Playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes brings warmth and exuberance to her narration in this memoir of family, language, home, and coming of age as an artist. A collection of heartbreaking and joyful moments comes alive through her voice. Her narration embodies the rhythms of her beloved North Philly neighborhood; the love and familiarity she uses to capture the voices of the many women in her big Puerto Rican family create an unforgettable intimacy. This is a memoir about language—how it shapes lives, how it lives in the body—and Hudes’s voice is as powerful as her words. The audiobook is a gorgeous mix of English and Spanish, open and musical, full of laughter and sighs, a spoken-word celebration as vibrant and overflowing with life as the stories she tells. L.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2021 Best Audiobook © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
My Broken Language
Narrated by Quiara Alegría Hudes
Quiara Alegría HudesUnabridged — 10 hours, 44 minutes
My Broken Language
Narrated by Quiara Alegría Hudes
Quiara Alegría HudesUnabridged — 10 hours, 44 minutes
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Overview
“Quiara Alegri'a Hudes is in her own league. Her sentences will take your breath away. How lucky we are to have her telling our stories.”-Lin-Manuel Miranda, award-winning creator of Hamilton and In the Heights
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: NPR, New York Public Library, BookPage, BookRiot
Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced their defiance in a tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her mother and aunts and cousins, but haunted by the unspoken, untold stories of the barrio-even as she tried to find her own voice in the sea of language around her, written and spoken, English and Spanish, bodies and books, Western art and sacred altars. Her family became her private pantheon, a gathering circle of powerful orisha-like women with tragic real-world wounds, and she vowed to tell their stories-but first she'd have to get off the stairs and join the dance. She'd have to find her language.
Weaving together Hudes's love of music with the songs of her family, the lessons of North Philly with those of Yale, this is a multimythic dive into home, memory, and belonging-narrated by an obsessed girl who fought to become an artist so she could capture the world she loved in all its wild and delicate beauty.
LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL
Editorial Reviews
★ 02/22/2021
Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Hudes (Water by the Spoonful) delivers a love letter to her Puerto Rican heritage in her astonishing debut memoir. Chronicling her childhood in North Philadelphia, with a Jewish father and Boricua mother, and her early career as a playwright, she exposes chasms around identity and builds bridges between her selves as Boricua, mixed race, composer, writer, and observer. After her parents’ marriage dissolved, she bounced between two households and felt “stretched between English me and Spanish me.” Her mom, a faithful Santeria adherent, and the soulful dancing of her cousins left her sidelined and unable to communicate: “My words and my world did not align.” Then her “not-quite-stepfather” brought home an old piano, and she discovered music was a “new language.” Upon leaving for Yale to study composition, Hudes felt at odds with the privileged backgrounds of her peers, and it wasn’t until she enrolled in an MFA program at Brown that she found her voice and was able to incorporate her Boricua culture into her theater productions, a breakthrough that “reminded viscerally of my inheritance.” The fine-tuned storytelling is studded with sharply turned phrases (after long workdays, her mom is “soggy-limbed, a marionette whose strings had come loose”). This heartfelt, glorious exploration of identity and authorship will be a welcome addition to the literature of Latinx lives. Agent: Ian Kleinert, Objective Entertainment. (Apr.)
My Broken Language is such a flawless demonstration of . . . strife with linguistic inheritance that it nearly broke me. In the moments after I finished reading, first came the aphasia of wonder at a book that exceeds you; and then, swiftly crowding out the silence, the cresting roar of my own Afro-Caribbean ancestors shouting Ogún Balenyó in unison.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Quiara Alegría Hudes is a bona fide storyteller about the people she loves—especially the women in her family who cook, talk, light candles, and conjure the spirits. Enormously empathetic and funny, My Broken Language is rich with unflinching observations that bring us in close, close, without cloaking the details. The language throughout is gorgeous and so moving. I love this book.”—Angie Cruz, author of Dominicana
“Every line of this book is poetry. From North Philly to all of us, Hudes showers us with aché, teaching us what it looks like to find languages of survival in a country with a ‘panoply of invisibilities.’ Hudes paints unforgettable moments on every page for mothers and daughters and all spiritually curious and existential human beings. This story is about Latinas. But it is also about all of us.”—Maria Hinojosa, Emmy Award–winning journalist and author of Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America
“Wise, graceful, and devastatingly beautiful, Hudes’s memoir gives voice to the complicated cultural collisions and gentle rebellions that seed a life. I was inspired and moved by the resilient spirit of Hudes and the Perez women, who through joy and great heartbreak manage to conjure a remarkable world in and beyond their Philly barrio.”—Lynn Nottage, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright
“Joyful, righteous, indignant, self-assured, exuberant: These are all words that could describe Quiara Alegría Hudes’s My Broken Language. The celebrated playwright calls her language broken, but in this extraordinary memoir she actually remakes language so that it speaks to her world. . . . Hudes’s first name is an invented endearment, a form of the verb querer, which means “to love.” . . . There may be no better compliment to the author of this marvelous, one-of-a-kind memoir than to say she truly lives up to her name. With My Broken Language, she has invented a language of love and to-the-bone happiness to tell stories only a Perez woman could share.”—BookPage (starred review)
★ 04/01/2021
