The power of the brown American diva

‘Please don’t let this be a scolding!’ I thought as I moved past this book’s tempting title to read the author’s bio, noting that she is ‘the chair of the Writing Programme at Columbia University’. Sure enough, the very first line of the prologue – ‘The sound of a diva’s voice was how I knew we were Mexican’ – made me fear that this might be the case. Funnily enough, my mother was also fond of the diva in question, Vikki Carr – especially the sob-fest ‘It Must Be Him’ – and my family weren’t Mexican as far as I know.

My scolding radar flared up even further on seeing the word ‘queer’ in a quote on the back cover by one Farah Jasmine Griffin (the author of the very scoldy-sounding Read Until You Understand): ‘A people – brown, black and queer – too big, bold, beautiful and messy to be confined within enclosures or by borders.’