of not belonging in this place or this family.
While Keda’s struggle with her identity anchors the novel, it’s not the only concern that plagues her. Daniel’s job requires that he travel often, resulting in strain on his and Anna’s marriage and frequently leaving Keda and Eve alone with an increasingly listless and unpredictable Anna. Keda shoulders these stresses, feeling emotionally adrift and unsure of how to help ease the tension between her parents. When kids at her new school ostracize her, escalating from racist assumptions to slurs, Keda absorbs that, too: The pain of dehumanizing treatment paralyzes her tongue, seizes her body with tension and replaces her exuberance with exhaustion. “For Black Girls Like Me” excels in its frank portrayal of the trauma of racism as experienced by a young adoptee. The prejudice Keda faces is by no means exclusive to the adoptee experience, but the distress she feels each time others mark her as wrong with their questions, assumptions and gazes will hold particular resonance for transracial adoptees. I found the novel’s articulation of that pain in Keda’s thoughts, feelings and silences especially powerful, because like Keda, I have often struggled to make others understand why ignorant questions and easily refuted comments can impact me so profoundly. When Lockington, a transracial adoptee herself, immerses us in Keda’s world, she makes it possible for readers to feel the sting of the thousand small cuts by which Keda is told that her very identity is troubling, unseemly or aberrant.
“For Black Girls Like Me” highlights with force and nuance the challenges young transracial adoptees face. But the novel also successfully situates those struggles within a landscape of adolescent concerns familiar to all. Keda learns to appreciate and care for her changing body; longs for the stability and comforts of childhood that elude her now that she is old enough to register her parents’ struggles; and chafes as all adolescents do against the pressures of familial expectations. This last conflict is written into the very structure of the novel’s narration. Keda’s parents insist that both of their daughters study piano and perform classical music, but Keda prefers freer, improvisational forms of music that resist the rigid structures her parents and piano teacher impose on her. The lyrical narration of “For Black Girls Like Me” emphatically asserts Keda’s individuality by flowing beyond conventions. The novel’s short chapters read much like prose poems, with evocative imagery and buzzing, rhythmic sentences that use no internal punctuation. Keda’s voice also comes through in her love for jazz, the blues, scatting and inventing lyrics that complement the beating heart of the sounds she hears in a room.
Significantly, the musical forms Keda is drawn to — which her parents view as less legitimate than classical music — are linked to the Black identity she only explores in private or in the company of other Black girls and women. In the moments before she falls asleep, Keda is sometimes visited by a pair of shadowy singers who call themselves the Georgia Belles and who evoke a home and community she never knew. Keda’s journey toward self-acceptance is inscribed in her shifting relationship to these figures. She is variously comforted and unsettled by the Georgia Belles, whose songs articulate the longing she feels for her origins, but also reveal her most bitter fears and resentments. Only when Keda integrates these voices into her own identity does she recognize herself as “[her] own magic” and begin filling the spaces once haunted by shadows with the light of self-love.
The voice Keda develops throughout the novel is empowering and essential. As she claims her own identity, Keda begins to speak aloud more of the feelings and worries previously confined to her internal narration. After struggling under the twinned pressures of her adoptive mother’s expectations and ailments as well as the gravitational pull of the absence that is her unknown birth mother (“a woman with no face and no name”), Keda learns to locate stability in herself. Late in the text, she writes the first lines of a song that remains unfinished: “A mother is a puzzle / A face that is mine / And not mine / A mother hurts / Be your own origin.”
Lockington’s important novel culminates in a celebration of ongoing growth as Keda realizes she is becoming the person who will continue writing the song of herself. The novel’s conclusion did leave me with some reservations about whether the third act holds Keda’s parents sufficiently accountable for the ways they fail to see and support her throughout the text, particularly as Anna’s struggles become the driving force of the plot. Nonetheless, Lockington’s attention to the dynamics of need, illness, resentment and reconciliation within Keda’s family makes the novel all the more impactful as a story with the power to salve emotional wounds for readers of all kinds. As vividly as “For Black Girls Like Me” conveys Keda’s experience as a Black transracial adoptee, it chronicles with equal devotion the delicate process by which parents and children can learn to see, respect and trust one another enough to flourish as individuals.
Kayla Harr is a transracial adoptee who grew up in Salem, Oregon. She is an academic advisor and Ph.D. candidate in English language and literature at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studies visual perception, objects and identity in modernist literature.
