My Broken Language

by Quiara Alegría Hudes

  Accepting god in her life had been the hardest part, and pivotal to her turnaround. Not going through the motions like a kid at Sunday mass—praying, genuflecting, grape juice and wafers. An actual reckoning. Removing the self from the solar system’s midpoint. Flor was futility, Flor was failure, Flor was not behind the wheel. “People try to do the twelve steps and skip the god stuff, they just mumble the prayer to get to what they like. That’s shortcuts, you gonna relapse. When they were the one in charge, they fucked up. Surrender or it don’t work.”

  She asked permission to say the serenity prayer. Not to proselytize, not to freak me out, but to share something that helped her be a better self. Same as me playing Chopin. I said of course, but as “god” left her lips my toady little cynic was turning somersaults. I was the Muppets in the balcony, sneering at the artists. God? Really? REALLY?! And yet Vivi’s bullet and penny-smooth scar pricked my conscience. Mom’s five-year-old premonitions jangled my memory. And what of my own knees throttling during Quaker meeting, or my pen-in-hand blackout in Dr. Phillips’s essay test?

  God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

  The courage to change the things I can,

  And the wisdom to know the difference.

  Words familiar as the hiss of a kneeling bus or a car alarm two corners away. Background noise, the soundtrack of Philly. But in Flor’s embarrassed delivery the lines trembled with solace. To be better today than she was yesterday, that was her new North Star. Every bit mattered. The little bit may be all you get. She laid her flaws on the sofa cushion, as though my witness were medicine.

  Her success would receive no departmental honors. There would be no leather-bound degree in Latin, no brass parade. But which accomplishment ran deeper? Every string quartet I’d composed at Yale, or every night Flor fell asleep sober? Her life was a pebble skipped across a stream—a brief event whose ripples were real.

  Then mom was hollering Come dust the gravy boat! and There’s nine matching napkins pero necesitaba sixteen, carajo! Flor slipped out to the alley for a smoke. I searched the closet for the missing linens, my cousin’s testimony throttling my brain, tilt-a-whirl. A full hour of explanation, of this-is-me and here’s-what-happened. Of I-speak-the-beast, I-put-the-beast-between-my-teeth, I-name-myself-aloud. Flor’s story as communion wafer. The opposite of silence.

  I did find the napkins, but it wasn’t little Qui Qui who laid them at each Perez place setting. Qui Qui was the kid who lost her cousins. Quiara was the woman who got one back.

  Sterling Library

  There were a hundred ways to spend a Yale afternoon, and all of them came with an unparalleled setting. An emerald lawn, a modernist dining hall, mahogany wainscoting on the seminar wall, an Olympic pool. Sterling Library was the crown jewel, its Gothic spires poking the clouds. Numerous slate walkways converged at its facade so that Sterling’s majesty was a part of almost all daily foot traffic. En route to the dining hall, seminar, studio. Heading to Ashley’s Ice Cream or back from the practice rooms. The cycling team gathered at its wide shallow steps before pedaling toward scenic Connecticut. Student tour guides barked its pedigree to hopeful high schoolers. “Half a city block!” the work-study sophomore would declare. Each of its three thousand stained-glass windows was unique. It housed millions of volumes. Cracking the door an inch required half your weight, heaving. Peek into the cavernous nave, you’d see columns uplit like a scene out of The Godfather. A brooding, shadowy, amber darkness antithetical to reading.

  Venture farther in, it would come clear that the treasure chest had been abandoned. Sterling’s labyrinthine stacks were rarely visited. None of its sixteen floors had computer labs or viable napping sofas. Students visited on a transactional basis. Get your book and go. All the more reason I loved it. The cavelike reverb and concrete floors in late spring. I’d sit with a book and let the cement’s cool kiss jolt my thighs. Corridors smelling of old paper and metal bookends. Dust hovered in what meager light permeated the stained glass. The time was always one breath before dawn inside those dim glowing passageways. Wandering aisle to aisle, often without goal, I raked my fingers along cellophane spines. I tried the religion section, poetry mimeographs, gardening books. Such meandering might lead to a song lyric, a line of dialogue, a term paper idea. The less related to my project, the better. Staircases between shelves secreted me to vaults of epistolary folios, military ledgers, nautical maps. Sometimes I pulled a drawer from the card catalogue simply to touch its well-thumbed edges. As if the past, and my place in it, were a simple matter of touch.

