My Broken Language: A Memoir

At Yale, Sterling Library takes up half a city block. It has 3,000 stained glass windows and houses millions of books. Quiara loves wandering through the library and reading in silence. However, the library also underscores the “whiplash […] bordering on absurd” that separate Sterling Library from Quiara’s neighborhood in North Philly. As time passes, Quiara thinks more and more about the gulf separating her from her illiterate cousin Nuchi. 

As graduation looms, Quiara knows she is on a different path from her cousins but doesn’t know yet where it leads. She is “troubled” by the divide between “Yale’s affluence [and] Philly’s scarcity” (230-1), asking herself over and over, “Why do I get Sterling Library and Nuchi doesn’t?” (230). However, Quiara lives on this divide, and to find peace, she knows she must become “a bridge.”

She worries about Gabi, who, after kindergarten, was moved to a “whiter” school and quickly labeled “remedial.” She was placed in ESL classes even though English is her first language. When Quiara tries to teach her to read in first grade, she quickly shuts down, crying that she is not like her sister. By third grade, Gabi can read, but only with “painstaking effort” (232). At Yale, Quiara is too far away to offer the constant support and encouragement that Gabi needs. She can only “feel the sisterly-cousinly love plunge knife-deep” (232) every time she walks by Sterling Library.

Riding in the car with her Yale classmates, the others begin discussing if they believe in God. The consensus among the white and “white-passing” students is no. When Quiara’s turn comes, she feels the familiar inadequacy of English when describing her reality. She thinks that the word “believe” is “not only irrelevant but almost comical” (234). She has seen the existence of God in her mother’s rituals and her own experiences with possession, making believing irrelevant. She finally mumbles a yes but struggles with the follow-up questions, not wanting to “reduce [Virginia’s] spiritual genius to sideshow” (235).

As she struggles to find the words she needs, Quiara dreams “of a library [she] might fit into” (235), one that contains her family’s stories and their concepts of reality, a place “to be surrounded by one’s history” (235), something future generations of Perez women would take for granted. In the car, Quiara thinks of Dr. Phillips’ essay test and the incident at the Quaker meeting when she became “possessed.” The spirit had used English words to name “dissonance, ugliness, suffering, love, and divinity” (236), and Quiara wonders why the language so often fails her. The other students in the car come from homes with “a generations-old mastery” of English. Quiara, however, reflects that her ancestors have “been educated in various languages, inconsistently” (236). Instead of language bringing the Perez family together, “bodies [are] the mother tongue” (237), creating a way of communicating that is never confused or lost in translation. 

Here, Hudes declares she must “step out of the narrative” (237) to deliver some context on her family’s linguistic history. She notes that what she perceived as a “profound cultural failure” actually marks her “place on the historic battlefield that is Boricua language” (237). 

When Spanish settlers arrived in Puerto Rico, the native Taíno people refused to speak Spanish. As the settlers pillaged the island and its people, various words of the Taínos’ Arawakan languages began making their way into English. These words, like yuca, described “new realities, new concepts, new food, a new material world” (238). When the colonial project had decimated the Taíno people, the Spanish began importing enslaved people from Africa, bringing new languages. For centuries, these languages “mixed and informed one another’s music” (239). 

Spain declared Puerto Rico’s independence in 1897, and the following year, the island became a territory of the United States. However, the US government and the sugar corporations taking over the island did not speak Spanish. The Foraker Act was passed, mandating the use of English in government and schools. English-speaking white men were appointed to government positions, Puerto Rican holidays were replaced with American ones, and English-language textbooks were distributed in schools where teachers were now forbidden to speak Spanish. Students were cut off from their history and culture. Schools were full of “confusion and disenfranchisement,” and “two generations had fled formal education” by the time Spanish was reinstated (240).

Coming to the United States as children, Quiara’s mother’s generation became bilingual. They dated Black, Brown, and white men, causing “Black Philly’s dynamic speech patterns” to unfold along with “white articulation” (240). Quiara’s generation learned English first and Spanish second, making Spanglish their “common tongue.”

With Jewish, Native, and African roots, Quiara’s mother would tell her she was “born of three holocausts” (241) and that she was born of resilience and survival. However, Quiara thinks that she has also inherited “the perpetration of those holocausts” (241). She is “the inflictor and the inflicted” (241).

Music is Quiara’s “chosen” language, and her “musical loves” have always been diverse, from neo-romantic punk to Stravinsky. However, at Yale, the coursework often seems “reductive,” and Quiara often feels as if she has “been mistakenly dropped onto someone else’s path” (245), even while her work is praised.

After graduation, she rents an apartment in West Philly with her high school boyfriend and begins playing gigs. She plays anything she can find—solo, with bands, as an accompanist. She records a demo and gets a call from Larry Gold, an R&B cellist and local Philly legend. When she plays some of her songs for him, he offers to record two of her pieces and then an album if he likes them. After recording, Gold asks Quiara what her music is about, but Quiara doesn’t have an answer. He tells her, in his “professional opinion,” she isn’t good enough. She is “close” but doesn’t “cross the line that makes a musician special” (252).

Quiara is invited to open for jazz poet and spoken word legend Gil Scott-Heron. In the back room before the show, he asks Quiara what her story is. She tells him she is “West Philly, born and bred” (253), but her mind is blank when he asks for more details. Her set starts, but Quiara feels “hollow,” wondering what characterizes her music besides “a general pleasantness.” As Gil Scott-Heron begins his set, she feels the “old shame” of her silence. 

Quiara finally admits boredom to her mother, saying she doesn’t know where she is taking her music. Then, her mother asks why Quiara has never pursued writing as a profession. She reminds her daughter of the musical she wrote at Yale and asks why she let it go. This never occurred to Quiara, who was never given any exposure to Puerto Rican literature throughout her entire education. Quiara’s mother asks her for a favor. She reminds Quiara of the “power a library shelf holds” (256) and tells her that their family needs her to remember their history after Abuela dies. 

Quiara thinks her mother is asking her to finally break the silence that surrounds her family. Much of this silence has ensured their survival, but now Quiara wonders if she can “build a throne made of visibility” (257). As she washes the rice, snapshots of her musical life fill her mind: learning piano as a child, listening to music at Tower Records, and composing music at Yale. She realizes that music is “no longer enough.” She hears snippets of music, each one appearing, then leaving with “a ceremonial kiss.” Finally, Quiara is left with “a profound stillness.” Into that stillness, she remembers the forgotten question: “Why do I get Sterling Library and Nuchi doesn’t?” (258)