My Broken Language

by Quiara Alegría Hudes

  One of my Brooklyn cousins had a C-section scar thick as a thumb, bisecting her abdomen from pubes up to navel. Little dots ran alongside it from the stitchwork, giving the appearance of caterpillar feet. Cellulite spilled out on either side of the taut, shiny scar. She would show off her bifurcated belly, jiggle it, tuck it in her jeans like a shirt. There was no small dose of bragging in her demonstrations. “I can’t get liposuction,” she said, smiling, “because the fat will eventually pool around the scar again.” The scar thickened with each new child and reopening. To the Jersey Shore and Rockaway beaches, she wore one-piece swimsuits. But at Abuela’s, her jeans were reliably unbuttoned and zipper-ventilated. “Have you seen how the doctors ruined me?” she’d ask, and even if you said yes, she’d unzip. Witness me, behold.

  The thick shiny scar up mom’s thigh resembled a strip of tape holding her together. She had stepped through a rotted floorboard in our West Philly twin while pregnant with me. So when I ran my finger along the scar’s glassy pathway, life in the womb felt close at hand.

  Abuela’s batas were so threadbare they’d turn a PG movie NC-17. Her daughters came through and exclaimed. “Mami, where are the new housedresses I bought you from Penney’s?” But Abuela had a proclivity toward the broken in. She rarely wore a slip before noon. If she stood before the east-facing window early morning, stirring stovetop café, the flower print magically faded in the sunlight. You could see everything. It was a shadow puppet show of titties and butt dimples. Abuela often sat upstairs, naked in the AC, slow-rolling stockings over her varicose veins. In this seated, hunched position her pendulous flat breasts cascaded over her tiered belly, two slinkies heading downstairs. At some point in her life, I assumed, Abuela’s nipples had been darker, but now they were the same color as her pale skin so you couldn’t tell where breast ended and nipple began. They seemed the very essence of regality. Vintage rarities whose value accrued with age. A front-facing superhero cape. I wanted a pair like that one day.

  Some of my older cousins had a subtle dark stripe up their abdomens. A shade darker than their particular color brown, adorned with peach fuzz. I admired those velveteen lines. They seemed feminine, a girly mustache. I used to think their belly button was thirsty and the stripe was the straw. I would study my belly’s reflection, anticipating my stripe. When puberty did not bring it, I thought maybe pregnancy. Something to look forward to. Now at forty, having closed up shop after two kids, I sometimes catch my unstriped belly in the mirror and think wistfully, maybe menopause.

  My girlish body hadn’t accrued much character. There were no hard knocks or tall tales writ on my flesh, no scars or distinguishing marks beyond freckles. All us young’uns were blank canvases, awaiting life’s paintbrush. I had Cuca’s flat butt and mom’s water-jug belly, but no real narrative you could read on my curves. That’s what made me a girl. One day I would be a woman whose body told tales, and I would show them to other women with equally epic, if distinctly shaped, bodies as a younger generation beheld with awe. This would be my defiant adulthood. The messy book of womanhood’s flesh was something to aspire to.

  In middle school I learned despising one’s boobs, body hair, and ass was American as apple pie. White girls stood before the locker room mirror coaching each other on suck-in-the-pouch tactics. I played my part, drawing in the stomach and standing taller. Made a girdle of my breath until the next girl’s turn. As instructed, I named aloud all my body’s flaws: inverted nipples that pointed down rather than giving the perky salute of a young cadet. I was supposed to behold fleshiness and corpulence with repulsion, and take corrective action where necessary. That “supposed to” let the joy of Abuela’s ring more fully. I was coming of age in a Vogue nation. Heroin-chic was selling Calvin Klein underwear. Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful was a national refrain. But not at Abuela’s. There, the Perez DNA wrote different rules. The notion of a single beauty mold, be it size or skin color, was dismantled by our fleshy testimony. To glance at us was to know plurality, to behold beauty’s parade.

  Mom had told me once, as she prepared to receive Changó, that initiates’ clothes are torn away so they arrive on their great spiritual path as newborns. It shone light on the fleshy world of mom’s home and Abuela’s. I understood with retrospective clarity why Titi Ginny, when teaching me how to shampoo my hair, did not coach little me from the side of the shower. No, she undressed and stepped into the water, too. She hoisted me to her naked hip and water poured over our connected bodies. Perez nudity was rebirth of a daily order, a resetting of the spirit to its naïve state, both a freedom and a strong protection.

