My Broken Language

by Quiara Alegría Hudes

  After murder and smallpox diminished Taíno slave labor, the Spanish crown approved African chattel slavery in the colony. Yoruba, Igbo, and other West African languages arrived on Puerto Rican shores, mingling with a Spanish that now held whispers of Arawakan dialects. The West African ñame and guineo were adopted to describe tubers and bananas. The word merengue survived the middle passage and centuries later became a Juan Luis Guerra tape played on July fourth in North Philly.

  Language loss on Borinquen was not limited to vocabulary, syntax, and sound formation. Names, too, were obliterated. Yoruba surnames, excised and replaced by those of Spanish slaveholders. Recorded family lineage was thusly ruptured. How, then, to track one’s kin? Delineate predecessors and forebears? How to know one’s sequence in the vast human current? The mass excising of names was a campaign of terror, a violent anti-insurgency strategy. Neither were the names of Native tribes and dialects immune to forfeiture. Simplified in the Spanish record, the descriptors “Arawak,” “Lokono,” “Carib,” and “Taíno” became catchalls for a diverse Native population. Today, debate on the accuracy and appropriateness of those terms rages on.

  For nearly half a millennium, words born of three hemispheres mixed and informed one another’s music. If language had been an effective colonial tool of violence and erasure, it was contrapuntally a West African means of resistance and resilience. While some prayed to Jesús as told, the tongue behind their tongue pronounced Obatalá.

  No sooner had Spain declared Puerto Rico autonomous in 1897 than the island became a U.S. territory in 1898. Language differences threatened the new colonizers’ ability to rule. Four hundred years of Puerto Rican literature, history, laws, and business records were in Spanish, but neither the U.S. government nor American sugar corporations hungry to buy up land spoke it. A few years into the acquisition, the Foraker Act foisted English, virtually unknown on the island, onto every level of the culture. Overnight, government departments were mandated to use English coequally with Spanish. Nonresident white men—English-only aliens—were appointed to govern by the U.S. president. School days now began with the United States pledge of allegiance and national anthem. Students learned both phonetically, oblivious to their meaning. Teachers and students were forbidden to speak Spanish in schools. English-language textbooks were imported from the mainland without adaptation, imposing a curriculum of U.S. history and culture. Island holidays were erased from school calendars, replaced by the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. English-language nutrition lessons recommended fruits and vegetables that didn’t grow on the island. Without them, course materials asserted, good health was impossible. Students were cut off from Puerto Rican arts and letters, the international Spanish-language canon, and the island’s self-created historic record. English enforcement (for the ease of stateside governors and sugar corporations) was justified as moral imperative. New leaders touted their will to bestow the blessings of enlightened civilization on the island’s masses. English was not simply a language, but a betterment project.

  I imagine that in this setting, speaking one’s heart and mind in public becomes dangerous, and necessitates strategy. I imagine that Native history, in order to survive, necessarily goes underground. Indeed, it was considered seditious when the 1930s Nationalist Party platform included the stipulation that Spanish be reinstated as the island’s primary language. For their nonnegotiable demands, party leaders were jailed, tortured, and murdered.

  Confusion and disenfranchisement reigned in the schoolhouse until primary instruction returned to Spanish in 1948. English was demoted to the secondary language of instruction. But the damage had been wrought. Two generations had fled formal education. School was the place you went to fail, to be misunderstood and deemed stupid. A fifty-year rift in the cultural record, and those empowered to contribute to it, now existed.

  In 1966, Obdulia Perez brought her daughters first to the Bronx then Filadelfia, where she settled next door to her sister. The racial slur lobbed at Abuela and Tía Moncha mocked their accent. I no spic English. Mom’s generation, after girlhoods en Español, became bilingual as they studied, protested, and paid rent en Ingles. At clandestine Young Lords meetings, mom and Tía Toña studied Black Panther methods, so that African American revolutionary phrases were adapted by Philly Rican rebels. Perez women married or mothered with Afro Boricua, African American, and white men alike. In hoagie joints, jazz clubs, and late-night love beds, Black Philly’s dynamic speech patterns folded into the Perez tongue. In Center City workplaces and hippie communes, white articulation allowed the Perez women to pass. My cousins and I, we flipped the equation, with English-first kindergarten and Spanish-second oral histories and Sunday chatter. Spanglish’s ever-shifting syntax and double-rich sonority became the common tongue of Perez generations. It was a dialect capable of tremendous calibration depending on who was on the front porch smoking a Kool or at Abuela’s table for some bistec encebollao.

