Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
A Veteran's Memoir
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- $279.00
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- $279.00
Descripción editorial
From award winning poet Khadijah Queen, a coming-of-age memoir about family, survival, and one servicewoman’s search for autonomy.
Yanked out of college and torn from her sunny hometown of Los Angeles in the early 1990s, Khadijah Queen finds herself sharing a basement apartment with her mother and sister and working two retail jobs in snowy, tiny Inkster, Michigan. Longing to escape the cycle of her family’s poverty, incarceration, and addiction, she joins the US Navy, determined to earn money to finish college and make it back to L.A. on her own terms.
But soon after Queen completes her grueling training and boards a doomed destroyer, she finds herself faced with near-constant sexual harassment, demeaning labor assignments, and overt racism. Stuck on a ship with nowhere to hide, she looks to poetry, literature, and letters from home to get through the long days and maintain her dignity. She keeps her head down until the workplace hostility against women spills over into her dating life and threatens to derail everything she has worked for.
In trying to break through the unspoken code of silence between sailors, Queen must decide where her loyalties lie: with the Navy or within herself. Unflinching and masterfully penned, this memoir questions the promises of service to reveal the true price of being a woman at sea.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet and essayist Queen (Radical Poetics) delivers a bruising account of her experiences as a woman in the military. She begins by discussing her move from Los Angeles to Michigan to help her sister care for her children in the late 1990s. With their funds dwindling and Queen's job at RadioShack providing little help, she enlisted in the Navy to help her pay for college and achieve her dream of becoming the first person in her family to earn a degree. During her time in the military, Queen endured physical injury, casual racism, and rampant misogyny from her fellow sailors, which forced her to conceal details about her physically abusive partner. Along the way, Queen meditates on female trailblazers throughout history, including French noblewoman Jeanne de Belleville, who became a privateer to avenge the death of her husband, and 19th-century Navy commander Mary Ann Brown Patten, using their stories to consider what might happen "if history met women in terms of both failure and success." Throughout, Queen is by turns vulnerable and fierce, making resonant observations about the complexities of war, womanhood, and perseverance. Readers will find much to admire.