  In my adolescence, a relative from dad’s side sat me down for a talk. “I’ve been wanting to bring this up, but I know how sensitive you are. I say it with love, because the Puerto Rican culture has many beautiful things about it, things that have made you who you are. But when you grow up, don’t become fat like your mom and aunts.” That word. Fat. How to make a human disappear in three moves. F-A-T, checkmate. I had marched on Earth Day. I knew overconsumption was rupturing the ozone. But hey, fatness was the problem, right? I silently swore to excise “fat” from my vocabulary. I had already put “bitch,” “witch,” and “whore” on a shelf. “Fat” would be in auspicious boycotted company.

  That was the same year my little sis, Gabi, ran into her bedroom naked. Beheld her reflection and declared her curves miraculous as mother nature: “My belly is round as the earth!” She had been four then. That Gabi was, by eight, one of the toughest kids in third grade came as no accident. You tryin’a step with some dumb-ass recycled fat joke? Best be prepared to have your buck teeth, onion armpits, or mummy breath flung right back at your donkey face. She threw insults like party snaps, quick blacktop detonations. Tuesday afternoons when I picked her up, I’d sometimes hang back at the monkey bars, unnoticed, and watch as she brought her bullies to tears. She could flip a mob with a single insult. The kids would circle round, amped up that some alpha was about to take her down. Within seconds that same mob was rolling laughing at the bully’s defeat. Ding-ding-ding! We have a winner! Most fat jokes, Gabi had learned, are generic low-brain-cell taunts. They hurt, yeah, but not from artfulness. Gabi would spit some bespoke shit your way. Now all of third grade knows you snack on your boogers during science plus you’re an idiot who can’t clap back. Double victory. Yeah, sure, Gabi would be quiet the whole subway ride home. Yeah, sure, she’d disappear into her room without saying hi to Pop. Better to weep into her pillow than talk about it. Cuz if Pop got wind? “Well, then, lose some weight! You’re too fat!” I would sneak into Gabi’s room and praise her body, mind, and spirit, and confirm, Yup, the world sucks and then, You make no mistake, little sis, your success is preordained. (Later I’d pray myself to sleep: Dear god, let her thrive.) You don’t want kids to develop grit that coarse. Medium grit sure would be nicer.

  The Perez bodies became a play. After a decade-long boycott, “fat” made an energized return. Now I could own the slur, twist its intention, transform it into an honorific. “Queer,” “bitch,” “dyke,” “witch,” and “whore” joined my reclaimed lexicon. In my play they became high praise, a code for belonging.

  I wrote the one-act play in my Providence corner apartment. A huge Victorian estate had been chopped into student housing and mine had the godsend of two exposures. Weeks after our wedding in the old Quaker meetinghouse, the boy and I had driven to Providence, stepped foot in the idiosyncratic crib, and sniffed a future amongst its dusty built-in bookshelves. Now my Lukumí library filled those shelves.

  As writing nooks go, none could be more romantic. My first-floor desk looked out onto the sidewalk. The brick herringbone pattern, clatter of heels, scratch of skateboard wheels—a sensory world that cushioned my solitude. Between classes students ambled back and forth in cloud drifts. Snippets of conversation bled in. The blue-collar construction workers next door said “fuck” with gusto from sunup till three p.m. My desk windo
w was nearly five feet tall and from my salvaged-trash chair I was eye level with the pedestrians. In warm weather, window propped up with a dictionary, there wasn’t even a pane of glass separating inside from out. When I first moved in, the window was painted shut. It took a butter knife and an afternoon to get the thing opening and closing. Now, on its sill, the boy would leave me a fresh cafecito, for inspiration, and scuttle away.

  Every morning I lit a candle, played batá music, and warmed up with a poem for Oshun, Orisha of female sensuality who undoubtedly held sway over this developing piece. At times, thoughts flowed quicker than I could write them. All those naked bodies lived in me again, as did the ways I’d been told to despise them. It was painful, yes, but rebellious and right.

  I brought the pages in. The feedback was positive. More, my colleagues urged. How could it end there? Give us act two! Paula said. Make it full-length and I’ll produce it as your thesis.

