The truth is stronger than fiction: telling the truth about black women's sexual lives

Journal of Sex Research, May, 2004 by Marcelle Christian Holmes

Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy. By Tricia Rose. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003, 415 pages. Cloth, $25.00.

This collection of Black women's sexual narratives is long overdue. The author presents 20 (not 19, as the book jacket states) oral histories from women who represent a wide range of ages, sexual orientations, socioeconomic classes, educational levels, and life experiences. The women featured in the book share stories about the messages they received about sex from parents, other family members, and friends. In the interviews, the participants talk about their experiences with masturbation, orgasm, and menstruation. They also talk, in fairly graphic detail, about their experiences with sexual abuse, pregnancy, and abortion. These stories, often difficult to read, are even more difficult to put down. Compelling, gripping, touching, and painful, these narratives illustrate Black women's struggles to forge caring, respectful, and loving relationships with their own bodies, with each other, and with sexual partners.

Surrounded by an introduction and an afterword, the narratives are organized into three sections, with a small prelude to each section. The first section, titled "Through the Fire," features seven women's stories that, according to Rose, highlight "the difficult, unpredictable, and ongoing process of negotiating sexuality" (p. 14-15). The second section, titled "Guarded Heart," presents the stories of six women who illustrate self-protection in the face of challenges. Finally, "Always Something Left to Love" conveys a theme of possibility and hopefulness, and the narratives in this section emphasize a commitment to love and to be loved. Rose states that each woman's story illustrates, to some extent, all of these themes, and that the placement of each story into a chapter was a question of emphasis only.

The question of organization is a difficult one, and Rose appears to have given a great deal of thought to the organization of the interview data. After conducting hours of interviews, what are the best ways to present the findings? An author can take one of several approaches. One, which Rose considers in the introduction, is to organize the data around a central theme. We can see, for example, how a certain group of women have faced a certain life event. The author can use pieces of the interviews that are illustrative of the points that he or she wishes to analyze. This approach allows the reader to see similarities and differences across a number of people, but it necessarily breaks their stories into fragments, and it presents the author as the expert and authority. Rose is critical of this approach when she writes, "We do not hear the women's voices in all their glorious, sometimes contradictory, complexity.... Cutting up such intimate stories into bits and pieces repeats a kind of silencing even as it claims to give voice" (p. 56). Another solution is to place the narratives into what Rose calls "story containers." "Rape victim," "incest survivor," "virgin," "single mother," or "lesbian" are potential containers that, according to Rose, provide a one-dimensional understanding of the woman's experience (p. 6). Many women are simultaneously incest survivors, single mothers, and lesbians, for example. Where would we put their stories? Can we use these simplistic categories when women's lives are much more complex and multidimensional? The introduction provides a serious critique of common approaches to the presentation of qualitative interview data.

Mindful of the pitfalls associated with various approaches, Rose chose to make each chapter a different woman's story and to present an uninterrupted first-person narrative with no analysis. This presentation represents a conscious effort to respect the integrity of Black women, who have historically been marginalized, misrepresented, and voiceless. However, I found that this presentation style ultimately did not solve the problems that I hoped it would address. Although the author presents these chapters as narratives that allow her participants to speak for themselves in a less fragmented way, every chapter in this book is necessarily a fragment of the original interview. In the introduction, we see the general sorts of topics that Rose asked the women to discuss, but we do not see the text of the actual comments or questions posed to each individual woman. It is thus impossible to know when the participant was prompted to say more or encouraged to change topics.

By omitting the interview questions, the narratives can feel choppy, with participants appearing to abruptly jump from topic to topic without any indication of the question or comment that brought them there. Additionally, the narratives were written in paragraph form. The organization of interview data in this way transforms the participant's words into chunks of digestible thoughts, when they were not originally so neat. I admire the author's intentions to respect the wholeness and integrity of her participants' stories, but her presentation choices contribute to the same type of fragmentation that she critiqued.