Finding Me
by Viola Davis · 2022
Buy on AmazonViola Davis is one of the greatest actors of our times. She’s the detective in the series How to Get Away with Murder and she’s been in many movies. In her memoir, she talks about the experience of being hungry growing up. She talks about her childhood from the perspective of a Black woman in America, in Rhode Island. You think, ‘Oh, that’s in the northeast, nobody is really struggling there.’ And she shows you, through her own memories, what was really happening with her family. As a Black family in Providence, her parents had a hard time finding jobs. They were so poor they had no new clothes. There was abuse in the family, and abuse in the neighborhood. She talks about getting bullied at school, how her teachers mistreated her because she was Black and also poor. She didn’t smell good because she wet her bed. Her parents couldn’t help with that either, because they were so stressed. What she demonstrates is the deep stress of poverty, and how that stress creates more opportunities for abuse and for discrimination. It’s a harrowing read, but it’s also really inspiring because she talks about how hard she worked to figure out how to get out of it. She was the only one of her siblings who was able to get up and out. She’s really one in a million. This is not an example of how people should do it. She’s in the stratosphere in terms of being able to get out of poverty and be so talented as an actor. But what I like about this memoir is that it’s a very unapologetic opening into the life of someone who is very poor and experienced hunger. She has a great quote in one of her chapters (which I use in my book as well) about how “the invisibility of the one-two punch that is Blackness and poverty is brutal. Mix that with being hungry all the damn time and it becomes combustible.” My book is academic. I talk about the history of enslavement and colonization and genocide, and I talk about rape, and about undoing rape culture. I have a lot of analysis and a lot of ideas about what to do about it. What I like about Viola Davis’s book is she opens up a window for you to experience what it’s like through her eyes. I was riveted. It’s a fantastic read. I could not put that book down. It confirmed all that I had learned from the women that I spoke to in Philadelphia. A lot of people were wary of my analysis of the violence underneath hunger, and didn’t want me to talk about it. They said, ‘Mariana, let’s just get more food stamps for everybody and everything will be fine. More food, food, food.’ I was insisting, ‘No, this is deeper. Especially the women’s experiences were so filled with violence and so much racism and gender discrimination.’ When I read Viola Davis’s book, I thought, ‘Okay, I feel confident now in releasing this book.’ She’s just one person, but just reading her story made me realize I’ve got to get the stories of the women that I talked to out there, and that we really have to change. We cannot allow this kind of hunger and poverty to persist in the United States. People love Viola Davis — obviously I do too. If people could read this memoir, they would have a sense of camaraderie with her, of solidarity and love that maybe will expand their hearts so that they can start to take action in the United States to change things.