  Summers were for the other Quiara, the quantum Quiara of the parallel universe aka Philly, aka home. Half a block of Sterling versus half a block of North 2nd. Whiplash contrasts bordering on absurd. There was a haunting indulgence in my freedom to wander, to pick a book from a shelf, to read. So many aisles Nuchi would never roam. So many pages she would never turn. Nuchi would not be dumbstruck at the climactic lines of for colored girls…

  i found god in myself

  & i loved her / i loved her fiercely

  Nor would she arrive at those lines by way of these, a few pages earlier:

  i waz missin somethin…

  somethin promised…

  a layin on of hands

  the holiness of myself released

  Pages that might talk her off some spiritual ledge, as they’d done for me. Narrative armor, safe places to land, instructions for survival sent to future generations. That is, if we in the future could decode them.

  With each passing semester, Nuchi occupied more real estate in my imagination, as did Yale’s monstrous beauty. Senior year it got bad. Graduation was a beast roaring at me, its approach magnifying my four-year remove from home. Soon I’d be back in Philly with my cousins. We would dance, no doubt. My stiff hips had loosened with age, my inhibitions shed. There would be a laying on of hands. But my cousins knew the raw score as did I—my ship had set sail. Toward what, to where? I didn’t know, and Yale hadn’t shown me the answer. But somewhere other than the Marines, nursing school, the corner—paths my younger cousins had already begun walking. The snag of resentment hooked and caught. Yale’s opulence became a mean sort of mockery until a bitter kernel implanted in my gut. I stopped visiting Sterling. Averted my gaze when I strolled past. A question on loop, taunting: Why do I get Sterling Library and Nuchi doesn’t? It roiled and implicated me. I was troubled by both extremes: Yale’s affluence, Philly’s scarcity, but more so by the divide separating them. Truth being: the divide was where I had made my home. Until I became a bridge, if such a reconciliation was possible, there would be no peace.

  And what of Gabi? Kindergarten went fine in my absence. It was a bilingual pilot program in the heart of el barrio. Latino kids, half English speakers, half Spanish. Then for first grade, mom advocated her into Greenfield, a magnet in Center City. Amongst a whiter population, Gabi was labeled different. Remedial. Grade levels behind. A report card came home with the word spanish stamped across it. A real Looney Tunes image. The red-ink letters might as well have read danger or fragile. Mom didn’t understand its significance, and when she asked, Gabi spoke fondly of her new ESL classmates. She was with Latinos again! Mom was floored. Thought she was telling stories. Had to march into school and ask the damn deal. English is her first language, mom told the administrators. Her Spanish is conversational at best, mom would say.

  Summer and holiday breaks were too short to cram in four years’ worth of tutoring. Thanksgiving break my sophomore year—Gabi was in first grade—I had pulled her to the couch, cradled her close, and plunged my nose into her nest of curls. I missed her smell, her soft embrace, the dimples bracketing her rascal smile. I missed being the center of her saucy world. Smooshed arm-to-arm on the cushions, I had opened a simple board book. Pointed to the first word. The letters were random squiggles, she said. They don’t pair with sounds, she insisted. Let�
��s memorize it, then, I responded. A straight line with two semicircles, that makes B. Can you find another B on the page? And seven-year-old Gabi pointed to a B, rankled and shutting down. I’m not like you, she whispered, tears welling up. For you, it comes easy, she said. It became her go-to armor against my impatience.

  “Try again, Gabi. What sound does B make?”

  “I don’t know! I’m not like you, remember?”

  And I would close the book and we’d play hide-and-seek till the tears were forgotten. By my senior year—her third grade—she could read to the end, but not without painstaking effort or shutting down or crying.

