My Broken Language: A Memoir

On the farm, Quiara’s mother constructs a circular garden that she calls a “living medicine wheel” filled with medicinal plants and herbs. Growing up in Puerto Rico, Virginia’s father had never learned to read or write, but he taught her about plants and growing things. Now, Virginia shares that knowledge with her daughter. During the week, Quiara’s mother works long hours, enduring a commute that leaves her too exhausted to visit her family in the city on the weekends. 

Instead, Quiara and her mother spend their weekends in the garden, where Virginia performs rituals. These rituals are now the only time that Quiara hears Spanish spoken. Around her American husband, Virginia always speaks English. One day, instead of reading a prayer or journal entry, Virginia wants to tell Quiara about “something scary” that happened to her as a child so that Quiara can be prepared if she experiences something similar.

When Virginia was a child, she had nightmares “full of uncanny details” (12). One night, she dreamed of the neighbor Don Genaro beside her bed, telling her to “alert everyone.” When her parents went to the man’s house, they found him dead. One day, a search party came to the house, hoping for Virginia’s help locating a missing girl. Virginia’s mother refused. However, when the girl’s body was found, and Virginia discovered that she might have been able to help, she fell ill. Her hair fell out, and her skin became sallow. Finally, the family decided to cut down a large magnolia tree in front of the house. The blossoms were thought to have medicinal and spiritual power, and with the tree gone, Virginia’s visions vanished. Without her power, she “mastered the art of being incomplete” (15), and her childhood resumed. 

Virginia asks Quiara if her daughter has experienced similar dreams or visions. Quiara sees “a wish” in her mother’s eyes but has to say no, sensing both are disappointed with the answer. What matters, Quiara thinks, is that her mother trusted her with this story. She thinks listening can be her “own inner dream state” (17) and hopes her mother will share more secrets.

Quiara’s father smokes unfiltered Camels and reads Asimov, Vonnegut, and Bradbury. He is a carpenter and never speaks of his past or his family. Laid back in his recliner, Quiara takes everything he says as “inarguable fact.” He is an atheist and tells Quiara, “Religion is the root of all evil” (19). Quiara thinks of her mother’s ceremonies in the garden and wonders if that means Virginia is also evil. For days, she tries to gather the courage to ask her father. 

Quiara’s mother once told her that her father attended a wilderness survival camp as a child. He was dropped off in the wilderness with just a compass and a knife, expected to survive for 21 days. However, a camp official came for Quiara’s father early one morning. His mother had died of a heart attack, and he was flown out in a helicopter for the funeral. Quiara thinks there is something “a little bit holy” (21) about her father’s sadness. As she spends more time with him, she sees a “crack in his foundation” (21). She decides that he is not an atheist but a “mystic.” His belief in something greater than himself is evident in how he speaks “of a nail-less bookcase like psalm speaks of valley” (22). With this realization, Quiara stops taking her father’s words as absolute fact, paying attention instead to his actions and “trusting the unspoken.”

Malvern, Pennsylvania, where Quiara lives with her parents, is “a monolingual, pale world” (23), very different from the diversity of their Philadelphia neighborhood. On the first day of kindergarten, the teacher mispronounces Quiara’s name, and her classmates mock her middle name, calling her “Algeria” instead of “Alegría.” To “contain the damage,” Quiara stops using her middle name, becoming Quiara Hudes. Although she suffers from the teasing, Quiara still feels she “harbors a superhero’s secret” (24): her name is “a brand-new word” (24). When naming her, her mother had invented a new conjugation of the Spanish verb “querer,” which means “to love.”

Although her middle name means “happiness,” Quiara was named after a Puerto Rican anthropologist, Ricardo Alegría, who discovered ceremonial grounds belonging to the Indigenous Taíno people. Alegría wrote a book of the Taínos, giving Puerto Rico’s Indigenous roots recognition for the first time. Hudes comes from Quiara’s Jewish father, but thanks to his customary silence, she knows nothing about the name’s significance.

When Quiara’s mother brings a birthday cake to school, the children are shocked by her “copper skin and loose bouncing afro” (25), so different from Quiara. The other children ask if she was adopted, then wonder, “what are you?” (25). Quiara doesn’t know how to answer. She has little knowledge of Puerto Rico and even less of her father’s Jewish heritage. Instead, she tells the kindergarteners surrounding her that she is “half English, half Spanish […] as if made not of flesh and blood but language” (25).

None of Quiara’s Puerto Rican aunts or cousins come to the farm. Instead, any visitors continue to be English speakers. One summer, Simon, Quiara’s cousin on her father’s side, comes to stay. He is “a city kid” a few years older than she, and Quiara delights in showing off the farm and surrounding forest. 

Out exploring one day, Quiara steps on a beehive. The insects swarm immediately, covering Quiara as she runs away. She tears her sweater off, thinking for a moment that she is naked in front of Simon, then faints in the grass. She wakes as her father carries her inside and takes off the rest of her clothes while Simon looks on with “mischievous excitement.” Quiara covers herself and wishes her mother would appear to rescue and heal her “with eucalyptus oil and feminine hands” (28). However, the bee stings never swell much, and Quiara is left to spend the day in bed, counting the stings with Simon. As they count up her chest, Quiara only lifts her shirt halfway despite Simon’s hopeful eyes. She understands that her body “means something different to others than to [herself],” but she is bothered that Simon’s “curiosity happened atop [her] wound” (28-29).

When Quiara is nine, her parents separate, and she and her mother move back to their old block in Philadelphia. To visit her father, Quiara takes the train into the suburbs, and the “disparity” between English and Spanish is apparent in the change from broken-down factories to neatly-manicured lawns. This change “sicken[s]” Quiara; it implies that her Puerto Rican family is “messy derelict squalor” (31).

Quiara feels unmoored in her new life and looks for clues about what went wrong in her parents’ marriage. According to her mother, her father had an affair with a “punk-rock sculptor” and then with the sculptor’s friend, Sharon, to whom he is now engaged. Quiara resolves to ask her father for his version of events. When he confirms her mother’s story, Quiara’s father stops being her “carpenter god” and becomes a “lonely stranger [she sees] on occasional weekends” (35). 

Her father’s wedding takes place on the Malvern farm, where Virginia’s garden is now withered and unrecognizable. Unsure of the “protocol,” Quiara joins a group photo, but her father’s new wife leans down and tells her that the picture is for her family members, adding, “Today is my day” (37). Quiara feels that the word “my” was “used as a weapon” (37), and she leaves the party, running through the fields and into the forest. There, she thinks she was wrong to believe she would be included in her father’s new family. She spends a long time in the forest, relieved to have settled on her identity as “the girl alone.” She returns to the party feeling lighter, ready to apologize to her father for disappearing, thinking she might get “thirty seconds or a minute” (38) of his time. However, her father never approaches her.