This has been my favorite reading in 2023. Viola Davis has described her childhood as being marked by extreme poverty and dysfunction.
She lived in “rat-infested and condemned” apartments and was bullied by boys who hurled rocks and racial slurs at her. Despite the hardships she faced, Viola Davis overcame them to become a successful and highly paid actress in Hollywood.
She is known for her roles in iconic shows like The Help and How To Get Away With Murder, and has won several awards for her talent.
She is also committed to philanthropy and actively gives back to her community, particularly in the fight against hunger.
Being a huge fan of Viola Davis, I just HAD to get my hands on this book.
But, I also approached it with a bit of trepidation – is this public figure and multi-award-winning actress the warrior goddess that I hype her up to be in my mind or will I be disillusioned?
Right from the very first words in the very first chapter, uttered defiantly by 8-year old Voila I was assured.
Yes, this is the badass woman I know her to be!
From the get-go you are drawn into Viola’s brutal reality growing up, and it was quite a shocker.
She shares intimate details of her experiences growing up in gut-wrenching poverty, and as a result, have to face abuse, shame, racism and sexism.
If I had to highlight and annotate each sentence and paragraph in this book that personally affected me, there would be very few sections or pages that were kept untouched.
“I held on to what I had, all that I had, the team effort with my older sisters. That preserved me. We were a girl-posse, fighting, clawing our way out of the invisibility of poverty and a world where we didn’t fit in. The world was our enemy. We were survivors.”
The eight-year-old girl who had never been told “You’re worthy; you’re beautiful” suddenly found herself as a leading lady, and a mouthpiece for all the women who looked like her.
I had no weapons to slay those naysayers, to change culture itself.
The obstacle blocking me was a four-hundred-year-old racist system of oppression and my own feeling of utter aloneness.
My art, in this instance, was the best healing tool to resolve my past, the best weapon that I had to conquer my present, and my gift to the future.
