NIKKI DARLING: Mean opens with the murder of a young woman named Sophia, whose death predates your rape the same perpetrator. “Myriam, think of how boring life would be if nothing bad ever happened.” Mean takes its name from a question that a young Gurba asks her father, “Why is there evil?” Her traumas are doubled by molestation and aggravated by racism. In Mean, Gurba is not only a statistical one-in-six female victim of sexual assault she is a mixed-race, first-generation, lower-middle-class Latinx from a small California town called Santa Maria, out by the grapevine. I simply wanted to show that the interiority of a teenage girl’s life was and is enough to justify its telling.Īt the heart of both books are the intersections of race and class and how they, too, play a role in misogynistic expression. It was my sincere hope that I could write a novel about a teenage girl without a male co-protagonist, vampires, or extraordinary circumstances. It’s also a meditation on girlhood and trauma. I wanted to reclaim the city as a place of historical importance to people who are born there, and not just as a transient dream state of people who are looking to find themselves: gold rush prospectors, actors hoping to make it big, health nuts, cult impresarios, millennial gentrifiers. My novel Fade Into You, unlike Mean, is a fictionalized account of my high-school experience at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts during the 1990s. Sharing ideas with her is an honor and a treat. Myriam is incredibly funny, generous, and one of the smartest people I know. Myriam and I have developed a friendship around humor and similar interests: we’re both visual artists who don’t make distinctions between literary and visual modes of creativity, à la the New Narrative movement we have both made work about the artist Ana Mendieta, explored concepts of fandom and obsession, and enjoy Roscoe’s House of Chicken ’n Waffles in Long Beach as a place for cultural exchange. I think this is true for many people who stumble out of her readings confused and unsure of what they’ve just encountered. Myriam constantly leaves me aghast, but she also leaves me thinking about important issues on a deeper level.
NIKKI J BREEZE CALIFORNIA FULL
I’ve seen her make rape jokes and call vegetables her spirit animals, when she knows full well the term spirit animal is offensive. Onstage she is droll, sarcastic, irreverent, and almost always in poor taste. I had read Myriam’s work and been a silent fangirl from afar for some time, having seen her read at events around Los Angeles and in Long Beach, where she works as a high-school teacher. Myriam and I met about five years ago through our mutual friend the poet Raquel Gutiérrez. Mean takes a hard look at how this country has treated victims of sexual violence and how collectively we have shamed them into inaction and steered them away from their own advocacy, demonstrating that consequences for attackers often fall entirely on the victim. Hand, the teacher, fails not only Gurba but her young attacker as well, condoning his behavior with silence. She makes clear, however, that the systemic violence perpetrated is carried out not by her fellow student but instead by a teacher who witnessed the attack. Think of President Trump, filling out endless health-care forms.Įarly in Mean, Gurba describes her first experience of sexual misconduct at the hands of a classmate who reached under a desk to fondle her.
She compartmentalizes her descriptions with bad puns and clinical formality, the same way the United States has normalized misogyny. To quote Jenny Holzer, whose words have come in some part to define the #MeToo moment: “Abuse of power comes as no surprise.” Mean wants us to settle in and feel the discomfort of our complicit behavior.Īs Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.” We have become cogs of violence, suggests Gurba. Mean plods through the gory details of violence with measured banality, begging readers to put down their feigned outrage and instead proceed as they normally would, with the assured knowledge that misogyny will continue and that happenings like the assault on Gurba are routine. It chronicles a lifetime of sexual violence, culminating in a rape by convicted murderer Tommy Jesse Martinez and its aftermath. M yriam Gurba’s Mean is a memoir that refuses to sensationalize itself.
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