Unbound with Tarana Burke Part 1
October 12, 2021
Glennon Doyle:
Hi, everybody. Thank you for coming back to We Can Do Hard Things. Today is a very special day. You are going to be happy you joined us for this one, because today we are talking with our dear friend and hero, Tarana Burke. You should know that we talk in this episode about sexual abuse and trauma and some heavy things. And so, if you need to protect yourself from that, please do. But also please know that this conversation is one of the most joyful, energizing and hopeful conversations you’ll hear. It’s like the paradox of the prophets. The flip side of carrying pain is this extraordinary gift of holding and spreading joy, and there is nobody who shows us that gorgeous paradox more beautifully than Tarana Burke, so you can do hard things. You can share in this hard joyful soul witnessing heart expanding conversation.
GD:
For more than 25 years, activist and advocate, Tarana J. Burke has worked at the intersection of sexual violence and racial justice, fueled by commitments to interrupt sexual violence and other systemic inequalities disproportionally impacting marginalized people, particularly black women and girls. Tarana has created and led various campaigns focused on increasing access to resources and support for impacted communities, including the Me Too movement, which to date has galvanized millions of survivors and allies around the world. Tarana is my personal hero. Her new book, Unbound, is out now. I’ll tell you that after this conversation, my sister texted me and she said, “Does the J. in Tarana J. Burke stand for joy?” It has to.
GD:
I said, “No, it doesn’t, but in our heart it does.” Let’s jump right into our conversation with Tarana Burke.
GD:
Okay, everybody. Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. I need to tell you, first off, that your small little loving team of Abby, Amanda, and I, have been losing our damn minds about the interview we’re doing today. If we do interviews for the next 20 years, there will never be a more important interview. There will never be anyone whose work is more important to us, and to the world, than the person we’re interviewing today. I know that with every bone in my body. And so, that’s why we were, and are, freaking out. That’s why I’m wearing a small tank top, because I’m already sweating. There’s this idea that what you do is you look at the world and there’s this power in the center. And then if you keep going out, you go towards the people that are the least protected, and you stand with those people. Because if you stand with those people, then you, by definition, catch everybody else.
GD:
Tarana Burke spends her life standing with black girls in America, who are some of the least protected people in our culture. And she has been doing it for 25 years. And she does it with grace and power like I’ve never seen before. And I just think she’s the most important f’ing person on earth. Tarana Burke, thank you. You can do hard things.
Tarana Burke:
Man, listen. Glennon, I need to carry you around with me, so that you can… I can have a little drum roll, and then Glennon comes out. Matter of fact, I’ll just tape it, because I know you’re busy.
GD:
That’s if I can do it.
Amanda Doyle:
She can be your hype girl. She can be your hype girl.
GD:
I am. I am. That’s what I’m doing out here.
TB:
I love it so much. I love it.
GD:
Before we get into this brilliant freaking book, Unbound, which we all knew, who read it before it came out, that it was going to be a huge success. It’s already broken into the top… Number three on the New York Times list, right?
TB:
Yep.
GD:
Oprah’s crying over it. Over and over and over again, people are comparing it to, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which I’m sure is just no big deal for you at all. Right, Tarana?
TB:
Good, God. I’m like, guys it’s a lot.
GD:
How are you?
TB:
I don’t know if you’ve seen many Spike Lee movies, but he has this thing that he does in a lot of his movies where the characters just sort of float, like this. I feel like I’m floating in a Spike Lee movie. It’s a very strange… I think you described it when we were talking the other day about, almost, out of body experience. I’m watching it happen, but I’m also over here like, “Oh. That’s happening.” It’s very strange. It’s hard to explain. And then I have these moments where I look over and I see my name really big on the book, and I’m like, “Oh my God, I wrote that.” It’s like, oh my God.
AD:
You wrote the hell out of it is what you did.
GD:
You wrote the hell out of it. Well, let’s start at the start.
TB:
Let’s start at the start.
GD:
Let’s start at the beginning of Unbound.
TB:
Yeah.
GD:
And parts of the beginning of your life, which is sort of where the origin of all of your work begins, which is when you were sexually assaulted as a child.
TB:
Yeah.
GD:
Abby, can you read that passage for us?
Abby Wambach:
“I had no real grasp of the gravity of what was happening, but I knew it wasn’t right. It made me feel nasty, and dirty, and wrong. Not realizing that he was wrong, and that he was the culprit. I thought we were wrong.” And later you say, “The only clear memory I have is running through the litany of rules I had broken. Never go off without permission. Never be out of sight when you’re playing outside. Never come upstairs late. Stay away from the grown up boys. Never, ever let anyone touch your private parts. What I know for certain, was that I was in big trouble. I hardly ever broke rules, and certainly never this many.”