  How to continue? Act two eluded me. The desk began to mock. I had run out of ideas and inspiration. The passersby became distractions, bad juju. The construction workers were now assholes imposing on my peace. The morning hours, which I loved most, became taunting as the day stretched before me with no voices to follow. The play gained a strong resistance to my efforts.

  I needed a Plan B. I began leaving for the graduate cluster after dinner. White particleboard desks stretched beneath fluorescent lights. No dividers, no delineated workstations. Just row after row of communal tables and overworked computers. Stacks of library hardbacks created semiprivate nooks. Snacks—forbidden—remained squirreled in knapsacks, so there was the constant motion of hands plunging into bags, a pickpocket’s dance. Magnetic key cards and the baroque sign-in sheet made entry an event—once inside, you stayed. Self-imposed lockdown. The cluster was open till some ungodly hour, and I was not a night person. The air of communal misery offered a strange brew of courage. Blank screens, unite.

  One such night, around ten, I was plodding along on act two. The cluster was packed. Midterm deadlines loomed. The play was styled as a flesh-and-blood comic book. There were fight scenes, chase sequences, and cape-wearing alter egos. Fatness, slut shaming, and sexual violence were the themes, all told through a bi-curious Latina’s coming of age. It was raunchy, X-rated, and naïve all at once. I felt a particular affection for the lead character, a fictional chubby Latina who captured my little sis’s essence. I enjoyed putting Oshun into a comic book, having the Orisha of sweet rivers usher in a girl’s first wet dream. But where to next, what did act one demand? What sort of ending was I building to? Comic books ended in apocalypse or redemption. Either option, on its own, felt incomplete for my chubby hero.

  The cluster didn’t allow for my usual indulgences. The lit candles. The blasting batá CD. The pacing back and forth as I improvised a warm-up poem aloud. Daily steps inviting imagination’s looseness. In the cluster, without my gradual strategies for entering a creative state, I just sat and wrote. A blunt entrance.

  I don’t remember that blackout like I do the others. In previous possessions, the on-ramp, that first surge and tremble, remain vivid. The initial denial, my desperation to still the tremors, to not be mounted—I remember, quite palpably, losing the fight each time. For this—my fourth surrender, and the final of my life that I recall—I have no memory of its arrival.

  I remember only the off-ramp. Sitting there, disoriented and unwell, as though an alarm clock had startled my eyes open. Headphone-wearing students typed on adjacent computers. Their banal slouches indicated life as usual. My asphyxiated gulps and strained heartbeat, indicators that the storm had hit. Time had elapsed: four hours. The page count read 87. Last I remembered, there were half as many. On the screen, the words “End of play” preceded a blinking cursor. It was one in the morning.

  I scrolled back to page 40 and began to read. At first the play’s mischievous, irreverent tone continued apace. Then scene by scene, it began lurching toward darkness. Threat and violence overtook playfulness and sensuality. The antagonists were closing in and they intended real harm. The comic book vibe morphed into horror. It was not what I had in mind when conceiving the project. I wanted warmth, rebellion, corporeality, defiant silliness. Reading on, I grew upset. The play’s mounting fury seemed imported from a stranger, but I was that stranger. Judging by the words, my subconscious had been incubating a beast. How could I be so unfamiliar to myself? I began to hate the play, not because it was good or bad, but because it unmasked me without permission.

  In the final scene, the antagonists caught up with my young hero. They’d been populating the subplots since page one, clownish satirical ciphers, comic relief. They were buffoons who called my heroes whores, and I reveled in making them ridiculous. But now they infiltrated the main plot. They gave chase, weapons drawn. My lead character was trapped. In the play’s climactic tableau, as the bad guys moved in close, poised to kill her, my superhero made one final declaration. I AM A WHORE.

  Blackout. End of play.

  Whaaaa?

  Record scratch!

  I almost fell out my seat. What the fuck was that? I AM A WHORE?

  That wasn’t the play I wanted to write! I could see that the way my character said it, she wasn’t yielding to the slur or diminishing herself. She was reclaiming monstrosity as her earned, rightful power. She got the last laugh, owned her whole self on her dying breath. And yet I loathed the line, rejected it completely. I highlighted the text, finger on the delete key. Teeth digging into my bottom lip, my eyes unblinking lest the tears drop down. But the words were stronger than my will to undo them.

