My Broken Language by Quiara Alegría Hudes
Review by Elodie Barnes
My Broken Language is a memoir by Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes; an exuberant, joyful, assured account of growing up in two distinct communities. Born to an American atheist Jewish father and a spiritual Puerto Rican mother, Hudes explores the spaces in between English and Spanish, the Philadelphia barrio and white suburbia. Less a story of broken language than of how Hudes remade her language to fit her world, this is a remarkable memoir that is full of the joys of resistance, and the power of the family to survive and thrive.
Hudes’ world revolves around the barrio, and the Perez women of her mother’s family — her own Mount Rushmore, her own goddesses. Here life is embraced, attacked, danced with and cried over in a passionate mixture of Spanish and English. As a young child Hudes sits on the staircase of her Abuela’s home, watching her cousins, wanting to join them but unsure of where she fits in this human maelstrom. On the periphery is Malvern, the overwhelmingly white, English-speaking, picket-fence suburb where her father settles with his new family. Travelling between them, not feeling fully at home in either and fully occupying only the hour-long train ride, Hudes begins the struggle to find her own distinct language even as (after being excluded from her father’s wedding day with his bride’s words, ‘Today is my day’) she rebels against ‘the English word “my”’.
As Qui Qui (her Perez family nickname) grows up, this exploration and discovery and refashioning of language twists and turns down many different paths. There is not only English and Spanish, but the language of music; having been gifted her first upright piano, she quickly finds that ‘[Bach and Chopin] soared where English and Spanish failed. All testimony and evocation, no mistranslation.’ There is the language of writing, as she discovers a love for English literature in high school. There is the language of the body, which the Perez women speak fluently and use abundantly: ‘Bodies were the mother tongue at Abuela’s, with Spanish second and English third. Dancing and ass-slapping, palmfuls of rice, ponytail-pulling and and wound dressing, banging a pot to the clave beat. Hands didn’t get lost in translation. Hips bridged gaps where words failed.’ This, in particular, gains poignancy as relative after relative is lost to AIDS, to drugs, to alcohol, and to the destructions of poverty and marginalised living.
And then, perhaps most importantly, there is her mother’s language, the language of Santería, of gods and goddesses and diasporic religion. A simultaneous source of shame and wonderment, Qui Qui admits that she ‘wished mom would worship a little bit whiter’ at the same time as longing to find common ground, to understand this part of her mother that feels like a different world. In a series of humorous scenes, she relates how day to day living with a Santera could involve finding a turtle in the bathtub, a goat in the basement and a chicken in the kitchen, all destined for a ritual sacrifice that Qui Qui could not be a part of even if she had wanted to be. ‘…Dance and possession were dialects off the same mother tongue. I spoke neither…English was what I was made of. My words and my world did not align.’
Over time, all of these languages come together to form Hudes’ own, distinct words. Shame and embarrassment over her mother’s religion turn to respect, and her first play as a sophomore music major at Yale is a salsa musical about a Santera and her daughter. Although this is not the beginning, it is an important point as Hudes realises that she is ‘craving an uglier language, one that expressed the Perez resilience and maelstrom’, rather than the conventional language of the western musical and literary canon at Yale. The Perez stories are ones that deserve to be told, and the quest to do so ultimately leads her to Brown, to mentor Paula Vogel, and to the medium of theatre. The book ends with her thesis play, dedicated to and about her younger sister Gabi; a vibrant, ferocious play in which the last words spoken by the main character are ‘I AM A WHORE.’ Despite all that has come after in her very successful career, Hudes says that this play still sends tingles up her spine: ‘I am reminded viscerally of my inheritance.’ Ultimately, that inheritance is the essence of this book, a language not just of words but of people, a language with a heartbeat.
My Broken Language is published by Harper Collins, 10th June 2021