Loud Mouth Brown Girl

This book is a work of love. Part book of essays, part memoir, it’s about me, it’s about living in Canada, it’s about the girls, the boys, and everything in between.

This book got me angry. When I first started writing it, Breonna Taylor had just died, so had George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, but the death that inspired it most was Jonathan Neely. He just wanted food and water, and for that, he was murdered in a subway tunnel. His killer still hasn’t faced justice, yet.

Typically I’d have more than a month to promote this project, but I just had to finish it, I started it when I was houseless, and I needed to get it finished before I go back to work, yeah that’s happening.

So anyway, I was super angry when I wrote the book, and that’s because I kept seeing Black folk dying, and white people getting away with murder. So I wanted to say all the things before it was too late.

Last night I dreamt I saw Tupac staring out a window, more than twenty years after his murder, and they may have at last found a killer – maybe. We’ll see.

I think that there is so much bullshit around Black death that we never fully know the truth. Too many times Black people have been failed by the state that is supposed to protect us, when in reality we know now the state is designed to destroy us.

I wanted this book to stand as a testament to all the girls who did speak out, who did say enough was enough, who fought back, and who stood up for themselves. I wanted this book to be a reminder that we do speak, even when they choose not to listen to us.

And the best part is that one of my best friends Nada Chehade wrote the forward, and I can’t wait for y’all to see it. I am so excited, she’s an absolutely FABULOUS Palestinian author and writer from Montreal.

She has a way with words that change the landscape when we’re talking about oppression and puts a face to the victims of the system, whether you want to see it or not. She makes you uncomfortable with her writing and I think that’s why I appreciate her work so much.

This book will offend Christians. It will offend white people. It will probably end up on the banned book list, good. It’s going to make you uncomfortable, it’s going to strip away the lies that have been told about me, and it tells the truth about what I went through, to get where I am. Fuck it was hard to edit.

I am unafraid of the backlash because this is my third book. At this point I am used to people choosing not to understand me I am perfectly okay with that.

What I am not okay is people pretending that women like myself aren’t speaking out when we are. I am tired of the question “why didn’t no one say anything?” The answer is no one knew. I got very good at hiding my body, my bruises and scars, I kept the secret. I saved the lives of the boys who were abusing me. And now I’m saving my own.

Sending all my love,

Devon J Hall