AW:
You later write, “I began to put away the memory of what the boy had done to me because of what I thought he said about me. My insides strain to accommodate this new information, but they couldn’t. And so they split. In the place I had tucked away from Mr. West and my mom, was the real me. The bad me. On the outside, I would pretend I was good.”
AW:
Now, Tarana, I need to know, what was that like as a kid for you to be abused and then to believe it was your own fault?
TB:
I tried my best to explain it in those kind of details because I’m a worrier by nature. I’m always thinking ahead. Something good happens, I’m thinking about the next thing, what could go wrong. That’s been since I was a kid, and probably stems from this. I just felt like I was constantly, it’s like baggage. I was constantly living with a secret. And I was so, so, so afraid that somebody would find out. And on a small scale, it would be like if you got a stain on your dress, or a mark on the wall or something like that, that you were trying to hide. I’ve done that too, where I’ve rearranged the furniture in my room so my mom couldn’t see that I got a big skid mark on the wall. Well, and then you’re afraid every time she walks past that part of the room, like “I’m going to get caught.” That’s what it felt like. It felt like I was constantly in fear of being found out.
TB:
And so it made me anxious and it made me learn to perform really, really early. And who knows where I pulled that from, but I just learned to… I showed up and I was just everything I thought good girls would be like. And the funny thing is, it’s who I was. It’s who I was prior to this, and I was like, “I’m just going to pretend to be that person again, because apparently I must be this bad person. But I’ma keep pretending to be who I had already been being,” if that makes sense. It was just the fear of constantly being found out. So I found some coping mechanisms and even that wasn’t really helpful, but.
GD:
What do you think, how do we, because so much of what I read about in that part is, the rules about you never doing things.
TB:
That’s right.
GD:
The rules about girls never doing things
TB:
Yep. Yep.
GD:
Leads them little girls to when they get abused, thinking, oh because I broke the rules. It’s not because they…
TB:
Did something wrong.
GD:
How do we switch that?
TB:
I used to talk to parents about this when I did these workshops that I understand, particularly in communities of color, but I think all little girls have this. It’s a thing that we do to children, particularly little girl children, that adults don’t realize you’re setting the child up… We take rules seriously as kids. You don’t run with scissors. You don’t cuss. Those things are reinforced over and over and over again. And we also know as children, there are the spoken rules and then there are the unspoken rules.
TB:
So you may have been told to say “please and thank you” and not to run with scissors, but there’s something about that room that you know you don’t go in that room when the door is closed. Nobody’s ever said that’s a rule, but there are messages that we get from adults that sit with us as children. So I had that little litany of rules, but I also had… There were other unspoken messages that you got. And what adults neglect to do, is they neglect to say, “If one of these rules are broken,” meaning those, don’t let anybody touch your private parts, or, don’t go off with boys, older people, or anything like that, they neglect to say, “But if that rule is broken, that’s not your fault.”
TB:
If somebody breaks that rule, it’s always the adult’s fault.
AW:
Yes.
TB:
You get these messages that you get ingrained in your brain that says, “Oh God, I did something wrong.” Nobody told me about who else was wrong in that equation. And so I think that’s the problem that happens to a lot of little girls. Girls are just riddled with rules and protocols. I think of so many times when I’ve been told, or I’ve seen other little girls be told, who are fully dressed, “Go put some clothes on,” because a man comes in the house. I could have a short set on. I’m a child with a short set and a tank top on. And it’s like, I’ll never forget, this is a little bit of a hood story, but I’ll never forget going to visit my uncle in jail when I was a pre-teen. I must’ve been, I don’t know, maybe nine or 10 or something like that. And we got to the prison, and they made my grandfather turn around. I couldn’t go in. I’m a kid, a little kid, but because I had a spaghetti strap tank top on, they said it would be a distraction to the other prisoners, the other inmates.
TB:
You just get those kind of messages from different places. The school dress codes. All these different places, girls get these messages that we are the guardians of our bodies, and if somebody’s attracted to us, it’s our fault because we didn’t do enough to protect ourselves.
GD:
That’s right.
TB:
So that’s where that stuff came from.
GD:
And that they can’t control themselves.
TB:
Yeah.
GD:
I thought about this when I was reading. There were so many parts where, if things had been different, in a certain situation you may have been able to share the truth.
TB:
Yeah.
GD:
But the way things were set up for you and for so many girls, there’s nowhere safe to share. I was thinking about your parents, the amazing Mr. Wes, who just, oh my God. I’m going to wait until you guys read this, man. But there was one moment where you were walking down the stairs of a building, and you ran into a woman that you…
TB:
Miss Davis. Yeah.
GD:
Miss Davis, that you loved. And you had a moment where you thought about telling her something that had just happened to you with the boy. And she said, “These little boys can’t keep their damn hands to themselves, my baby. You got a daddy that’ll go to his grave to protect you, so be careful because we need Big Wes around here.”