  Is this what had happened to Nuchi? Had no one discovered the proper intervention, or bothered trying in the first place? Had she been dismissed to the back of the room or from the room altogether? Sayonara, kid, go be someone else’s problem. I wasn’t there to witness either childhood. Not Nuchi’s, which preceded mine, or my sister’s, which continued regardless of my absence. Providing homework help from far-off Yale was impossible. I couldn’t even counter all these new Gabi narratives with the heft or pace at which they arrived. Couldn’t insist daily: girl, you a gat-dang genius. Couldn’t say, mark my words, I know smart and you’re off the charts. Couldn’t promise over Cheerios, we’ll figure this out, matter of time. Or wrap her in the bath towel with a melodic reminder: your belly holds mother earth, Little Shakespeare.

  One thing I could do, though. Feel the sisterly-cousinly love plunge knife-deep as I walked past Sterling and looked away.

  The Foraker Act (On Boriken’s—and the Diaspora’s—Language History)

  “Do you believe in god?”

  All the other Yalies in the car had taken their turn with the question. Unilaterally, their answer was no. They were white or, like me, white-passing. Secular Jews, nonpracticing Protestants, fourth-generation atheists. They approached the question as a twenty-minute segment of the day trip, half-deep getting-to-know-you talk. Each had a different story about their particular flavor of nonbelief. They cracked self-deprecating jokes about their stubborn skepticism. They lamented having no tradition—there were times it might provide ballast, they conceded—but such was the cost of reason-based existence. Now came my turn, last.

  “Do you believe in god?”

  I often struggled to squeeze my reality into words that didn’t fit, English ill-fitting as a stranger’s shoes. As it had so many times, a gulf stretched between me and this language. My language. I clammed up. The heat flooding my cheeks tipped beyond reticence into panic. I was certain they could see my fever rise, sniff a faith that snagged and cobbled me beyond small talk’s palatable edges. And the words, which slid off their tongue with such ease—did they not see how the words were inaccurate to the topic?

  “You” was a straightjacket. There is no plural “you” in English. But a question regarding the sacred implicated a circle beyond myself. It meant Tía Toña’s sopera urns, mom’s Lakota prayers translated into Spanish, it meant herb gardens, Yoruba thrones, cowry divination, Abuela’s whispered Bible study.

  “Believe” struck me as not only irrelevant but almost comical. Back in my Philly living room, god started fires, made sock puppets of flesh and blood. I had seen mom down a whole jug of rum. God played hard with my material world. My eyes had borne witness. What did belief matter?

  And which “god” did they mean? Atabey, an Orisha, a spirit guide, los Egun, Abuela’s Jesucristo, mami’s Olofi Olodumare, Tía Moncha’s Virgen Maria? Divinities had crossed oceans to enter my Philly home, and naming them required four languages: Taíno, Yoruba, Spanish, and English. Not to mention the visual language of mom’s thrones, the vibrational testimony of the batá drum.

  My Yale friends awaited an answer. But English—my first tongue, my mother’s second—lacked the vocabulary to describe my concepts. So how could I tell them? How could I name myself?

  Finally, I spoke in softest voice. Yes. I whispered it, half wishing they wouldn’t hear.

  “Really?”

  “Wow. So, what does god mean?”

  “Like, a bearded man in the sky? The Sistine Chapel guy with the pointed finger?”

  I was an oddity, a real curiosity. Qui Qui’s primitive beliefs, a throwback, an enigma. This confusion was nothing new. Descriptions of Santería and Changó were often required in my life outside el barrio. Though I didn’t love having to explain mom, I was used to it. But amongst this eloquent company, positioned as we were near the levers of earthly power, I worried my bumbling explanation would reduce mom’s spiritual genius to sideshow. But how I yearned to share the numinous world I had come to study, metabolize, and respect.