With this riveting memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Hudes tells the story of attempting to find the language that best fits her, along with the languages (English and Spanish) she heard throughout her childhood. Beginning with the distant memory of her parents' split, Hudes evocatively recalls life traveling between her abuela's North Philly kitchen, her mother's West Philly home, and her father's farm in a homogenous Main Line suburb. Recollections of her mother's and grandmother's upbringings in Puerto Rico are rich with detail, as are depictions of aunts, uncles, and cousins who find their way in and around Philadelphia. Hudes is at her best when conveying the challenges of navigating two worlds—not feeling Puerto Rican enough to fully connect with her mother, and always feeling out of place when visiting her Jewish father and his new family. Her writing also thoughtfully details the shame and silence around AIDS, especially as it touched her family. To find solace amid grief and disappointment, Hudes turned to music and literature. The book's powerful final chapters cover her time studying music at Yale and ultimately earning an MFA from Brown. VERDICT Hudes has written a can't-miss love letter, in the form of a memoir, about the people and city that shaped her. A beautifully written story of finding one's own sense of self.—Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal
Playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes brings warmth and exuberance to her narration in this memoir of family, language, home, and coming of age as an artist. A collection of heartbreaking and joyful moments comes alive through her voice. Her narration embodies the rhythms of her beloved North Philly neighborhood; the love and familiarity she uses to capture the voices of the many women in her big Puerto Rican family create an unforgettable intimacy. This is a memoir about language—how it shapes lives, how it lives in the body—and Hudes’s voice is as powerful as her words. The audiobook is a gorgeous mix of English and Spanish, open and musical, full of laughter and sighs, a spoken-word celebration as vibrant and overflowing with life as the stories she tells. L.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2021 Best Audiobook © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine
★ 2021-01-19
A Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright presents a tender yet defiant tale about finding strength in one’s roots.
In this elegant and moving memoir, Hudes begins with her upbringing in Puerto Rico and Philadelphia, examining the complexities involved in negotiating two distinct worlds early on. At first, she fixated on the languages spoken around her and the ways in which their syllables and pronunciations told stories that would become woven into her own. As she grew older, however, her awe morphed into an acute awareness of her difference from other children, and she was embarrassed by her mother’s spiritualist practices. “I so wanted to take my dad’s side, join his disavowal of any god, his assertion that religion was the root of all evil,” she writes. “It would have brought a perverse relief to write off mom’s gift as gremlins of brain chemistry, to name some psychological diagnosis.” But as members of her family fell ill or became victims of violence, Hudes realized the significance of acknowledging the power of their stories and the importance of maintaining familial bonds and traditions. The text often reads like poetry, but it is also playful, the author toying with the barriers of language, and the narrative is propelled by the urgent notion that community matters in a world designed to push the have-nots further into the margins. It’s rewarding to see how, with the help of a loving mother and support network, Hudes derived power from her own culture and found success. She admits that the work is never fully finished. “No matter how far I traveled, how old I grew or how loudly I voiced us, our old silence chased me down, reaffirmed their hook,” she writes near the end. If the author’s worst fear is to be silent, she can rest assured that this memoir speaks volumes.
A beautifully written account of the importance of culture and family in a small but powerful community.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940177250076 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 04/06/2021 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
1
A Multilingual Block in West Philly
Dad was hurrying mom in English. “Let’s 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 dad’s 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 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. 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 Ginny’s softball team was waiting in Fairmount Park and she had to be on second base in an hour. So she rolled down her driver’s side and promised to visit the farm, my big cousins in tow. Mary Lou, Cuca, Flor, Big Vic, Vivi, and Nuchi. She’d cram all their stinky teen butts in her backseat, and they’d see the country for the first time. “Bring Abuela and Tía Toña, oh, and Tía 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.
Dad slammed the tailgate and mom teared up in the pleather passenger side. “Extrañaré a mi hermana.” Dad stayed quiet, probably didn’t understand. But I knew the Spanish word for missing someone sounded like the English word for strange. Sandwiched between them, I sensed mom’s worried profile. She had talked the move up for months, but saying goodbye to a sister was a whole ’nother thing.
“Then why do we have to move today? Can’t we finish out summer on the block?”
“Because, Quiara, I been stuck a city girl since I was eleven. But before that, before I came to Philly, I had a whole farm to myself. Mami gets to be with nature again, where she belongs, like in Puerto Rico.” And her tired eyes made room for a little spark.
How she told it, mom had been changing scenes all her life, same as geese veeing over the art museum. There was always a next stop full of new promise. Even Abuela’s memories about PR were made of a million places—towns, cities, and barrios. Too many to keep track. This time, I got to join mom’s migration.
Pulling away from the narrow block, the rearview showed my crew double-dutching and playing shoot-out. No final waves, hollers, or stuck-out tongues. Whatever’s the best language for saying bye, I’d flubbed it cuz the city already forgot me.
