A review by jaclyn_sixminutesforme
Black and Blue: a memoir of racism and resilience by Veronica Gorrie

4.0

Gorrie is a Gunai/Kurnai woman and in this shares her journey growing up and raising her family, and ultimately to working in the police force and the ongoing trauma that has had on her life since. Dr Chelsea Watego’s introduction frames the memoir to follow perfectly in articulating that Gorrie “is here to tell the truth of the Queensland Police Service, of the good and the bad. She so powerfully captures the hopelessness she felt when, having met the markers of success within the police force, she was discarded when her body could no longer withstand it.”

This is stunning storytelling—Gorrie shares this intimate conversation in her writing style that kindles a connection with the reader almost instantly. The writing is direct and deeply personal, a self reflection of a career and life as much as it is an account of the institutional racism and sexism permeating society and the profession specifically. So much of those broader traumas inform the personal as Gorrie writes them, though she notes clearly in her author note that she does not profess to speak beyond her own personal experience. The connection Dr Watego makes to Gorrie’s narrative approach and the difference between the Black Witness and the White Witness (first articulated by Amy McQuire in 2019) in that “she does not extract others’ stories to centre herself as the lead character or heroine. She affords a generosity to those she speaks of, even those who brutalise her, and unlike the White Witness, she refuses to pathologise them.” I thought about this a lot while reading the memoir, thinking about *how* Gorrie was telling as much as in the *what* of her story.

Also be sure to check out @_declanfry review of this in Inside Story (“Killing the cop in your head—forty ways of looking at Veronica Gorrie’s Black and Blue”)