Brown Girls by Daphne Palasi Andreades
Reviewed by Cath Barton
Queens, where the brown girls who inhabit this book are from, is the largest borough of New York City, but perhaps not so familiar to non-US readers as Manhattan or Brooklyn. Daphne Palasi Andreades peppers her narrative with the colours and flavours of this place, where she was born and brought up. We imagine ourselves dodging the traffic with these girls on the Boulevard of Death, eating Silician pizza slices together, or watching tattooed hipsters surfing off Rockaway Beach. Andreades and her characters may be from what she calls ‘the dregs’ of this part of the city, but that has clearly not pulled them down, and their zest for life zings through Brown Girls.
The parents of the brown girls are Pakistani, Guyanese, Haitian, Chinese, Filipino and more; Queens is one of the most ethnically diverse parts of the US. Andreades’s device for conveying unity in diversity is to make her characters into a chorus: Ruchi, Thanh, Victoria, Carmen and more, and at the beginning, proclaim ‘we brown girls are ten and already know how to be good.’ Their parents came to NYC in the 1990s, full of hope for a better life in America. That is what they want for their girls, too, and they give them a strict upbringing focussed on working hard so as to achieve the American Dream.
Ah, if only it were so simple for these brown girls, whose teenage angsts are compounded by their feelings about brown boys and other ‘All-American’ boys, and experimenting with painting their faces lighter ‘Until we are the color of lilies. Or bones. There. Beautiful.’ They are nonetheless dutiful, as their parents expect. By their twenties, some of them have left Queens and gained recognition for their work, but they still don’t feel seen. Life remains complicated.
Andreades has made Brown Girls out of breathless fragments of flash fiction. She includes bursts of detail which give the narrative energy but, because they are so short, never weigh it down. This approach works brilliantly for highlighting what life is like for the girls at ten, twelve and so on as they grow up. Elsewhere she uses lists, as in the chapters Do Now: What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up? and Our Mothers’ Commandments. Again, a way of conveying a lot succinctly.
Where Andreades’s fragmentary structure serves her – and her readers – less well is when she focusses on a single character. Trish is a girl who has left Queens. Her story is not a happy one and it recurs to haunt the others. However the full force of her tragedy does not come through, perhaps because although Trish has a name, her independent voice is never heard.
In contrast, there is a punchy strength in the combined voices of the mass of brown girls who grow up in Queens, leave, return and leave again. Although they speak as a chorus, this is not a homogeneous group and Andreades’s use of the first person plural makes the conversations and thoughts of the girls immediate. When they visit the places their families left behind when they came to the US, they find themselves amongst people who look like them, but at the same time cannot escape the fact that they are different, their American-ness betrayed by the fact that their stomachs aren’t strong enough for them to drink the local water. It’s a weakness, brought about by privilege. They ask themselves, over and over: ‘The colonized, the colonizer. Where do we fall? Realize: Whether we like it or not, we lay claim to both.’
Brown Girls considers these girls’ relationships with men: their brothers, husbands and lovers (though hardly at all their fathers). Some of them marry white boys, but are put down by the boys’ families; some of them leave for a brown boy, or a brown girl. We the readers are in the bar with the brown girls when they return to Queens for a reunion, at their shoulders listening in, privy to their hopes and disappointments, complicit in the way they follow their desires.
Andreades’s prose is breathless. It gathers momentum from the first page and almost falls over itself in an adrenalin rush as it tracks each year of the brown girls’ lives, but at the end it slows. The pandemic and its death toll, disproportionate among brown people in the US, forces itself into the narrative, and the book concludes on a sombre note.
Brown Girls is published by 4th Estate, 3rd February 2022