TB:
I think that was a very important part for me to include, because it was important when it happened to me. And I was 12 when it happened. It brought me back to being seven and it’s like, right, that’s what I knew. That’s what I knew, I do not want anything to happen to Mr. Wes, so I’m going to leave this alone. I think in a lot of instances, there are people who experience some sexual violence and don’t tell because they don’t have a support system. They think they won’t be believed. That happens a lot.
TB:
I actually had the opposite problem, where I did have a support system. It was no question that Mr. Wes and my mother, or my grandfather, whoever, would believe me. It was just, what would happen if they did? Which brings me to another thing that adults do and we don’t realize it. You see this every year, drives me crazy, during prom. You have the girls who get ready for prom, and the father or brother or uncle with the shotgun, or the big bullying holes and saying, “You do something to this girl and I’ma kill you.” Whatever. A lot of us grew up with parents who said things like, who did say, “If somebody touches you, it’s not your fault.” But the way they said it was, “If somebody touches you, I’ll kill them.”
TB:
“Something happens to you, you come to me, I will bury them.” I heard that over and over again. My mother, “I don’t play about my child.” I’ve done it. What that did was, now making me responsible for them.
GD:
Yes. Yes.
TB:
Not only am I responsible for my own protection of my body, but now I’m responsible for the adults. Oh my god. I want to tell because I know something is not right here, but if I do, my dad is going to jail. And it will be my fault for something I did. I broke the rules and I made my father go to jail. This is me at seven. We underestimate how human children are. We are watching all these things, you’re taking it in like a sponge. Those are little human beings. And one of the things I knew, because I did live in an urban community that was over-policed and under-resourced, is that I knew what consequences were. I knew what jail was. I knew what the police did and how they operated in our community, and I knew it was never good news when they came around. So I didn’t want to… Mm-mm (negative), no, not for me.
TB:
So we have to be super careful about the messages that we give, that we pass on to our kids, because little kids are little worry-warts. They don’t want mommy and daddy to be hurt. It gets complicated for us, us meaning children, speaking of my small Tarana self.
AD:
And that was really your reality. It wasn’t a perception of yours. It was a real responsibility that you bore. Because one of things you do so beautifully in this book over and over is that you portray, impeccably, these double binds that you’re in. And I feel like so many girls and women go through this, particularly black and brown girls, and most suffocatingly, black and brown survivors, is that the protection provided by your community is what saves you, but the need to protect your community is what silences you.
TB:
Exactly.
AD:
At the very same time.
TB:
That’s a very succinct way to put that. It’s exactly what it is. And you are just caught in the middle. We did a PSA once for, I was just talking about this last night. This Honduran woman was talking about being assaulted by her uncle when she was 16, and didn’t say anything because the uncle was a citizen, and her family was undocumented. And she did not want to involve any law enforcement in their lives. She didn’t want any police to come around at all because it put her whole family at risk. And the uncle, knowing that he had the privilege of being a citizen, and could change their lives any time, held that over their head.
TB:
And so, a lot of times in black and brown communities, there is a whole set of other things that they’ve thought of, on top of the shame that you’re encountering. On top of the guilt and all of the things that come, almost automatically, when you experience sexual violence, is compounded.
GD:
And then Tarana, for that message especially, because you work so closely, you work with little black girls. For a little girl to hear that from Miss Davis… So her message was, the little boys can’t control themselves. Your dad won’t be able to control himself. So you have to control your truth.
TB:
So you, at this young age, it’s all on you. And I took that very seriously. Okay. But our little bodies only can hold and deal with so much. And so that starts coming out in other ways, because it’s got to.
GD:
Yeah. And then we have the church.
TB:
The church.
GD:
And I will never, ever stop laughing about reading about little Tarana in Catholic church, because we have a different background. I was a little white girl, but I also lied in confessional over and over again. Or made up sins to cover up my true badness. Tarana says, “I would go to confession regularly to confess a cover sin. Lying, swearing, or something else, instead of what I really held inside. I quietly asked God for forgiveness for lying, and then I’d redeem myself by doubling whatever penance the priest gave.”
GD:
But what I need to tell you, my favorite part is that when little Tarana would go outside to say her double penance, she would only say the first couple. Because you have to understand that when you’re a Catholic kid, other kids are watching.
TB:
Watching. That’s right.
GD:
And so if you’re sitting your ass in the pew for a long time, they will know you did something really bad.
TB:
What did you do? Exactly.
AD:
Tarana’s doing three rosaries.
AD:
We know what’s up.
TB:
Because, in Catholic school, I loved confession but most kids want to just get through it. So you come out and you do your rosary, your ten Hail Marys for our fathers, whatever. In my mind, I had to do 20 of them. So I’m just like, “Our father, who art in Heaven.” Everybody look at me. And then I’d be in the lunch line like, “Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee.”