  I stood, agitated, brushing against knapsacks and chair backs in a space too cramped for pacing. Then I sat, opened a browser window, and emailed Paula. “I’m scared. I wrote something that disgusts me. I do not want to feel this way. I do not like who these lines reveal me to be.” I was too horrified to walk home, certain my antagonists were lurking in Providence alleyways, ready to annihilate me as they had my lead character. So I sat and sat, awaiting a response, strange to myself, as neighboring students typed away.

  Was this what I signed up for? Was speaking the Perez wounds reopening them? Though I couldn’t remember the possession itself, I knew it was a purging of inherited trauma. But also a tasting. The fire gave me truth even as it burned me. Having left myself in those unremembered hours, did I know myself at last?

  The goat, turtle, and chicken whispered old warnings, doomed animals whose pain I wanted no complicity in. Once upon a girlhood their blood made me wail, told me too soon about the mortality I was made of. But seated in the computer lab, I remembered an asterisk beside each death. Previously, the sacrifices had loomed so big they’d erased what came next. Now I saw each animal’s forgotten epilogue: how after ritual sacrifices mom labored into the night. The next morning meant waking up to a transfixing aroma, and there it would be on the stovetop over low flame: chicken soup or goat stew, the fruit of her overnight labor. I had tasted each of these special meals, though doing so broke my strict adolescent vegetarianism. Out of respect for each animal, I had eaten. Though I would only eat alone, so I could weep, unwatched, while lifting spoon to lips. The soup’s flavor humbled me. Delicious. Every bowl was a braid of suffering and renewal and now, in a computer cluster, I could not say if those sacrificed animals broke me or built me.

  What did I know?

  I AM A WHORE….

  Old crank calls rang, a jangling disturbance. Cut it out, stop calling! Simpsons volume low as vulgarities lanceted mom. Hoe. A tool for turning up earth, rejuvenating soil, making way for new growth. Ho. All the shame a woman carried. How mom branded the word unto her heart. AZADA AZADA AZADA! But what use was a garden tool, I railed, when the Perez women had divorced mother nature? Abuela’s gandules harvest, over. Mom’s circle of sage, dead. My horse farm woods, gone. Ripped and rent from all soil, we who had once been earth-women and were now North Philly—treeless rub
ble, tire-strewn and derelict. But wait. Hadn’t one plot of land persisted? Migrated with us all this way? One human-size patch of earth? Our bodies.

  I am tired soil, break me, wound me.

  I AM A WHORE….

  Around three in the morning my inbox dinged. Paula was up late. “I have been scared, too,” she said. “Trembling as I wrote about old violations. Certain I would be chased down once again. I locked every door in my writing cabin and hid in a closet. A lunatic was in the house, I convinced myself, so I sprinted to the car and locked myself inside, key in the ignition, hand on the key, as the owls screeched till sunrise. The actual threat, of course, was internal: the fact of myself laid bare, removing the armor and seeing the wounds still bled.”

  I closed the browser window and lingered in my chair, wrecked by gratitude. Why was I the bewildered repository for grand matriarchal bequests? Paula’s email still jolts me today: walk toward the internal fear. Skin zapping, arm fuzz half-raised from the lightning bolt, I printed the play and collected warm pages. Empty now, the graduate cluster seemed ready for my leave-taking. The final line, which I was unable to delete, had become part of the material world, slumping in my backpack above pens and snack wrappers.

  In a matter of months houselights would dim, ink on paper would become actor’s voice on audience ears, and I would tremble, hermana, as you saw the anarchical yarn I had spun from the Perez body. As you witnessed, at fourteen, a roomful of strangers witnessing you. Seated at your side in that dark theater, fear would convince me my words were a knife in your back, my play was a sisterhood-annihilating machine. Seconds after houselights rose, I would admit these fears, needing to know: are we through, did I break us? And you would say through tears, as folks filed to the lobby, “I feel seen. I feel, like, I don’t know, like, fuckin’ powerful. Yeah, it hurt but, like, I’m a lead character of a whole play, yo! Thass a honor! Thass right, people, y’all better hear my story!” You would tell me, hermana mia, that your grip on shame had loosened a bit.