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  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. Mom had, in my youth, cornered me to whisper this incantation. The bloodsickness that nipped at our Perez shoulders, that clung to our heels like shadow, was so historical as to be, essentially, unfathomable. All the language loss—and creative repurposing—was one facet of my inherited catastrophes.

  But did I not, with my particular racial and cultural makeup, also inherit the perpetration of those holocausts? Had I not committed the very crimes I sought to heal from? Had I not pillaged the mother tongues I also aimed to honor? Yes: I was—I am—both sides of the coin and the edge. This inherited trauma, this epigenetic memory. How to name myself with lucid precision, compassion, and unyielding rigor—I, the inflictor and the inflicted? The mother tongue robber and the mother tongue holder?

  When my friends asked, “Do you believe in god?” heat lashed my cheeks, seared my throat. My perimeter went on lockdown so that what lived inside—divine spark, spiritual curiosity—could not escape and find voice. I did not yet grasp the magnificent and fraught language history I’d inherited. I hadn’t heard of the Foraker Act or known Abuela’s early schooling arrived in meaningless phonetic een-glush. No, instead I cursed my incorrect mother tongue, certain it was my deepest personal failing.

  Gil Scott-Heron Asks Me a Question

  Music was the only language I’d chosen. It offered safe harbor to feel confused, depressed, lonely, alive. At the piano, both fluency and blunder were rewarded. Wrong notes became new compositions. Its constancy was infallible, its role in my life uncomplicated. But I didn’t know if, as a language, it could say everything I needed it to, if it held the vocabulary to parse, wrangle, and reveal all that I’d dammed up inside.

  My musical loves, like my family tree, branched wide from the get-go. Aunt Linda snuck me into CBGB for her neo-romantic punk gigs—a Puerto Rican preschooler primped in velvet and lace. She was the only chick instrumentalist in sight. Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, both discovered with Tower headphones cupping my ears, were loaded into side-by-side decks, trading late-night plays when I should’ve been sleeping. When Uncle Rik scored tickets to Steel Pulse, I got preteen high off secondhand reefer. The last number in the set ended with a minutes-long ritardando. Phrase by phrase, steel drums slowed to a standstill, leaving me dumbstruck—a finale, a climax, made of space and silence. Adimu Kuumba, with gray-streaked locs and high-proof breath, played beneath the 48th and Baltimore traffic light. His African instruments were all sculpted from trash. Man could hypnotize you with his Bustelo kalimba. One day I stepped off the 34 and he called, Come close, I’ve been waiting. His boom box’s volume knob was busted, Bobby McFerrin whispered so low I had to press ear to speaker. Mom gave rent money to Joaquin Rivera, a barrio trovador, to bolero-serenade us gra
veside at the cemetery. Aguinaldos for the dead. She hired batá players and our living room became a dim sweaty speakeasy: motherland polyrhythms making the cobwebs quiver.

  At Settlement Music School, Dolly Kraznapolski assigned me Scriabin preludes and frowned when, come Tuesday, I played original music. Donald Rappaport, a theory teacher down the hall, took over weekly lessons when she was at wit’s end. For my last year of high school he encouraged and critiqued my compositions, never charging a dime. He showed me dissonance in less than ten seconds: Play a C major in your left hand. Now an F-sharp major in your right. Now, go compose, bye. When I brought in the resulting piece, he declared it better than Scriabin.

  In my final lesson before college, Mr. Rappaport gifted me a Music Tree. An eleven-by-seventeen paper flowchart so intricately drawn it resembled circuits. He had spent adulthood tracing his pedagogical genealogy, tracking music teachers over twenty generations, all the way back to Johann Sebastian himself. The man knew his lineage and therefore his soul, and thought the Music Tree would bestow this clarity onto me. “You are a descendent of Bach,” he told me. Two days later, I was on 95 North to New Haven.

