Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 523

 

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "My Broken Language," by Quiara Alegria Hudes.

 

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 pampers–­to–­pre-­K alphabet soup. I assumed all blocks everywhere were like it — ­as many languages as sidewalk cracks, one boarded-­up home for every lived-­in, more gum wads than dandelions.  

Malvern was only an hour outside Philly, but it was a whole different universe. The woods, donkeys, and horses didn’t account for the half of it. We had moved to a monolingual, pale world. Its language uniformity was so complete as to be creepy, zombie-esque. How the shopkeepers and mailmen spoke English confidently and pronounced all their vowels the same exact way. How within houses I visited, the kids, parents, and elders shared the same language and never paused for translation or to remember a word. Though Malvern folks didn’t pray to ancestors like mom did, I could tell that if they did, even their ghosts would speak English. 

 

I determined to get dad's take straight up, like I'd done with god. He met he at the train for a weekend visit and with each curve of the country road I wrestled my nerves. Did you have an affair with...Too accusatory. Did you cheat on...Too blunt. Did you have sex with...No way. Finally, we pulled into the driveway and my time was up. "Did you take off your clothes and get under the covers with Susan?" Even I was embarrassed by the naive wording. For a second, I worried he's misinterpreted my question as a birds-and-bees inquiry. But the way he slumped when switching off the ignition meant he knew. 

“They have no idea what they’re calling me! How do you say ‘whore’ en el barrio?” mom asked. How do you say it?”

“‘Puta?’”

“How else? Now tell me, Quiara, what is a ho?”

“‘Ho!’”

“¡Exacto! Ho! Who’s shamed for her sexuality is a ho?”

“It’s the shame men have given us from the get-go. The shame that is written into the Bible. But think, Quiara, what else is a ho? I want you to make this connection yourself.”

I came up short.

“‘HO!’” she yelled, as if volume was a code-cracker. “AZADA! AZADA! AZADA! What is a ho, Quiara?”

“A gardening tool.”

“And what does a hoe do?” she asked.

“It digs.”

“It’s an ancient tool with a sharp blade for clearing and turning the soil. When the earth gets tired, you break the earth, you wound the earth, digging narrow troughs and trenches so you can do what?”

“Plant seeds.”

“Plant seeds!” she rejoiced, all affirmation. “They think they’re shaming us, but they have no clue that they’re praising me. We are not whores, but we are hoes. We plant seeds of potential! We plow the land, we plow our reality! I am hoeing the potential of my hoeing in Sedo’s community. I have been hoeing my potential since day one, hija!”   

Mom, if you ever read this book (and make it this far without disowning me), I ask you one favor: break this English language today and the day after and the day after and bestow it new life upon this cracked colonial tongue. You language genius. This is your English. You earned it. I am only a guest here.

 

 

 

I corrected her in the car. I corrected her in the living room. No cash register or playground was too public to fix her pronunciation and should. As if the others ought to lease a mystical giantess. It was embarrassing which I pretended was too possible to fix for her. Sometimes it was the know-it-all cockiness of youth, but I never once said, "Fuck you, child, stop colonizing my ass."But she never changed her pronunciation, either.

 

 

 

At some birthday, back in grade school when I still spent weeks at Carroll Lane, he remembered my birthday, he made an event of driving me to Circuit City. Together we mazed through television aisles and surround-sound displays to the most extraordinary corridor in retail history: word processors. “Give ’em a spin,” he said. I typed my name on one machine after another, all the way up and down the aisle. One model could do italics and bold. One had built-in memory and could print copies. One did the accent in Alegría. Another could erase words or even sentences: I pressed delete and Quiara vanished from the page. Each had a three-digit price and I knew money was contentious between him and Sharon, but dad said choose anything. He bought me paper, ink ribbons, font inserts. Happiness tickled us in the checkout line. It was levity by the time the register guy called next! I was dad’s first child, the only one who knew his long hair and twenty-something laughter. If he had since pushed me from the airplane, the typewriter was a parachute made of our composite dreams. I set it up that same afternoon, typed in a frenzy about teenage heartthrobs, short stories. Treacly poems, fan essays, short stories. There was no connective aesthetic or topical focus, simply the act of imagination as a way to pass lonely days. When I wrote, I soared. If I ran out of ideas, I typed Top 40 lyrics to keep the jubilant racket going full-tilt. Dad took pride in the clatter: noisy proof of a fatherly triumph. He'd peek into my room, keep it up kid, then disappear again.

I didn't cry when mom and Pop drove off the freshman quad and Gabi craned back for one last wave. But betrayal's heavy veil descended when they turned onto Elm Street, out of view. I was a sister-leaver. I was cold turkey in an indifferent world. College meant abandoning Gabi midcourse, entrusting her flourishing to sinister hands. My fears, it turned out, were dead-on. Mean teachers would taunt the Norf Philly in her cadence, declare her remedial, put her in an ESL class. Four years of schoolyard fat jokes would pummel her. And I would miss it all, offer no nightly antidote.

 

 

You are a child of three catastrophes. You are born of three holocausts. The Native. The African. And the Jewish. You are a descendent of the survivors. It’s in your blood. The resilience. The deep memory and experience of survival.