TB:
It’s such a bananas way to live though. Confession time, I’d liked it, but also it was so weird because it would take me like two days to get through what I thought I had to. Sometimes I’d write it. You know how you have to write, in detention, “I will not talk. I will not.” I would just write out Hail Marys or our Father or the Apostles Creed, or whatever. Because I was just like, I got to get through… You remember, right? I was like, “In choosing to do wrong, and failing to do good.” And then also, I was one of the pimps. When we got to that part, I’d be like, “I have sinned against you and your church.”
AD:
You’re like, “You don’t even know how bad I’ve sinned against you.”
TB:
“I have sinned against you and your church.” And it’d be like, I get to say that out loud. I talk about in the book, Catholicism both saved and ruined me in some ways. But in that moment, I really wanted to talk about that because it was such a saving grace for me because that, speaking about what we were saying, that duality that I was holding felt like, it’s like putting on a fur coat and jumping in a pool. It’s just this heaviness that you always have. And so what I had with confession and this relationship I wanted with God was, “I know you know who I am. I’m just going to keep apologizing. I know that you are merciful and I know that you are generous with your mercy and abundant in grace. Can I please, please, please… If I keep praying, will you just keep giving it to me?”
TB:
It was a real savior for me as a child, because if not, then I would’ve been buried in just the guilt and the shame with no release for it. So there’s a lot of criticism about Catholicism, I know, but that… I don’t know that I would’ve made it through that time period without it.
GD:
So there was something liberating for you inside the church?
TB:
Yeah. Absolutely.
AD:
Speaking of Catholicism, it was while you were preparing for the Sacrament of Confirmation, your grandfather prioritized passing down to you the racial theory and Black Liberation text. Which seemed to me, as I was reading your story, a sacred Sacrament in your life as well.
TB:
A baton.
GD:
Yes, exactly. It allowed you, it equipped you, that you say, even when you were a young girl, you could smell white supremacy from a mile away because of that framework that you had been reading and internalizing. How vital was having that consciousness, that was so subversive to everything that you were being told in all the schools and all around you, to the person that you’d become and the work that you would do?
TB:
I think it was critical and I think both of those things were critical. I’m so glad that I was grounded in my faith really, really early. I’ve really, really enjoyed being Catholic. I did all the things. I was baptized at seven, eight months, but I did my communion and my confirmation and I did all the things. But I’m also really glad that my grandfather came in at the point that he did, because of how much I enjoyed being Catholic, and because of the release that I got from confession and that kind of thing. I probably was very close to slipping into being obsessive, probably. And so what bringing this consciousness did, was help me balance some of that out and see a broader view of the world. So this is not the only thing that’s liberating. It began to feel liberating to me to understand who I was in the world and have something else to think about besides my sins, because the flip side of the liberation is that Catholicism makes you think about your sins all the time. Just all the time, you sin, sin, sinny-sin, sinner.
TB:
And everything’s a mistake. I don’t know if y’all do this, but you know how you walk in front of a church and you’re supposed to make the sign of the cross? I have ran back a block. Okay?
GD:
Yes, we do. Yes.
TB:
To be like, wait, did I? And so now I’m in front of the church just doing this, just stuff like that is not healthy.
GD:
I know. And then you’re like, wait, is this faith or superstition? Because it feels a lot like superstition.
TB:
This is not… Exactly. I’m like, why did Jesus kick over the tables in the temple, for me to run a block back to make sure that I made the sign of the cross?
AW:
Just in case.
TB:
Right. But also, I’m going to do it just in case.
AW:
That’s right.
GD:
Yeah.
TB:
And so I think that I would’ve gone down a rabbit hole with Catholicism if I didn’t have the instinct to interrupt that and balance it out. The grounding doesn’t go anywhere and it gave me… Being Catholic early set me up for my faith later. I’m Christian, but I’m not Catholic anymore. I was able to pull the things that I needed, the good stuff, and figure that out later on. But at the point my grandfather came in, and I started understanding, it helped me shift and focus on something else. There’s a bigger thing in life than sins I might have done and things like that. So I’m really glad. And he didn’t know what was going on behind closed doors, but I think he was looking at me like, “This ain’t. No. This is not.”
TB:
Just a small tidbit, I found out later. So my grandfather, I found out later, that’s why I put in the book, that he was in a Catholic boy’s home when he was growing up. And so he had a really sour view of Catholicism. But he believed in letting his children choose their own path, and my mother chose to be Catholic, much to his chagrin. And then I did, so, I guess he was like, “I’m about to pull it. I’ll have to intervene somewhere.”
GD:
Well, thank God he did though, Tarana. Because you just took what you wanted from Catholicism, but his framework became part of your faith too, right?
TB:
Absolutely.
GD:
Your faith is so social justice. It’s like those two got smushed together and you left behind what you didn’t want of Catholicism and it became who you are now. It’s so beautiful.
