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A review by suzyreadsbooks
What God Is Honored Here?: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by and for Native Women and Women of Color by Kao Kalia Yang, Shannon Gibney
5.0
4.5 stars
What God is Honored Here? is an anthology of 20+ essays and poems about miscarriage and infant loss, written by women of color and Native American women. Editors Shannon Gibney and Kao Kalia Yang aimed to collect and highlight the experiences of grieving indigenous mothers and mothers of color, whose stories have previously been misrepresented or missing entirely from societal narratives. I appreciated the wide variety of voices in this book, including women of many different ethnicities and religious backgrounds. Miscarriage and infant loss is an incredibly somber topic, and I could feel how hard it was for some of these women to talk about their experiences. Hearing so many similar stories back-to-back made this book more emotionally challenging, but it also highlighted each author’s unique perspectives, including differences in support systems, approaches towards grief and guilt, and methods of honoring their children. Some essays felt like they ended quite suddenly, mirroring the authors’ pregnancy stories. Other essays include future pregnancies and live births.
The infant and maternal mortality rates in America are extremely high, especially for women of color. One continuous theme throughout the book is the dismissive attitudes of healthcare providers, often causing these women to become more dangerously ill than they would have been if they had been appropriately treated at the time of their initial concerns.
There were many nuances within these narratives. In Binding Signs, Dania Rajendra talks about the confusion of being pro-choice while mourning a miscarriage and fallopian tube removal. I really loved her passage about the internal conflict of believing that embryos are not people, yet missing the people those embryos never became. Elsa Valmidiano talked about her experiences volunteering in the Philippines with an organization that medically assisted women who attempted self-induced abortions, and the different types of stigma and shame of abortion versus medically-induced miscarriage.
This book is a necessary step in narrowing the gap in the societal narrative around miscarriage and infant loss. What a gift to contribute during National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. The only downside of this book is that, as far as I can recall, this collection only included cis women in heterosexual relationships. I would have liked to see some representation from the LGBTQ+ community, as miscarriages and infant loss can happen to individuals in many different types of relationships using a variety of assisted reproductive technologies.
Thank you, University of Minnesota Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
What God is Honored Here? is an anthology of 20+ essays and poems about miscarriage and infant loss, written by women of color and Native American women. Editors Shannon Gibney and Kao Kalia Yang aimed to collect and highlight the experiences of grieving indigenous mothers and mothers of color, whose stories have previously been misrepresented or missing entirely from societal narratives. I appreciated the wide variety of voices in this book, including women of many different ethnicities and religious backgrounds. Miscarriage and infant loss is an incredibly somber topic, and I could feel how hard it was for some of these women to talk about their experiences. Hearing so many similar stories back-to-back made this book more emotionally challenging, but it also highlighted each author’s unique perspectives, including differences in support systems, approaches towards grief and guilt, and methods of honoring their children. Some essays felt like they ended quite suddenly, mirroring the authors’ pregnancy stories. Other essays include future pregnancies and live births.
The infant and maternal mortality rates in America are extremely high, especially for women of color. One continuous theme throughout the book is the dismissive attitudes of healthcare providers, often causing these women to become more dangerously ill than they would have been if they had been appropriately treated at the time of their initial concerns.
There were many nuances within these narratives. In Binding Signs, Dania Rajendra talks about the confusion of being pro-choice while mourning a miscarriage and fallopian tube removal. I really loved her passage about the internal conflict of believing that embryos are not people, yet missing the people those embryos never became. Elsa Valmidiano talked about her experiences volunteering in the Philippines with an organization that medically assisted women who attempted self-induced abortions, and the different types of stigma and shame of abortion versus medically-induced miscarriage.
This book is a necessary step in narrowing the gap in the societal narrative around miscarriage and infant loss. What a gift to contribute during National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. The only downside of this book is that, as far as I can recall, this collection only included cis women in heterosexual relationships. I would have liked to see some representation from the LGBTQ+ community, as miscarriages and infant loss can happen to individuals in many different types of relationships using a variety of assisted reproductive technologies.
Thank you, University of Minnesota Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.