  Maybe that’s why I began looking away from Sterling Library. Because I was dreaming, instead, of a library I might fit into. One with space to hold my cousins, my tías, my sister, mi madre. An archive made of us, that held our concepts and reality so that future Perez girls would have no question of our existence or validity. Our innovations and conundrums, our migrations and Rashomon narratives could fill volumes, take up half a city block. Future Perez girls would do book reports amid its labyrinthine stacks, tracing lineages through time and hemispheres, knowing that one day they’d add to the collection. A place where we’d be more than one ethnomusicology shelf, but every shelf, the record itself. And future Perez girls, or hell, even Gabi, would step into the library of us and take its magnificence for granted. It would seem inevitable, a given, to be surrounded by one’s history.

  * * *

  —

  My Yale friends and I continued driving through the mountains. Foliage flanked the twisty road and blanketed the valley ahead of us. It was calming, how the trees stood and offered themselves to my heart.

  I answered the follow-up questions as best I could, fumbling toward explanations of religious syncretism, how the old world folded atop the new out of necessity and invention. They could tell I was rankled, and moved on to other topics. I pondered the view, remembering, suddenly, those two strange moments in which I’d become…possessed? Was that the right word? In Dr. Phillips’s essay test and at Quaker meeting. Two instances of writing and storytelling when I had lost control, relinquishing authorial power to something deep within or far outside me. During those fleeting tempests, language, meaning, and narrative enacted themselves upon me. A truth was spoken and therefore purged. I had named dissonance, ugliness, suffering, love, and divinity in ways my everyday language didn’t equip me to. Rough and raw words had ripped into the world, unconcerned with permission or modulation. English words. Why couldn’t I do that with English now, in road-trip conversation with college buddies?

  Those particular Yale friends had English-speaking parents. Their grandparents held advanced degrees from American universities. English was a generations-old mastery in their homes. Their upward mobility was enabled by English, their conceptual reality sculpted and limited by it. They thought and dreamed in the language. It was the English-language god whom their families had long abandoned.

  My elders had been educated in various languages, inconsistently. At twelve, mom was plunged into English-only junior high in Philly. A few courses at Community comprised her higher education. Pop had left Barranquitas, Puerto Rico, for grade school in Philly. His English had a few years on mom’s, but taking over a grocery store—becoming a businessman—at sixteen prematurely ended his formal education. Abuela used her second-grade education to read La Biblia. She scorned the English language, downright refused to speak it. And her schooling, she knew, was more than some got. My abuelo, an indentured servant since childhood in Puerto Rico, never stepped foot in a classroom.

  Language was not what connected us as a family. A dinner table ritual, where people gather to discuss news of the day, was not at the heart of how we communicated. Bodies were the mother tongue at Abuela’s, with Spanish second and English third. Dancing and ass-slapping, palmfuls of rice, ponytail-pulling and w
ound-dressing, banging a pot to the clave beat. Hands didn’t get lost in translation. Hips bridged gaps where words failed.

  * * *

  —

  I gotta step out of the narrative for a sec. I have studied, at forty, histories I hadn’t at twenty-one. Perhaps if I had majored in American Studies, I would’ve known I was not the first in my lineage at a loss for words. Perhaps I would’ve accepted my place on the historic battlefield that is Boricua language. Perhaps I would have found context, or even strength, in the centuries-old cultural becoming that now included me. Quizás. But at that time, I thought speaking English marked my profound cultural failure.

  Prior to 1493, Taínos spoke various Arawakan languages and dialects in the island’s coastal and interior pockets. Then European ships appeared, importing guns, smallpox, and Spanish. From first encounter, the Taínos refused to assimilate and speak Español. Their words, and the bodies that housed them, were pillaged. The colonizers’ vocabulary, in turn, grew. Hurakan, boriken, barbacoa. These became Spanish for “hurricane,” “Borinquen,” and “barbecue.” Hamaka (fish net) became “hamaca” (hammock). Batata and tabaco would traverse Spanish toward the English “potato” and “tobacco.” Wayaba would become the Spanish “guayaba,” the English “guava.” And of course the colonizers learned yuca, for that nourishment rooted in Boriken’s soil, which the god Yukahu’s fertility made abundant. These weren’t solely new words to Spanish occupiers, but new realities, new concepts, new food, a new material world.