TB:
Somebody said this to me, but it made so much sense, and now I’m sorry if that person’s listening that I’m not crediting you. But somebody said something to me about, do I ever think about how my love of confession ties to the movement and the work, and how that is grounded in confession, to some degree. And I said, “Oh, that is really profound.” Because I had not thought of it. But I’ve been thinking about it ever since they said it and it does make sense, that that nugget stayed. There is something liberating about getting truth out of your body, getting it out of your system and confessing, not to the world even. even if it’s to God, if it’s to yourself. I tell people all the time, if it’s in your journal, whatever, there is something… The part that felt liberating, I also feel like I held on to that and it helped me be a truth teller. I really do enjoy telling the truth.
GD:
You do.
TB:
I just enjoy it. It’s really, really feels good.
GD:
Well when you say that, it reminds me of the first time you sat in front of the mirror and you said, it was after Heaven. And you said, “I was raped. He molested me. I didn’t want it. I didn’t like it. I’m sorry.” Confessional there. And then you said, “It was out of my body for the first time and I was still alive. I was still standing with my truth on the outside.”
TB:
Yeah. I think we all know this feeling of a thing that we’re holding. It could be anything, but the thing we’re holding, if you articulate it, it makes it true and we’re more scared of that thing being true out in the world. That thing had balled up inside of my body, and I talk about it being in the pit of my stomach for so long, that I was just scared. It would come up, and I could think it, but I couldn’t say it out loud. And I think some part of me thought, “If I say this out loud, I’ll die. It’s over. This is it.” I don’t know, just whatever dramatic thing might happen. And I forced myself to say it, to look at myself while I said it. And I was like, “Oh look at me. I’m still here.”
TB:
And then I have that other thing that happens later on in the book, which Oprah calls, “You had a dark night of the soul.”
GD:
Yes. That’s awesome. Yes.
TB:
Did y’all say the same thing?
GD:
Absolutely.
TB:
I had to go look, I’ve heard that term so many times throughout life, but I had to actually go look it up when she said it. And I was like, “Oh yeah, okay. That seems dead on.”
GD:
Incredible. What an incredible part of the book. I loved the way you talked about yourself as a teenager so much, Tarana. I thought the parts where you really talked about what it was like to be a teenage girl protecting your hurt with this ferocity was so amazing, and those are some of my favorite parts. But after a few incredible passages about your teenage years and then about some violence and fighting that happened, you say, “It’s the trap in which so many black girls find themselves, either performing our pain, or performing through it.”
GD:
This is a little bit later. “I couldn’t quite grasp the shame, grief, vulnerability, and the emotional pain. I didn’t understand the anxiety, so I had no way to explain the fluttering in my chest and rock hard feeling in my stomach that paralyzed me at any given moment. I didn’t understand why I had to keep these things to myself. I just knew I had to. I had to keep performing. And there was no air for me, a dark skinned black girl who had been damaged and used. There was no air for me to be anything but what they said I was. Girls like me didn’t get the air to cry, the air to release our shame, the air to say, I don’t want to fight you. I don’t even know why I’m so mad at you, except for that you look like me and who the fuck am I? We didn’t get the air to be reborn and handled warmly.”
TB:
So, that last line is from Ntozake Shange book, For Colored Girls. And I wanted to bring it full circle because I’m talking about that line and I used to say, “There was no air.” That’s the best way I can think about, when I would see other people, when I would see other girls who were prettier than me, or more popular, or just from my estimation seemed free, it just felt like the air was rare for them. It was just like they breathed the different air, they lived a different life. And girls like me just didn’t have it, we couldn’t.
TB:
It also spoke to this feeling, I’m not having it now but I’m recalling it now, this feeling of just not being able to have a full breath. Before, there was always something, whether it was a thought, or an action, or a thing, there was just always something that didn’t allow you to breathe in and breathe out and just live. And anger and rage felt really, really good after performing good girl for so long. It just felt like, fuck it. I don’t know what to do next. And this is how we cycle through coping mechanisms. I tried the good girl thing. It’s not helping. I still feel this way. Let me try this other thing. And I was fortunate, because I could’ve been, I tried drugs to cope, or I tried alcohol. Let me try drugs now.
TB:
People don’t realize what brings people to those coping mechanisms, we just look at the end result. So, oh that’s an alcoholic, that’s a drug addict, that’s a bad girl. So I’m a teenager who will bite your head off, who will fight anybody that steps to me and says anything crazy, but not a single adult says, “What happened to your heart? How did you get here?” I’m still a child, but we don’t get seen as children. You just go from whatever small person, to this now mini adult, and I’m only held accountable for the consequences of things that happened to me, but not the root cause of them. Nobody is digging into the root cause. And so, you get what you get. And I was dishing it out early and often.
