Tarana Burke Opens up to Oprah About Talking to Her Own Daughter About Abuse
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In her searing new memoir, Unbound (available in bookstores and online September 14), #MeToo founder Tarana Burke opens up about sexual abuse, shame, and finding the capacity to love—and to lead.
For Oprah, the memoir was so moving that not only was it published under her book imprint with Flatiron, but it inspired Oprah’s latest intention of the week message for Oprah Daily Insiders.
“Among the many aha moments I had while reading her final manuscript was this lesson she shares about capacity,” Oprah says. “Now, she writes about capacity in the context of whether or not a person is even able to care for himself or herself or others. And when I read that, I went, Whoa. All these years I had expectations of people who didn’t have the capacity to manage.”
In an intimate conversation, Burke sat down with Oprah to reflect on a series of passages from Unbound that each offer poignant lessons. For the week of September 13, we’ll be sharing parts of their emotional chat each day.
Friday, September 17
Oprah's comments on Unbound: "The horror that every victim of sexual violence carries with them is you're gonna be overprotective of your child, you're gonna do everything to make sure that this doesn't happen to your child. And then one night, you asked Kaya, and Kaya had the courage to tell you the truth. But more importantly, when I read that somebody had been 'messin' with Kaya,' the courage to ask Kaya—to me—was a full circle moment, because it meant that you had created capacity."
Tarana Burke's reflections: "When Kaya gave me the answer, I had such a mix of emotions because it felt like failure to be quite honest. My initial reaction was: This one thing that I needed to do, I failed at doing. Protect my child. But I also knew that I had this gift. This work that I'd been doing. I have these tools. I actually used one of the tools to get Kaya to talk with me that I used with the girls, which is writing it down.
This is the thing I use when I used to do parenting workshops. Particularly in our community, we tend to grill our children, and that's not helpful to your child. And I would do that same thing with Kaya until it came to this day when I said, 'There's nothing you can tell me that will separate you from my love. Nothing. There's nothing you could ever do or say that would make mommy not love you. Because I realized I needed a cushion in there. They needed some sense of safety, and when it dawned on me that Kaya felt exactly as I felt as a baby, as a child. That I had done something wrong, that they had done something wrong.
And so once I took that away, and said even if you think you did something wrong mommy will still love you, it created the space for them to say, 'OK, this is the thing that happened,' and they also felt complicit. Like, I was a bad child. But it also set the tone for everything. My child is mommy's little baby, and we have a close and really honest relationship that started from that point and changed how we communicate. Talk to your child different. Ask different questions."
Thursday, September 16
Oprah's comments on Unbound: "You'd been working, working, working, in the trenches with young girls, trying to get them to understand what it means to be groomed. Literally using words that would help them explain it themselves—explain what had had happened to them. Doing the work, but nobody's tweeting about it. Nobody's raving about it. And then you're at your house and #MeToo starts trending on Twitter without any attribution to you and you admit that your ego was clouding your judgement in that moment. You've been working with these girls in the #MeToo movement since 2005, and now it's fall of 2017."
Tarana Burke's reflections: "It was traumatic. People started calling and texting me. In my community, I've been doing this work a long time, so I have a pretty large network of folks. I'm associated with this work. People know 'Tarana works with little girls. Tarana works with Black girls. Tarana does sexual violence, #MeToo, all of that.' But this was different. I was like, if these white folks get ahold of this work, it's over. What can I do? They won't credit me, they won't talk about me. This is my work. I kept on this, 'My work, my work.' And I do think on the one hand it makes sense, right? There's a lot of Black women who create things online and create things publicly who don't get credit. A lot of women of color who deal with their work getting stollen and that kind of thing. But this is not like an influencer, or being a creator on YouTube. This was different kind of work. I had to cycle through that moment of panic, and then check in with what was happening online.
And then I read this woman's story online again, and it just sat me down. I told you how God comes to me in bold ways. Because I had been using [#MeToo], I know what it means, and I know what it feels like. So I thought, 'You gotta take yourself out of this.' I had made the commitment to give my life to service and give my service to people a long time before, and so I was like, what does that actually mean in this moment? This is the time to show up and be who you said you were. If this is happening for these people, then maybe I should be inserting myself to say, 'Hey, let me direct the conversation.'"
Wednesday, September 15
Oprah's comments on Unbound: "At 22 you still weren't able to speak out loud what had happened to you, because there's still so much shame about it. That's why our stories are so similar, and then the thing that freed you is the same thing that did for me. You picked up I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Can we have a shout to Maya Angelou?"
