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My Broken Language
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About This Book
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes tells her lyrical story of coming of age against the backdrop of an ailing Philadelphia barrio, with her sprawling idiosyncratic, love-and-trouble-filled Puerto Rican family as a collective muse. Quiara Alegría Hudes was the sharp-eyed girl on the stairs while her family danced in her grandmother's tight North Philly kitchen. She was awed by her aunts and uncles and cousins, but haunted by the secrets of the family and 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 books with the stories of her family, the lessons of North Philly with those of Yale, this is an inspired exploration of 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.
Reviews
"The great scenes, yes."
"Her writing also thoughtfully details the shame and silence around AIDS, especially as it touched her family."
"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."
"While her language is abundantly fluid and evocative, what the title evokes is a life lived between two languages and two cultures ..."
"This heartfelt, glorious exploration of identity and authorship will be a welcome addition to the literature of Latinx lives."
"This is a book of bringing together dissonant stories, one that Hudes alone could write ..."
"Hudes intentionally resists tying together her experiences into neat narrative bows."
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