  A month after that, the dorm phone rang and I was informed that his decades-long battle with stomach cancer had ended. I hadn’t even known he was sick. Now an actual legacy rested in my hands. Bereft, I taped the Music Tree beside my bed, then left for class. As I tried sleeping later that night, the Music Tree stared me down, demanding more than I felt capable of, and I removed the tape and folded it into my desk drawer, where it remained, folded, till we moved out of freshman dorms.

  How could Yale’s offerings not feel reductive in comparison? Music had been a window onto humanity, diasporic to the marrow. Rather than going wide, perhaps Yale went deep. But its particular focus felt out of touch and at times arcane. Coursework in my major often felt surreal, like I’d been mistakenly dropped onto someone else’s path: someone with laser focus and unassailable skill. I was all grit and romance. I often feared the mix-up would go public any second and the Yale intercom would announce, “Sorry, kid. Head down the hall to English, where you belong.”

  Senior year, I was accepted into the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop, a well-regarded creative lab for burgeoning stage composers. At twenty bucks a pop, the weekly Metro North round trip to New York meant adding to my studio hours. So be it. New York, far as Aunt Linda showed me, meant soul, rock, and reggae. She had taken me to some musicals, too: Savion Glover’s tapping, South African chorales, and American gospel had fueled those stage scores. On BMI day one, I walked into a room of forty white composers and lyricists. “What is your favorite Sondheim?” was the icebreaker. I’d never heard of him, not even West Side Story. They vowed to remedy my cultural blind spot, burning me CDs, listing seminal works to study. But the god to which they unanimously prayed left me cold. I was informed that the stage works that had inspired me—Sarafina!; Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk; The Gospel at Colonus—were in fact marginalia, trimmings from the true meat of music theater.

  Wynton Marsalis spent a brief residency at Yale, rehearsing a jazz oratorio before its Lincoln Center debut. I cut classes for a week to watch, and he eventually outed the music major in the back row. “Hey! Yeah, you! Know how to copy charts?” “Yes, Mr. Marsalis.” “Well, look at that, she can speak!” Sixteen jazz cats chuckled. “Here, Cassandra Wilson threw a fit when she saw her pages,” and he handed me some charts that looked decent far as I could tell. I got to it. Ten minutes later, the regal alto arrived and thanked me, in elegant voice, for her cleaner pages. “Now I can rehearse,” she said with a smile as Wynton Marsalis put a twenty in my hand. “That looked like the calligraphy of a composer. Am I right?” He told me to bring an original trumpet piece to tomorrow’s rehearsal. “You’ve been eavesdropping on us, now we’ll hear where you’re coming from.” I stayed up all night. Eraser dust snowdrifting atop eighty-eight keys, corner store coffee haloing my treble clefs. Next day, Wynton Marsalis waved to the band. Listen up! He propped my new piece on the music stand, lifted matte brass mouthpiece to lip, and began to blow, fingertips padding the opalescent valves. The piece was all sustained notes, prayerful and sexy. While composing, I had used only the piano and my singing voice. Heard on the trumpet for the first time, the melody cooed like a baby waking calmly from a nap. “Girl’s got an ear, huh?” he asked at the end. The jazz orchestra nodded and mm-hmm’ed. “She’s bad,” said a sax player. To which I nodded a cool thanks, but inside I swooned.

  Evan Ziporyn, a founding member of Bang on a Can, taught a master class. He selected my bass clarinet piece for his guest recital. The night of the concert, all the faculty came. Usually a frumpy bunch, the professors dappered up for the evening, headed as it was by New York royalty. Professor Friedman was an elite amongst elites, though he rarely tucked his shirt in properly so it tended to stick out his unzipped fly. Undergrad boys hovered near him, trying to cull favor with Classical era trivia or modal philosophy. I was a pleb, and female to boot, who’d begun piano in high school—Friedman hardly knew or cared I existed. But after Evan Ziporyn played my hypnotize-your-ass solo, full of double notes and harmonics, Friedman approached me and shockingly made eye contact. “That was actually quite good.” To which I responded with a string of gee-whiz-really-aw-shuxes, though regardless of his affirmation—almost in spite of it—I knew that jawn was decent.

