A review by hannahdotmay
My Broken Language: A Memoir by Quiara Alegría Hudes

challenging dark emotional hopeful reflective medium-paced

5.0 

A memoir to rival most, My broken language is  Quiara Alegría Hudes chance to tell us of girlhood in Philadelphia, an adolescent at yale and a coming of age at Brown. She, like us all, has had many iterations, a daughter of immigrants, raised in a matriarchal community built on Puerto Rican spirituality and socialist values, a writer, a composer, a playwright. She has lived many lives and laid bare both her mistakes and accolades. 

Language is at the heart, expressions of Spanish and Spanglish fall in equal measure. She talks of an upbringing surrounded by a community language, one that united her family but separated her as she climbed the echelons of social mobility, joining her middle-class counterparts studying Bach and Mozart, in the hallowed halls of Yale. 

Background commentary on the AIDS epidemic, how it ravaged her specific community, how they lacked the words or desire to express the grief from a hideous disease, her phrasing is so poignant, she talks of hushed voices and gaunt cheeks, watching loved ones waste away and wondering in her childhood naivety, what she could have done differently. Poverty, neglect and gentrification are rife among her smart social commentary, houses that weren’t built to hold families, mothers who weren’t always equipped to raise sons. 

There is an absence of masculinity as Hudes attributes much of her selfhood to her mother, a community activist and spiritual leader, a woman among women who raised her and her cousins, and taught them lessons of self-love and respect. She talks of the legacy of a body, the curves that were passed down through generations, the love she had for families of thick thighs and luscious chests, she speaks only of skinny when it shows illness and hurt, ‘I didn’t learn about [it] until blood sickness rolled into town’ 

it compares to in the dream house, to how we fight for our lives, to hunger a memoir of my body. It is a memoir of self hood and belonging, a white America obsessed with assimilation and a thriving community who are competing to show them, western isn’t the only way.

Expand filter menu Content Warnings