Growing up, Roya Marsh was considered “tomboy passing." With an affinity for baggy clothes, cornrows, and bandanas, she came of age in an era when the wide spectrum of gender and sexuality was rarely acknowledged or discussed. She knew she was “different,” her family knew she was “different,” but anything outside of the heteronorm was either disregarded or disparaged.
In her stunning debut, written in protest to an absence of representation, Marsh recalls her early life and the attendant torments of a butch Black woman coming of age in America. In lush, powerful, and vulnerable verses, dayliGht unpacks traumas to unearth truths, revealing a deep well of resilience, a cutting sense of irony, and an astonishing fresh talent. This is a dazzling debut from a necessary new voice, at once a clarion call for stories of Black women and a rebuke of broken notions of sexuality and race.
Paperback, MCD × FSGO, 2020
read an excerpt
Roya Marsh
more about authorPaperback, MCD × FSGO, 2020
read an excerptAn excerpt from dayliGht
in broad daylight black girls look ghost
"Carefully, i arrange my disguise. It has been designed not to stand out . . . i decide to look like a poor Black woman."
—Assata Shakur
i’m good with my tongue.
it makes me most visible.
with a shut mouth I’m a good dresser.
a flapping tongue makes me:
sexy
well learned
a conquest
my voice is more pronounced than my skin tone
and i need to know why
i track down my ancestry through DNA
i track down someone with my last name
she tell me it’s hers
she white
says it’s funny how I’m black
i say, “ha-ha”
results say i’m hers
in history
in old law
in old English
say her great greats
owned my greatest
on this soil.
“wow,” she say
and i hold my tongue. tight. between molars.
’til it bloody and useless
’til i can’t speak
’til she don’t see me
and swallow back the blood i ain’t ask for in the first place
Roya Marsh