Tarana Burke's reflections: "Yes, I can shout everyday for the rest of my life, because it's also why writing a book has always been important to me. Not that I could ever even try to begin to do what she did...I snuck the book, and I read it and I could not believe what I was reading. I also didn't really understand Maya Angelou as a real person. I thought she was just a person in a book. I was like, 'Oh my God, there's somebody else.' I remember re-reading it, and re-reading it.
In high school, when I heard her voice and made this connection to this real person, her voice was the second shift. It felt like she was light. She felt comfortable in her skin, she felt wise. All of this I was hearing in her voice, and I just thought 'How?' All of these years from when I read the book to when I hear her voice I thought, 'We have a secret.' I know who this is, I know what this is like. We have a secret. And I had been on a fake it 'till you make it kind of thing. I'm just gonna pretend to be really, really good, so people won't know what I really am. And then here she was not pretending...This was another big shift for me because I thought, how does she manage that? I know that this doesn't go anywhere, at least it hasn't gone anywhere. So can these two things exist at the same time? Can I feel actual joy at the same time that I'm feeling all of this pain? I don't understand it, and I became a little bit obsessed with her."
Tuesday, September 14
Oprah's reading from Unbound: "There's no question that self hate severely limits one's capacity to love full and whole-heartedly. Capacity and desire are not the same thing, especially in discussions of love. I was an adult with a child of my own and a trail of mistakes behind me before I could say with certainty that my mother loved me, and that clarity came with being faced with my own limited capacity. No matter how deep desire to love my child, I was still encumbered by the ghost I tried to bury. I failed often. If I hadn't had the experiences I had had with my mother, I am not so sure I would have fought so hard to build my capacity."
Tarana Burke's reflections: "My mother hasn't read the book, yet. I intend to have her read it soon...I've just been so nervous about it. Because I want her to be clear, I know it's gonna be hard for her to read, but I also put that other piece in there because I want her to know that I get it now. I will never really understand her decisions and some of the decisions she made, but I understand what drove her to make some decisions—whether it was right or wrong. I've been in that place. And I had the desire to be the best mom ever, I had the desire to make sure my child was free and liberated and had this wonderful childhood, but I didn't have the capacity because I hadn't dealt with own trauma. I was still carrying shame, I was still carrying forth the things that I learned from my grandma, my mom, so I had to unpack that stuff. Honesty and a real deep longing to make sure that my child had a different life was what helped me to face that stuff and say, 'Oh, I see what the problem is here. I just don't know how.'"
Monday, September 13
Oprah's reading from Unbound: "Unkindness is a serial killer. Death in the flesh sometimes seems like a less excruciating way to succumb than the slow and steady venom unleashed by mean spirited cruel words and action that poison you over time. I guess that's why I can't stand the old children's rhyme, 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.' Every time I hear it, I think to myself, that's a lie. You can dodge a rock, but you can't un-hear a word. You can't undo the intentional damage that some words have on your mind, body and spirit. Especially a word like 'ugly.'"
There's a funny way that some people deal with those they deem physically unattractive. Usually they stare for about half a beat too long. When you notice they smile a small, guiltily fading smile. And then their eyes dart away, and they their posture falls into an unsettling mix of toddler and chimpanzee as if they don't know where to move next. Suddenly they're fascinated by the nothingness over your shoulder. I know this act all too well. And I have seen it so often that I can spot it in the split second it takes to pass a stranger on the street. I can read the slight readjustments as discomfort churns through their body. There is just a millisecond of disgust. Sometimes offset by embarrassment, and then if confronted by my brief unrelenting stare, guilt.
I know this because I'm ugly. At least that's what the world finds new ways to tell me everyday."
Tarana Burke's reflections: "There's a part of me that has to confront that reality. My reality. I have a very close circle of friends, lovely people who have been my friends for 20 or 30 years. And your friends hold you up and they say things to you all the time like, 'You're beautiful. Stop it. Don't say that. Don't talk badly about yourself.' And I look in the mirror, and I see something that looks fine...But the world has told me different over and over again. So, over time I understand the historical significance of that as a Black person. I understand the cultural significance. I understand pop culture. Intellectually it makes sense, but it doesn't change what it feels like.
Dealing with the violence and abuse I dealt with as a child, I let that become the reason. I just mire all of that together...Fundamentally, I don't understand unkindness, because it's just not necessary."
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