AD:
Early and often. For years, you thought that the assault on you wasn’t something that someone did to you, or even something that happened to anyone else. And then one day, you snuck Maya Angelou’s, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings from your mother’s collection.
AD:
And you wrote, “When I read about what happened to a young Maya Angelou, I was able to read her as innocent in a way I didn’t allow for myself. Maya was decent and nice, and it seemed egregious that God would have allowed something so horrible to happen to her. It was the first time I ever realized a little girl like her could have gone through what I went through. I finished the book and kept, what was now in my mind, our secret. To my 12 year old self, Maya Angelou was just another name on my mother’s bookshelf. She wasn’t Dr. Maya Angelou, the esteemed poet, author, activist, and all around legend. She was a lady who wrote a book that shared my secrets. She was my confidante. I no longer felt alone.”
TB:
Yeah. It’s like having a… What do you call those? Like your ghost pal or your secret pal. What do kids call that? Imaginary friend.
GD:
Imaginary friend.
TB:
Yeah. It’s like having that. And I don’t know that I didn’t think it only happened to just the two of us, but I didn’t know anybody in real life. Nobody ever talked about it or said anything like that until I was much older. So it was like, oh my God. It was the feeling she talked about. It’s not the details ever, it’s the feeling like it was her fault, and not wanting to speak words because what happened to him now was her fault. And all of those things sat with me and I was like, “This is amazing. I have a friend.” Even though my friend is in the book. But I read Judy Blume, Tiger Eyes, and I thought those were my friends too, so I was just that kind of kid.
GD:
Same. Same, Tarana.
AD:
And then she became not so imaginary friend.
TB:
No.
AD:
When you first
TB:
Heard her
AD:
Heard her.
GD:
But that was just so amazing Tarana, because that part… Just knowing you, because you had this heartbreak and pain that started your work in your life, and then you have this ferocious joy that is why the whole world falls in love with you. And so, to see you experience Maya Angelou first as somebody who was hurt like you, and then to read in your book later, you experiencing her in high school, your high school honor’s English class where your white man teacher put on Dr. Maya Angelou reading Phenomenal Woman, performing it. And you had the most beautiful experience where you saw her power and her joy and you say, “As I sat tuning out my teacher, my mind returned to what I had just seen. How had a woman, who had been through what I’d been through, been able to claim such confidence and pride? While I was finding newfound comfort in anger, she was smiling. While I was lashing out, she was laughing and reciting beautiful poetry.”
GD:
And then later you say, “More than anything, I contemplated the question that eventually became central to my healing. If what I saw was real, how could a body that holds that kind of pain also hold joy?” Can you talk to us about what that meant to see her, in all her glory, knowing that she was your friend who experienced what you experienced?
TB:
It was life changing, but it was also like, wait a minute. You know how sometimes you have little kid notions in your mind, and then you find out the adult real thing? And it was that moment of, I thought that what we were doing, Maya Angelou and I, we were faking it until we make it, essentially. I didn’t have that terminology. But it was like, you saw she writes book. I had never seen her. I had never her saw her on television or anything. I’d only read her books. So in my mind, it’s just like, I don’t know what I thought in my mind but I didn’t think that. And she had this eloquent way that she spoke and was so confident, and it all felt real, and I was like, “Oh my God, I am not real.” I am not a real person. I am a shell of a person. Everything I’m doing is performance.
TB:
I don’t know that I had this deep of a thought like this at 15, but essentially, I am just piecing together what I can to live. I’m just trying to survive. I’m just trying to get through these days and hope nobody finds out who I am. But she’s like, “Hahahahaha. Look at all this joy. My name is Maya.” I was just like, “Yo, how do you do that?” And what I knew for myself was that this person, this body that I had was constantly felt like it was in pain. When I calmed down and I wasn’t running track, or in Honor’s Bowl, or doing something to impress some people, in my quiet time, I felt pain all the time. I felt sadness, a really, really deep sadness. And so, I was searching for that sadness in her face. I was searching for that in her voice, in her something. I thought, “I’ll be able to see it” and I just couldn’t. And I’m like, “Okay. Does the sadness go away? Does the pain go away?”
TB:
I have the journal. At the top, I just wrote, “Joy. Pain. Question.” This is, how does this work? But what it did because… And I thank God for curiosity, because I was also just very curious, honestly. There was the, I want to feel better thing, but it was also like, how does this work? Maybe I’ve been thinking about this wrong. And I just became very curious about the coexistence of those two things. Do I write about the Joy Journal in that book?
GD:
Mm-mm (negative).
TB:
That’s so crazy that I don’t even remember it. I don’t write about it. So I’m the person who kept the Joy Journal at some point in my life when I was in my early 20s, because I wanted to document what joy looked like in my life. I thought it was unfair. This is the part of me that’s like, like I said, to respond to injustice. I was on this quest. This was around the time of Deepak Chopra and what’s the other guy’s name? Eckhart Tolle.
