Take My Hand

Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Hachette

Otago Daily TImes, June 25th 2022

Take My Hand by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is inspired by real events: a 1973 court case brought against the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare on behalf of two sisters aged 12 and 14, who were surgically sterilised without consent.

The story is told from the perspective of Civil Townsend, a nurse charged with administering DepoProvera to the girls (at the time, an experimental drug not approved by the FDA). Appalled by their squalid living conditions, she arranges federal housing and welfare for them, and when she discovers her Clinical Director has arranged for their involuntary sterilisation, she scours the practice’s records for more information. Her investigations reveal a widespread and systematic practice of coercive or non-consensual sterilisation of the poor and women of colour.

Perkins-Valdez is deeply committed to bringing this history to light, hoping to “provoke discussions about culpability in a society that still deems poor, Black and disabled as categories unfit for motherhood.” Unfortunately, she is less successful in her mission than authors such as Leila Mottley, and Take My Hand lacks the emotional force of Mottley’s Nightcrawling, primarily because the novel’s narrator is one step removed from events.

Civil, who has her own reasons for becoming involved with the family, may be forced to question the assumptions that she, a black woman of privilege, has made about them and reassess her own role within the system. Still, she is less invested than Mottley’s protagonist, Kiara, and it shows. That said, the question of reproductive rights the book addresses remains relevant today, with reports of forcible sterilisation of illegal immigrants in US detention centres and the clawing back of abortion services in many states.

Individually and in combination, both Take My Hand and Nightcrawling contribute to important and ongoing conversations about social and racial injustice in America and beyond.