Life, I Swear is a chronicle of transformation and growth by and for modern-day Black women. Some of today’s most influential Black female voices chronicle their private journeys, offering testimonies of living through pain and joy with raw honesty and unapologetic self-love.
In each episode of her podcast, Life, I Swear, emotive storyteller Chloe Dulce Louvouezo explores the nuances of our diverse experiences. In one-on-one interviews and personal prose, the podcast centers on personal stories that offer universal insights into topics relevant to modern women’s lives, from identity and family to trauma and motherhood, told through the lens of Black women. A catalyst for change, this revelatory, stunningly illustrated essay collection builds on the premise of the podcast by diving deeper into themes of mental health, identity and resilience. Life, I Swear is sure to spark lively, thought-provoking, and necessary conversations that encourage Black women to return home to themselves through self-examination and grace.
Today, we are so excited to feature a guest post from Chloe Dulce Louvouezo:
Stories of Other Worlds
I grew up in Niamey, a small capital city in the heart of West Africa that starkly contrasted the childhood experience I read about in the books of our American library. Those books inspired an exploration of stories far different from my own and were one of the first portals through which I learned just how different people live, speak, and understand the world around them.
At the time, my only window into life in the United States was through the movies I watched and the books I read. Down the red dirt road of the school grounds was our quaint library, a haven and a place where I would lose myself in the thrills of the pages of Judy Blume books. Nestled on the floor I would study the black and white photos bound in the middle of autobiographies of American icons I had only faintly heard about. The schoolgirls and I would huddle around second hand copies of YM magazines, giggling at the honesty and audacity of the young writers’ details about boys and beauty. Line by line, I would read and reread principles of failures and dreams in Chicken Soup for the Soul–written by two white American men–and wonder if they would apply to my own life one day. I would imagine the writers’ contrasts to my own experience, if only I understood them.
Reading became a study of the difference between my life and the lives of others, our realities, and the little intersection they shared. As a brown girl in Niger intrigued by what seemed to be the sophistication of the West, mystic surrounded the idea of Americanness growing up. I was lured in by the books, fascinated with the differences they amplified about myself, and aware that there was lived experience I just didn’t have—because of my tender age, my Blackness, or my place–that created a blind spot in my context to fully understand American ways, which cyclically drove my curiosity.
How we see ourselves through books is reflective of our relationship with the world. Stories of young Black and brown girls didn’t sit on those shelves and weren’t played out on my box television set at home, whether Black in America or Black in other parts of the world. Stories of lives like my own, of being home outside of home, didn’t exist. But thirty years later now in the United States, I return to the library, this time with my son. Since then, I’ve lived to tell my own coming of age stories and survived the adult scenes that I had once only imagined. Pursuing through the aisles, the publications tell a much broader story today that inform how he draws both conclusions and inspiration around living as a young Black person in this world. Book by book the library introduces him to tales of Marley, Basquiat, and others that make the world and stories of his existence more accessible, as do they of my own—a Black girl in Africa, of another time. And when your story isn’t being told, I tell him, that’s when you write it. We sit together flipping through the pages of my first book, Life, I Swear, and imagine the stories he himself will grow up to one day tell.
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Thank you so much, Chloe!
Life, I Swear published on November 2, 2021.
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