West Trade Review: "The Sweet Home of Legend and Reminiscence: Knitting the Past and Present in Deborah D. E. E. P. Mouton’s Black Chameleon: Memory, by, and Myth" by Yael Valencia Aldana

by Yael Valencia Aldana

March 22, 2023

Yael Valencia Aldana is a Caribbean Afro-Latinx writer and poet. Her work has appeared or is upcoming in Typehouse, South Florida Poetry Journal, Chapterhouse Review, and Slag Glass City, among others. She is an Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor at West Trade Review and an Editorial Feedback Consultant for Craft Literary Magazine. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Florida International University and lives in South Florida.

Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood, and Myth by Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton; Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.; 320 pgs.; $27.99

In her memoir, Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood, and Myth author Deborah D. E. E. P. Mouton invites readers into the magical everyday of her life and her ancestors. Her extraordinary lyrical prose braids childhood and adult memories with speculative mythmaking. The latter of which serves as its own form of truth. Mouton’s memoir covers her childhood in Los Angeles to her adulthood in Houston. A life realized in a unique nonlinear poetic voice.

The memoir opens in the speculative past before Mouton was born. Here her ancestors survive the horrors of slavery by blinding themselves and then growing eyes in their necks. Here Mouton reframes the past. She gives her ancestors agency over their lives during a time when the enslaved had little. Our modern eyes recognize a sisterhood in these industrious women. Mouton relays an equally mythical childhood viscerally told. She bear crawls under church pews to nestle in her epic-sized father’s six seven father’s arms, and watches the Black beat off her older sister. Here the reality of the phrase “getting the Black beat off of you” comes to life. Her sister’s skin loses all color under the hands of her mother. Mouton’s otherworldly retelling of this scene connects a magical present to the fabled past of her ancestors, and adds to the legacy of women in her line surviving by pulling the extraordinary out of the ordinary.

Some of her most important lessons learned are the moments of profound disappointment when a girl child realizes that boys and men can have sharp unfriendly claws that bloom into casual violence. Mouton transcends the reality of this all-too-familiar lesson of a boy grabbing you when you don’t want them to.

“Every daughter has their fall to bear [. . .] For the dragon is more than an urban legend. Swallow its name too many times, and it will make a mockery of you. Make you it's midnight itch that it is sure to scratch. I wish that was the only time the dragon tried hoarding a part of me. But when seeking the smell of fire, there are far too many other things that sell you on their burn.”

One of the most wrenching moments in the memoir came the morning after a right-wing politician was elected. For Mouton, it was just another morning. But for her white colleagues, it brought a fear into their lives they had never known. Mouton is startled by one of her colleague's reactions. “Her eyes filled with water, and she lamented about how disappointed she was with our country. She told me all about how she felt knowing that she wasn’t safe, said she couldn’t imagine living every day in this fear.” A fear that laws could be passed to subvert her autonomy over her own body. A fear Mouton had known daily growing up as a Black female. In this moment, Mouton laughs, so shocked at how safe the woman felt previously, but empathetic that this woman had no magic to temper her new distasteful reality.

The memoir’s best literary achievement is the subversion and resistance of the traditionally linear and chronological form of storytelling. Her chronology ebbs and flows between a bewildering childhood, a bewildering adulthood, and back again. Just when I start to feel a bit disoriented in her fluid timeline, Mouton re-anchors me with a tangible story in her blazing prose. Mouton pushed the traditional form of memoir, introducing single stanzas of her poetry between sections, then blooming into multi-page poems later in the book. Her work is in conversation the Audre Lorde’s iconic Zami, a memoir with similar intentions, and the more recent American Bastard by Jan Beatty. Mouton, like Beatty breaks memoir’s conventions allowing her poetry to speak as strongly as her prose.

Working with prose that are both highly lyrical yet approachable, Black Chameleon, creates a necessary conversation between past and present, between the speculation of myth and the extraordinary ordinariness of every day. Mouton has earned the skills of navigating a hostile world through magic and myth-making. Skills that were passed down to her through countless ancestors on her chain. Skills that allow her to blossom and live as they did. She has created a work that breaks the form’s conversions and creates an in-between space between the grinding reality of daily life and an otherworldly alchemy that is true to her voice as Black creative. Mouton invites us to find the grace in what we have suffered and acceptance in the blemished skin we all wear.

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The Sweet Home of Legend and Reminiscence: Knitting the Past and Present in Deborah D. E. E. P. Mouton’s Black Chameleon: Memory, Womanhood, and Myth

NONFICTION REVIEW

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