GD:
Oh yeah.
TB:
[Yon Levonson 00:42:16], and The Help. Remember The Help? Not The Help.GD:
The Secret.
TB:
The Secret.
AW:
The Secret.
TB:
Not The Help. The Secret.
GD:
You’re trying to manifest shit, right? Yes.
TB:
Right. I was like, “Okay.” I didn’t have quite the language yet, but what I did have was a job that didn’t pay me shit and a child to take care of by myself. And The Secret cost like $119. I will never forget watching that whole infomercial
GD:
Oh Jesus.
TB:
And getting to the end and being like, “Seven CDs for $100? I can’t afford that.”
GD:
That was the secret.
AD:
That was the secret.
TB:
That was the secret, exactly. You can buy the book. Every message that I got during that time, and I’m not trying to disparage any of those people or things, but for me as a single mother, every message I got said, “Joy is right out there somewhere if you can just get your coins to get it. It’s just right beyond your reach.” It was always outside of you. And I was like, “So what about people that can’t afford it? We just don’t get joy?” I was like, “That can’t be right. There’s no way that God set us up in a world that joy is for the rich or the privileged. It ran up against what I believe, speaking to what you were saying, Amanda, about how those things mesh together.
TB:
It ran up against everything I believed about who we are and what we deserved and how power and privilege worked. I bought a book from the Dollar Store. go to the goddamn Dollar Store and buy a journal. Go in your house and dust off one of them seventeen thousand journals that you’ve got that you fall in love with because it’s pretty, and that you don’t use
AW:
And you fill out the first page.
GD:
So true. I have 88.
TB:
Right. You fill out the first page, right.
AW:
First page.
TB:
Break off that first page or fold it to the back, and write joy at the top, and you got a Joy Journal. But my point in saying that is that I am the person who wrote down… I wanted to document what felt like joy because I felt like, if I can quantify it, then I don’t have to afford what they’re selling because I got it.
GD:
That’s right.
TB:
And so the book had things in it like… I’ve told this story before but I can’t believe I didn’t put this in the book. Whatever, next book. But I used to pick up Kaia from daycare, and I wear my bracelets. I’ve always worn them. My mother gave them to me. And so Kaia would hear my bracelets as soon as I hit the door in the daycare. And Kaia, every single day when I got off of work and I’d get Kaia, you’d here Kaia say, “My mommy is here.” And then you hear running down the thing. And I’d be waiting at the end of the hallway, and Kaia would just… And I would write that down because that was my joy. That was the most joyous part of the day. Even if it was for ten minutes, I felt so good. I felt nothing bad.
TB:
It was stuff like, I would get on the phone with my girls and I would laugh until my stomach hurt and I had tears coming out my eyes. You can’t pay for that. It didn’t stop me from being triggered. It didn’t stop me from feeling sad, but it existed in the same body. And once I started to document that, and I was like, okay. You can’t sell me shit no more. I’m not buying any of it. I might buy your book and read it, but I’m not buying them CDs. I’m not saving up my money to go… I’m not doing that. I can’t afford to. And it almost became a part of my ministry to talk to, my personal ministry, not religious, to spread that as a word. Like, yo, we have joy. We have to name it. The problem is that other people tell us what we find joyous does not qualify. So a bunch of black girls sitting together laughing, or white girls. I’m sure you all, because I can tell from your personalities, have had people tell y’all, “You are too loud.”
GD:
Yes.
TB:
“You laugh too loud. Y’all are too silly.” Women are always too something. You get a group of women together laughing, cackling, somebody’s like, “Oh my God. It’s so un-ladylike.” You get a group of black girls together, “Why are you all so loud? It’s so ghetto.” I like to be fucking loud and it brings me joy.
AW:
Yes.
AD:
Yes.
GD:
Yeah.
TB:
I’m sorry, I’m getting off topic.
AD:
Put down your journal.
GD:
None of that is off topic. No. That’s the most on topic thing. It’s the most on topic thing. The fact that you can have both of those exist in your body at the same time, and you don’t have to be all pain, and you don’t have to be all joy all the time.
TB:
No. No. It’s not possible. It’s not even possible. It’s just… But it started for me with that Maya Angelou clip and watching it. And it took me a long time to get to answer that question. But it planted a seed of, something else is possible.
GD:
Yeah.
TB:
Yeah.
GD:
And then you went off to college. And sister is dying to talk to you about this one part that you wrote, this one sentence that you wrote, which maybe we’ve talked about for 13 hours. There’s no way you thought about this sentence as much as we’ve thought about this sentence, Tarana Burke.
AD:
Well, it goes back to what you were just talking about of, in the same body. Okay? So, this is… To me, it might just seem to me like a sexy as hell little interlude, but to me, it blew my mind. Okay, so you’re talking about you and Rob.
TB:
Oh.
