be gentle with Black girls
by Tania De’Shawn
Element Agape, 2022
Paper: $15.00
Genre: Poetry
Reviewed by: Katharine Armbrester

Cover of 'be gentle with black girls.' Abstract cover art includes swirling lines in dark orange-brown on a dark brown background. A light pink circle highlights the book's title, written in alternating capitalized and lowercase letters. Additional text on the cover reads: end the adultification of black girls.

In one of the poems from her chapbook be gentle with Black girls, Tania De’Shawn writes: “adulthood ravished my girlhood like a relaxer on virgin hair…on the days when your skin is a minefield of triggers / breathe.” Laced with pain and raw emotion, her work will leave the reader shaken, educated, and roused by De’Shawn’s writing.

Adultification bias is the act of viewing children as adults and is particularly common in the case of Black girls being sexualized and viewed as more mature than their white counterparts. The term might be new, but the injustice is not, and it is woven into the fabric of the Black experience of this country.

Harriet Jacobs, a runaway slave, wrote in her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: “When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.”

Written in 1861, Jacobs’ words have echoed down the generations, with De’Shawn taking up the refrain in the sixteen poems that make up her debut chapbook. Her voice is strong and singular, even as it is—unfortunately—part of a resounding chorus of mistreated young Black women and children. “Mamas and babies just hurting / Hurting so loudly / Both wailing with mouths too inexperienced to form foreign words like ‘Hold me and tell me you love me.’”

Several poems are from the perspective of Deja, perhaps De’Shawn’s alter ego. “Smelling of baby magic” the five-year-old Deja is already hurt by the adults around her, when at school and in church they comment on her appearance and crush her natural confidence. As Deja approaches puberty and its dangers, the jibes grow more pointed as her elders police her behavior and appearance.

“I felt each jagged edge of ‘Your face is getting fuller’ / ‘You’re doing good on your diet’ / ‘You’ve let yourself go’…a few moments ago we were happy in pews singing our hypocritical hallelujahs / Declaring we love a creator / all the while hating the bodies he created.”

Despite the efforts of the wounded-turned-hardened women around her, Deja “wears her soft-heartedness like her favorite earrings” and her heart is broken while still in elementary school. She suffers the lacerating, near-universal experience of the first time a girl is rejected by a boy and is subsequently convinced that her value is determined by her appearance. “Her belief in her beauty vanishes…Nine years old is too soon to learn because you are dark or big, then you are less valuable.”

In her poem “mothers & children” De’Shawn again evokes Jacobs, and the many thousands of Black women who inherited the generational pain of severed childhoods and shattered innocence. Elaborating on the theme, “Galactic Sisters” is an ancestral prayer of resisting adultification. “You are a prayer passed from your mother and your mother’s mother / plead to God make my daughter free to love all you’ve created within her…spectators apathetically gaze as we balance worlds on our shoulders.”

Ultimately, De’Shawn declares that despite the stacked odds against Black women, they still raise their voices, their hearts crying out for love and dignity: “women kept our own language / to remind each other that we are grand, lovely, protected…we are orchards bearing fruits of wisdom and heartache.”

The reader hopes that Deja’s journey is not finished, and that De’Shawn will again, with her powerful voice, evoke her ancestors who overcame subjugation and adultification. “Liberation is a bitter fruit ripe on the vines pressed into wine / I’ve acquired the taste for / never to be constrained by public opinion again.”

 

Katharine Armbrester graduated from the MFA creative writing program at the Mississippi University for Women in 2022 with a focus on playwriting and is a freelance reporter for Starnes Media. She reviews literature for the Southern Review of Books and is also a contributor to Alabama Heritage magazine, Alabama magazine, and the Literary Ladies Guide, an archive dedicated to classic women authors.