The horse farm was on a twisty road flanked by woods. Perky little hills worked a number on my bladder. Despite a strong midday sun, the road was all green shadow thanks to trees thick and tall as god’s fingers. My old block’s trees were like zoo elephants—one or two specimens stunted by a cement habitat. But this chaos of greenery had my heart calling dibs. Monster claws made of vine and bramble reached for our truck. Far as I had known, plants began in the soil and grew to the sky. But not here, where greenery grew sideways, diagonally, and downward. “We are your new brat pack,” the woods whispered, seeming mischievous as my old crew, and also like they wouldn’t tell on you.
When I got out of the pickup, I walked to the edge of the woods and stared. “Introduce yourself. Go talk to the trees,” mom said. I ventured in, ferns feathering my shins, and didn’t stop walking till I couldn’t see the house and the house couldn’t see me. Jack-in-the-pulpits were terrariums of rainwater and drowned flies. Mushrooms shriveled and swelled. A baby toad peed a puddle in my hand. In that moist wilderness, mine and mine alone, I recited a poem aloud. An original, from memory, about the Chuck Taylors that my dreams were made of. The trees listened close, gave a standing ovation. Their mossy velvet roots invited me to sit and felt so soft I almost forgot Titi Ginny’s lazy boy.
2
Spanish Becomes a Secret; Language of the Dead
“Please, mom? Can we go to Titi Ginny’s this weekend?”
“Ay, how many times do I have to say no?” Mom rested, sweating, against the hoe’s tall handle. Ribs heaving above spent lungs. All morning she had sliced the hoe’s blade downward, troughing and trenching a patch of earth out back. Now they reversed roles and the hoe supported her momentary repose. “Go cut me an eight-foot piece, entiendes?” She handed me a knot of twine. I found a measuring tape in dad’s workshop garage, and an exacto knife for cutting. Two important tools, I told myself, for an important task. When I returned with the measured and cut section, she told me to anchor one end in my fist. I held it firmly against the dirt, pink earthworms wriggling near my wrist. Mom lifted the twine’s loose end and walked a steady circular path using the rope as a tether, marking her course with a walking stick. In just minutes, she had etched a circle into the freshly turned soil. Its symmetry was flawless. Next came the compass, which I got to hold, as mom located north, east, west, south, and center. She marked each of the five directions with a river stone, conch shell, or raw quartz. The garden would be a living medicine wheel, she told me.
For the remainder of the weekend, whether baking bread or sweeping cobwebs from the ceiling, mom paused on the hour, headed out back, and jotted numbers in her marble composition book. “This column is time of day. This column is the sun’s position. This one, shadow length. So I know where to plant each herb. Back in Puerto Rico, Papi taught me. He couldn’t read or write, so his brain was his notebook. My job was to bring coffee to him while he farmed, then bring back the empty cup. Little by little, I observed his methods. He would share a tidbit about the plants, seasons, moon cycles. For a man who never stepped foot in a schoolroom, your abuelo was a genius.” A genius who died in Puerto Rico before I was born. The man and the island were mysteries to me, and the title Abuelo felt too familiar for, essentially, a stranger.
“How come he couldn’t read?”
“He knew a little. Mami taught Papi the basics. But when he was younger than you, Papi lost all his elders to a hurricane. An entire community carried out to sea and, whoosh, swallowed by the ocean. He was one of two children who survived. Grew up like a slave in poverty, but with his indigenous science knowledge.”
She compiled a notebook index of herbs and scooped me up for long drives to nurseries that might sell them. Angelica. Rosemary. Eucalyptus. Rue. Lemon balm. Yerba bruja. Basil (albahaca). Verdolaga (purslane). Peony. Artemisa (wormwood). Various types of mint. Parsley. Marjoram (mejorana). Hot peppers. Pazote. And many, many sages. Because of its strong personality and curative properties, sage was to be planted at center. Mexican sage. Purple sage. Pineapple sage. Lemon sage. Rooting young herbs in loose soil made mom glow with a radiance I’d never seen in Philly. Depending on the humidity, her hair might be a tall springy afro, pyramid down in loose curls, or lie smooshed beneath a bandana save a strand at the ears. As summer progressed, she darkened from new-penny bright to old-penny rich. But some things never changed: her ski slope nose, the overbite that emphasized her tiredest smile, and slender shoulders with enough soft to lean your head on.
Monday through Friday mom still left home early and came home late, the bone-tired breadwinner. I had no clue what she did in the city, but the long train ride home was standing-room-only as briefcases pummeled her knees. She returned soggy-limbed, a marionette whose strings had come loose. Mom’s curls and clothes that had been impeccable in the morning drooped off her brow, shoulders, and hips. She looked like a neglected laundry line. I was usually already in bed and only heard her entrance, the muffled footsteps in the hallways, the mattress’s sigh as it accepted her troubles. Often, a fight would suddenly energize her and I’d stare at the ceiling to mom and dad’s vitriolic screams.
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