AD:
Oh is right. “They never played the music for long, maybe two songs. But whenever they did, we found each other and let out whatever pent up sexual energy we were both trying to ignore. We danced like no one else was there, like it was a mating ritual and we had fire in our bellies. I loved every minute of it. It was the first time in my life that I got to safely explore my sexuality with no demands on my body.”
AD:
Can you talk about this? Because I feel like it’s another double bind that you talk about. Which is that, for so many survivors, it’s the very same bodies that are the portals through which we access this pleasure and sexuality, are the same portals that were poisoned by our assaulters with shame and hyper vigilance. It’s like being told to run and have fun on a playground full of landmines. How do we explore safely, in the midst of trauma? When do women ever get to do that? Just, how?
TB:
Let me say this first. First, you’re the first person, in the thousands of interviews I’ve done, to bring up this part. And to bring up Rob, whose name is actually [Seo 00:49:34], because I had to change it in the book. I’m bringing him up because he just recently passed away. I know. I’m still really raw behind it, because he was one of my first loves. And we remained friends up until his death. He died in June, on June 1st. And he will never know… I wanted him to read this. I wish I had given him… Anyway, doesn’t matter. But I really wanted him to read this because I wanted him to know how important that relationship had been to me and had remained for so long.
TB:
He and I, later on we dated, and actually for real dated. But he was my friend. He was so respectful. And everything I knew about relationships, including the boyfriend I had at the time, there was always pressure and it was always tenuous. Either there was the forced situation, which obviously was terrible. But even after that, and I think this also happens to a lot of survivors, this is what you’re talking about. You experience some kind of sexual assault in college, in high school, before then in elementary school, and then you’re trying to live your life the way people say you’re supposed to live. You’re supposed to get a boyfriend. You’re supposed to date. You’re supposed to do whatever. And there’s the regular world of, maybe not rapists, but harassers and people who think it’s okay to touch you without consent, or situations we get entangled in where consent is on a sliding scale, it seems like. And I had all of these other things that have happened too.
TB:
It was so important to me. And I think people listening will understand this. I developed like a normal child. I went through puberty, which meant I had the hormones, which meant I felt sexual and I wanted to explore. I could not explore in the way that everybody else could. I actually thought, and this is part of my downfall, I thought the first person who I have sex with is who I’ve got to be with for the rest of my life. This is it. And it happened to be my daughter’s father. So that’s it. I’m stuck with him. If he turns out to be a bad guy, I just have to put up with it, because you put out. So that’s some of the Catholic stuff, but it’s also some of the, this is the only way you can be a good girl. You’re already bad enough, don’t be out here. Now you’re going to be a whore. That’s just, really. Do you want guys to literally come down himself and just tap you on the shoulder?
TB:
And so, I thought that’s the way to deal with it. And then I met him. And I’m Caribbean. I love reggae. I love to move my body. I love to be that way. And I would do it at home in my room. I’d be practicing and doing all of that, but with an actual boy, I couldn’t go to the places. And he allowed me to go to those places. We’d finish dancing, and that would be it. And then there was a part of me that was kind of like, “Don’t I owe you something?” It’s the other messages that girls are given and what all the trauma does to you as well. I’d be like, “I thought you were supposed to… No?” I had to cycle through that.
TB:
We went through our whole freshman year. I had a boyfriend at home, even though he was cheating on me and having a baby by somebody else, but I was trying to be loyal. Yeah. We went through our whole freshman year. We did not kiss. We did not date. We didn’t touch outside of the way that we danced on that dance floor, and it allowed me to understand my body as a sexual being. As a person who can feel pleasure, and that pleasure does not have to be balanced with trauma of some sort. And it was just another form of liberation. It was so beautiful. And that’s how he was. Even when we dated, he was super sensitive to the things that had happened, and super sensitive to my needs in those ways. He’s just a wonderful person. It didn’t work out that we would be together, but he was still a wonderful person.
GD:
I’m sorry that you lost him.
AW:
May he rest.
TB:
I have lost. Yeah.
GD:
Okay listeners, this is going to be sad. We’re going to have to pause this beautiful conversation right there, but we’re going to pick it back up on Thursday. So in the meantime, pick up Tarana’s book, Unbound. It’s out now, and the book needs to be in your hands and on your shelves. And then come back here in two days and we’ll hear more from Tarana. You’re not going to want to miss Part two of our conversation. In the meantime until then, when life gets hard, we’re going to remember that we can do hard things. And we’re also going to remember to rest. Okay. See you soon. I give you Tish Melton and Brandi Carlile.
GD:
We Can Do Hard Things is produced in partnership with Cadence 13 Studios. Be sure to rate, review, and follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Odyssey, or wherever you get your podcasts. Especially be sure to rate and review the podcast if you really liked it. If you didn’t, don’t worry about it. It’s fine.