Quiara Alegría Hudes - My Broken Language: A Memoir

It wasnt until I read Quiara Alegra Hudess book that I realized Ive spent much of my life running away from who I was as a girl in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn and from the mother who was then just a young woman with curly bangs and a lot of secrets. I write about myself for a living but I seem to only remember the sorrow, because I can see the scarsbut there was joy in those early New York summers, even when I felt like the loneliest girl in the world. Reading this book felt like those summers, the first ice cream cone from the first ice cream truck down Myrtle Avenue, the choking sob thrill of a memory lost on every single page, over and over again, and I cried from the relief of knowing that this was my city, this was my community, this was my legacy, this was my family, this was my story too.

K arla C ornejo V illavicencio , author of the National Book Award finalist The Undocumented Americans

In her vibrant memoir, My Broken Language, Quiara Alegra Hudes takes us on an unforgettable tour of her neighborhoods. Negotiating between languages, cultures, religions, and the most important boundary, the haves and have-nots, Hudes takes us with her to visit her relatives, leading us up the front stoop into the living room, past the household shrines. But more than being a translator for these vivid families, Quiara Alegra Hudes teaches us the grammar and the rules of the languages spoken and unspoken. Through music, food, storytelling, and memorable depictions of these worlds apart, Hudes has created a must-read book that is difficult to put down. Her generous intimacy causes us all to examineand honorour families broken languages that create a rich emotional legacy for the people we become.

P aula V ogel , emeritus Eugene ONeill Professor and chair of playwriting at the Yale School of Drama

Our histories, our spirits, our words, our racial diversity, our stories, our names will not be silenced thanks to Quiara Alegra Hudes. Her story helps us understand that our textured, rich cultural realities are to be valued, shared, and celebrated. The knowledge of Native and African elders grounded in natures forces is alive and Hudess journey urges us to understand and embrace the multiplicity of the spiritual energetic threads that guide our unique existence and contributions. It is in boldly standing in our truth that the misinformed histories that dominate the public narrative will be destroyed. Hudes is telling us: Say it loud, say it proud, we are the keepers of their stories, the spirit of our ancestors, and the storytellers that will pass forward their stories.

D r. M arta M oreno V ega , founder of the Creative Justice Initiative and Lukumi Priestess Omo Obatala

A wonderful and absorbing narrativeHudes presents an exquisitely told and deeply personal narrative about notions of home, family, and belonging. Its a master class on how we might all find the courage to tell our own stories on our own terms.

K imberly D rew , author of This is What I Know About Art and co-editor of Black Futures

Dad was hurrying mom in English. Lets go, Virginia, as he leaned against the tailgate sucking an unfiltered so hard I heard it crackle all the way on the stoop. Mom propped the screen door with her foot, ordering me to carry out boxes in snaps, gestures, and screams. And Titi Ginny was telling mom to pay dad no mind in Spanish. Siempre tiene prisa, she whispered with a tilted smile, turning dads impatience into a sweet little nothing.

My brat pack came to wave me off and started in on the obscene gestures whenever mom turned her back. Chien was first-generation Vietnamese. Ben and Elizabeth, first-gen Cambodian. Rowetha lost her Amharic after leaving Ethiopia. We all spoke English, unlike our parents, who all spoke different languages from one another. This was my West Philly crew, my pamperstopre-K alphabet soup. I assumed all blocks everywhere were like itas many languages as sidewalk cracks, one boarded-up home for every lived-in, more gum wads than dandelions. But mom told me no, nature would reign at our new rental house on a horse farm.

Titi Ginny unlatched the screen so it slammed, and handed me a pastelillo grease-wrapped in paper towel. A snack for the drive. I wanted her to re-create our current layout in the new spot, to move next door so I could sneak across the alley and watch cartoons in her lazy boy. There was a spot between two pleather cracks, duct-tape repaired, where my butt fit perfectly. My Sunday morning throne. But mom said there were no alleys where we were moving, and no such thing as next door either. That gave me something to think about.

Anyway, Titi Ginnys softball team was waiting in Fairmount Park and she had to be on second base in an hour. So she rolled down her drivers side and promised to visit the farm, my big cousins in tow. Mary Lou, Cuca, Flor, Big Vic, Vivi, and Nuchi. Shed cram all their stinky teen butts in her backseat, and theyd see the country for the first time. Bring Abuela and Ta Toa, oh, and Ta Moncha, too, I said, marveling at the prospect of hanging with my fam outside of Philly. Titi Ginny turned the key and every version of dios-te-bendiga rolled off her tongue. There were a million ways to say god-bless in Spanish. Dios te cuide, dios te favoresca, dios te this and te that. There was only one way to say it in English, and you only said it after a sneeze. Then off she went before off we went.