  After graduation I intended to scrape by on gigs. To spend coffeehouse afternoons composing for stage and Ethiopian restaurant dinners scribbling lyrics on napkins. I didn’t crave much in the way of stability. Mom’s income as a grassroots organizer was always sporadic, so depending on the year, shopping meant Macy*s or the Second Mile Thrift Shop. The vagaries of Pop’s contracting work meant one summer with Dorney Park excursions and another where fish hoagies were shared, not eaten solo. Flush and tight felt the same to me, and in this I recognized artistic freedom.

  It was Clinton days, jobs were falling like rain in spring. Philly had cheap rents and music for days. My typing straight-up broke the Mavis Beacon test, so I could land desk jobs on a dime when gigs slowed. The boy and I had survived four years of long distance. We moved into a cheap West Philly rental, the row-home-chopped-into-thirds kind, with a huge picture window that let in January frost and August stink. At halftime, we made love on our futon, then, half-dressed, continued watching Iverson turn the Sixers upside down. Reflected in the boy’s eyes, West Philly shone brighter. One day while walking past Clark Park he made me swear not to propose marriage. “Allow me that much,” he said, pissed I’d long ago asked him to prom.

  Tuesday afternoons were my days to get Gabi. She told me how school was on the 42 westbound. I cooked arroz y habichuelas with extra olives, how Gabi and my boyfriend liked, then unfolded the futon and tucked her in. Wednesday mornings we rubbed sleep from our eyes, crunched Kix, sipped Bustelo, and grabbed the 42 eastbound, where I blew besitos as the school bell rang. Gabi disappeared into a sea of backpacks and it broke my heart every time. On paper, I was up thirty points in the first quarter. Living life so full that Wednesday mornings, after the boy left for work and Gabi was at school, hurt.

  The Roots had started Okayplayer, a Monday night neo-soul revival at the Five Spot. Jill Scott, John Legend, Jaguar Wright, the Jazzyfatnastees, Kindred the Family Soul. They were all catapulting to fame, an ascendancy that was dizzying to be near. An old neighborhood friend invited me late one Monday. Rashida’s voice had been the stuff of fourth-grade legend. When she sang the Kwaanza song, parents wept. The vibe onstage was down-to-earth, its smooth backbeat offset by ferocious female vocals. Two appletinis later, we conspired to join the cause. Over the next few inspired weeks we cowrote some songs, neo-soul with a dash of rock. Soon we open-miked the Five Spot, trying to catch some Okayplayer pixie dust in our hair. Me on keys, she on mic. Testing, testing. The club lights shifted from blue to ninja turtle green, with stage smoke obscuring my view of the front row.
Four bars into my piano intro, the house bassist laid down a resonant lick. We made eye contact to confirm: groove on lock. Two bars later, the house drummer’s rimshot got a few extra hips moving in the crowd. I had never played with rhythm cats so refined—such a high caliber of time, touch, and feel. They nodded right back at me, letting me know. Shit felt good. Then came vocals, and the audience was swaying, hands waving, heads bopping. We played the hell out of our two-song limit.

  We expanded our set to a full hour and landed us the headline at Doc Watson’s, a bar known more for dollar wings than music. But the manager had CBGB dreams for his beer-soaked rugs—hoping his venue would become for rock what the Five Spot was for neo-soul. Our first gig had twelve paid tops. Our second, over fifty. We scored a regular spot.

  Meanwhile, dance classes needed accompanists, choreographers needed incidental music, record companies needed session players. I’d do whatever asked: keys, vocals, duos, solos, band stuff. “What’s your genre?” bandleaders and engineers called and asked, seeking last-minute players. “Tell me what you need,” I responded. Thankfully, the piano hid my trembling fingers while showing my confident eyes.

  Moonlighting as a solo performer, I served up dreamy, broody rock songs. They were darker than the bright neo-soul bops from the Five Spot. And more sensual, too. Playing the keys, microphone perched like a praying mantis, I sang about my lover’s body as a season, taking me like a storm. I sang about a more forgiving world in which redemption would be on time. Audience ears perked up. Crowds stayed longer, bought more drinks. Bookers and DJs asked for demos. Erik Tribbett, Jill Scott’s traps guy, agreed to lay down three tracks. I worked extra hours at a Center City desk, found the cheapest studio that wouldn’t embarrass me in front of the prominent musician, and we scheduled the session for a week out, after he returned from Hawaii with the Roots, where he was filling in for Questlove.