In Longing to Tell, Tricia Rose turns academic research into a literary masterpiece.
She interviewed 20 African American females for Longing to Tell with various ethnic backgrounds, broad range of age, and socioeconomic upbringing. Rose organised the real life commentaries on sex, intimacy, relationships, and race into an easy to follow narrative. As you go through the pages, the stories will carry you through a broad range of emotions. The women speak truth to situations that happen in every day life, but may be considered taboo in the African American community.
In a culture driven by sexual and racial imagery, very few honest conversations about race, gender, and sexuality actually take place. In their absence, commonly held perceptions of black women as teenage mothers, welfare recipients, mammies, or exotic sexual playthings remain unchanged. For fear that telling their stories will fulfill society’s implicit expectations about their sexuality, most black women have retreated into silence.
Tricia Rose seeks to break this silence and jump-start a dialogue by presenting, for the first time, the sexual testimonies of black women who span a broad range of ages, levels of education, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Both brilliantly conceived and sensitively executed, Longing to Tell is required reading for anyone interested in issues of race and gender.
