Review by Teresa Tumminello Brader
LaToya Jordan has many illustrious writing credits, including a piece in Mom Egg Review 13; several are devoted to the experiences of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood, and she writes across several genres. To the Woman in the Pink Hat is a worthy addition to these topics, and in a speculative-fiction vein. Published by Aqueduct Press, her novella is Vol. 87 in their Conversation Series, a collection of short works of, or about, feminist science-fiction. The press prides itself on bringing “challenging” texts to “demanding readers”: Jordan’s entry fulfills these objectives.
The challenging and demanding elements in Jordan’s eighty-three pages are the themes, especially in their not shying away from the violence the protagonist Jada Morris has committed, necessary for illustrating how violence to bodies leads to trauma, and more violence. Think of a seven-year-old Black girl you might know right now and project her seventeen years into the future. She could be Jada, living in the time of this book in a country still holding Women’s Marches. Nothing has changed for women, much less for the young “POCx” who’ve discovered they’ve suffered involuntary sterilization after participating in a so-called birth-control study. “Someone on social came up with the moniker SU, and we went with it. It stood for stolen uterus and we thought Sue sounded safe and all-American for a group of brown girls out for justice…and maybe a little blood.”
Confined in The Center of Future Leaders, Jada uses a cloud- journal mandated by her therapists, one an android. “Ayana was her AI therapist, and Zoe was her human one, classic good cop, bad cop. Ayana looked older, while Zoe played the girlfriend/older sister role. She didn’t trust either of them.” Suppressing memories of her crime, Jada doesn’t understand why she’s being forced to literally relive them. “She would try her best to get this assignment right because she couldn’t let herself get kicked out and sent to a traditional prison. She’d disappoint her family and everyone who fought for her to be at The Center.”
The government is not the overt villain in the future Jordan has created, though it’s certainly the enabler of a corporation that preys upon the desires of rich white infertile women to provide them with uterine implants. Besides profit, the goal is the birth of fewer Black and brown babies, and more white ones. The recipients either don’t know the uteruses were stolen or they don’t care: The white women’s need and privilege are paramount.
It’s not hard to imagine Jordan’s story happening in a country that perpetrated brutal gynecologic experiments upon enslaved women; that ignored the repercussions of the Tuskegee syphilis study upon the female partners of its unwitting subjects; that exploited and profited off Henrietta Lacks, a Black woman, for medical and scientific research. These events are not far behind us and are too easily dismissed as being in the past.
Even before arriving at its chilling conclusion, the novella addresses questions of family, trauma, and bodily autonomy. It never reads as a polemic, but it should be yet another call to action for white women to interrogate and dismantle the white supremacy upholding racism.
To the Woman in the Pink Hat by LaToya Jordan
Aqueduct Press, 2023, $10 [paperback], $5.95 [e-book]
ISBN: 9781619762367
Teresa Tumminello Brader, mother of two grown children and stepmother of four, was born in New Orleans and lives in the area still. Her first book, a work of hybrid memoir/fiction, Letting in Air and Light, is forthcoming from Belle Point Press, October 10, 2023. Her short stories, poetry, reviews, and essays appear in print anthologies and online at Bulb Culture Collective, Halfway Down the Stairs, MER, Lit Pub, Months to Years, and others.