Black Chameleon Memory, Womanhood, and Myth

Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton

eAudio - 2023

This program is read by the author.In the literary tradition of Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped, this debut memoir confronts both the challenges and joys of growing up Black and making your own truth.Growing up as a Black girl in America, Deborah Mouton felt alienated from the stories she learned in class. She yearned for stories she felt connected to—true ones of course—but also fables and mythologies that could help explain both the world and her place in it. What she encountered was almost always written by white writers who prospered in a time when human beings were treated as chattel, such as the Greek and Roman myths, which felt as ...dusty and foreign as ancient ruins. When she sought myths written by Black authors, they were rooted too far in the past, a continent away.Mouton writes, "The phrases of my mother and grandmother began to seem... more