My Broken Language: A Memoir

Arriving at Brown, Quiara feels “woefully unprepared” among classmates who cite authors she has never heard of and grew up involved in school theatre. After having spent four years “unlearning” and “un-remembering” the music she loved, Quiara doesn’t want to repeat the experience at Brown. However, her “ignorance” among her cohort is clear, and she goes to Paula, who assigns her a reading list of a hundred plays. As she reads, Quiara can hardly wait to finish each play before rushing to her desk.

Paula drives her students to the Cape, where they tell ghost stories and wake up to the “blinding white sand dunes” surrounding their professor’s home. She tells them, “Playwriting can get you this!” (278), indicating her success and reminding them that they don’t have to be “starving artists.” However, Quiara is excited not by the thought of wealth but by “put[ting] one’s world onstage” (278). She is enamored with Paula’s energy, and her “untired eyes” are a novelty to Quiara. She watches Paula make oatmeal for breakfast but declines a serving, thinking it best not to “lower [her] defenses.”

Paula teaches her students to “find [their] fellow travelers” and bring those people along with them if a door opens (280). To this effect, Paula brings her own fellow travelers into class as guest teachers, one of whom is Holly Hughes.

As a middle-schooler, Quiara loved artists like Keith Haring and Spike Lee. Her backpack was covered in Haring pins, and she often skipped lunch to rent Lee’s Do the Right Thing. In 1993, the National Endowment for the Arts cut funding, resulting in a “nationwide defanging” of controversial artists. During an afternoon at school, Quiara learned about the NEA Four, a group of performance artists whose grants were vetoed. She immediately rushed to the library, where she discovered the work of Holly Hughes, Karen Finley, John Fleck, and Tim Miller. These artists spoke about many of the topics that were taboo in her family, like the AIDS crisis, giving Quiara “permission to claim [her[ silences aloud” (283).

When Holly Hughes walks into Quiara’s classroom, she tells the students to take five minutes and list all their identities. Quiara starts with “pianist” and progresses to “hides-on-Abuela’s-staircase-during-the-party girl” (284) before the feeling of the spirit takes over. Quiara’s pen moves of its own volition, and when she comes to, shaking and nauseous, her list of identities goes on for pages. Reading through them, Quiara realizes that she has listed the identities of the Perez women. However, in each identity she has listed, Quiara also sees herself. Her family has made her; they are her “biblical ribs and mud” (286).

Sedo, Quiara’s “Pop,” grew up in the interior of Puerto Rico in a tiny town with no electricity. When he was five, his uncle took Pop to the city for the first time and bought the boy his first Coca-Cola. However, when Pop took the bottle, he cried out and dropped it: he had never had a cold drink before. 

This story becomes one of Quiara’s plays, just like the story of the Fourth of July dance party and the story of her first period. The memories accumulated from “a lifetime of eavesdropping, secret-keeping, and spying poured forth” (290), and Orisha appear in every play, sometimes front and center, other times almost invisible. As Quiara writes, she starts to wonder if she can create “a safe space” where she can “control the narrative, center [her]self and [her] loved ones” (293). She turns the Perez women into protagonists and builds “the throne” to honor them.

Although she is immersed in writing about the Perez women, Quiara is distant from their “present-tense […] reality” (295). When her mother calls to check in, she tells her that Nuchi is sick. She is skinny and showed Virginia a “purple sore” on her belly. The silence still holds, though, and Quiara’s mother refuses to say the word “AIDS,” infuriating her daughter. However, Quiara knows that her anger at her mother is an “easy target” that allows her to overlook other sources of fault. 

When she sees Nuchi at Virginia’s birthday party, Quiara asks about her health, and Nuchi takes off her shoe to reveal “a whopper of a bunion” (297) instead of addressing her HIV status. By some measures, Quiara thinks that Nuchi has “weathered the storm;” her children have gone on to college, and she has “a parcel of grandkids” that she babysits (298). Through it all, Nuchi hasn’t lost her sense of humor, an accomplishment that Quiara sees as “her most impressive humanity” (298). Looking at her cousin, Quiara hopes that one day she will “claim and really know a resilience of [her] own” (298).

The Perez women are frequently and shamelessly naked, showing off their bodies like “natural wonders.” Their shapes and curves are so varied that they reveal the “downright laziness” of using “fat” as a slur. As a girl, Quiara’s body hasn’t “accrued much character,” and she looks forward to the day she will be “a woman whose body told tales” (303). She grows up in “a Vogue nation” that demands skinniness, but the Perez women, in their “fleshy testimony,” tear apart “the notion of a single beauty mold” (304).

For ten years, Quiara boycotts the word “fat” but reclaims the slur when she begins writing. She writes a one-Act play about a bi-curious Latina girl inspired by the Perez women and their bodies, but her inspiration dries up for the second Act. One night, for a change of scenery, Quiara goes to the graduate cluster to write after dinner. There, Quiara experiences another possession. When she returns to reality, gasping and feeling “unwell,” four hours have passed, and she has written over 40 pages. As she reads back through the play, she is alarmed to find the story becoming dark and violent. The antagonists become more present and finally catch up to the lead character, trapping her. They move to kill the girl, who proclaims, “I AM A WHORE” (309).

Quiara is alarmed. She can see that the girl is “reclaiming monstrosity” with the declaration, but Quiara hates the ending. She goes to delete the line but cannot bring herself to do it. Instead, she emails Paula, telling her professor she has written something that scares her. She sits in the lab waiting for a response and thinks of the animals that her mother used to sacrifice. She remembers that Virginia always turned the sacrificed animal into a special meal that Quiara had eaten out of respect, even though she was a vegetarian throughout adolescence. She remembers Pop’s children calling her mother a “whore” and her mother laughing and reclaiming the term. Quiara wonders what use a hoe is for women who have “divorced mother nature” and migrated to the city. However, she realizes that “one human-size patch of earth” went with them in the form of their bodies (311). 

Paula responds to Quiara’s email telling her that she, too, has been frightened while writing. The act of “removing the armor and seeing the wounds still bled” is difficult and painful (311). Quiara prints the play and goes home. She feels like her apprenticeship is over, and what comes next is beginning. After that night in the lab, she will not experience another possession. 

The play is produced a few months later. The lead character is based on Gabi, and Quiara momentarily worries that she has written a “sisterhood-annihilating machine.” However, after the play, her sister cries, saying she feels “seen” and “fuckin’ powerful” (312). Addressing the Perez women directly, Hudes writes that they are their “own librarians” and they must “declare [their] tremendous survival” not just in words but with their bodies. Sitting beside an unidentified Perez woman on opening night, they touch while watching the play, affirming, “We are here” (314).