My Broken Language: A Memoir

When her baby sister Gabi is born, Quiara “[dives] headlong into the mire of playtime” (198). One day, when Gabi is four years old, Quiara chases a naked and soaking-wet Gabi around the house after bath time. Suddenly, Gabi catches sight of herself in the mirror. She begins posing and poking her chubby body, sucking her belly in and letting it deflate, finally declaring, “My belly is round as the earth!” (196). Quiara watches, delighted to witness her sister “discover herself,” but also wonders, “How long, this utopia? When will the belly become a source of horror?” (201)

As she prepares for Yale, the thought of leaving her sister and new boyfriend devastates Quiara. Chubby, brown Gabi is “live bait in the Skinny Pale Cabaret that called itself America” (201), and Quiara feels like she is abandoning her sister. However, while Quiara knows she can “offer no balm or protection to [her] elders,” she thinks that Gabi is her “chance to foster a self-loving, not-disappearing Perez girl” (202). College will give her the tools she needs to help her sister “flourish.”

When choosing courses for freshman year, Quiara tries out a composer’s seminar, a 400-level course for which she has taken none of the prerequisites. The other students and the professor are all white and male, but the professor invites her to play the composition she sent in with her application. There is no applause at the end, but Quiara senses she has “survived the hazing.” When asked for her most important influences, she responds with Celina y Reutilio, a Cuban duo played constantly by her mother.

The course starts with Schoenberg and Ruggles, pioneers of atonality. Their compositions are “the most inharmonious, nihilistic note combinations [Quiara has] ever heard” (205), and she is intimidated by the scholarly way the other students discuss them. She is searching for “an uglier language” that will allow her to articulate the complexity of the Perez family but worries that this music is “too bleak.” She worries that a degree in music might lead her in the wrong direction, but she resolves to learn as much as she can. 

Although she has received generous scholarships and grants, Quiara still has to work to make ends meet. She is lucky to score a job with good pay and generous hours working in the School of Music’s recording studio. Most other students don’t have to work, something that comes as a shock to Quiara. In the studio, she learns to wrap cables and set levels. In one late-night session, the studio records one of the piano professors playing Shubert’s Piano Sonata in A Major, D. 959. The music is “magnificent,” leaving Quiara flushed.

At Yale, “‘music’ was a synonym for ‘white’” (213), with the ethnomusicology section taking up just half a shelf in the listening library. Quiara misses the way music connected with life in the barrio (neighborhood), constantly filling the air. Instead, music becomes “a forensic pursuit in which the human body was checked at the door” (213).

Over the summer, Quiara copies her mother’s music collection and sets about studying and transcribing songs back in her Yale dorm room. However, when she plays a piece in her composers' seminar, her professor dismisses it as “folk music, basic stuff” (251). Quiara longs for “an intellectual home base” that doesn’t “blindfold itself to [her] culture” (215). Finally, a professor gives her a flyer advertising a fellowship for students of color to create a scholarly community. With the money from the fellowship, Quiara takes piano lessons from an Afro-Cuban expat and visits a “legendary kiosk” in Times Square that specializes in out-of-print salsa music. 

She begins “dissembl[ing] the songs like a vintage engine” (217), coming to understand them so she can rebuild them. The songs develop into a musical called “Sweat of the River, Sweat of the Ocean,” a story about an agnostic woman who has to dismantle her Santera mother’s altars after the woman dies. Latinos come out of Yale’s woodwork, and Quiara’s play is cast and rehearsed. With no space for an onstage band, she records the music herself after recruiting a band including fellow students and her original piano teacher, Aunt Linda.

Quiara’s family treks up from North Philly for the show. Sitting next to her mother, Quiara watches the play that has been intimately influenced by the woman. The play is saturated with her mother’s Orisha deities, and here, they “required no explanation.” She feels that she has “bettered” Yale, bringing the university into her family instead of conforming.