‘My Broken Language’ by Quiara Alegría Hudes is the Free Library’s One Book, One Philadelphia pick

Before she became a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright or teamed up with Lin-Manuel Miranda to write In the Heights, Quiara Alegría Hudes straddled two worlds: the tight-knit Boricua community of her mother’s family in North Philadelphia and the seemingly idyllic suburbs of her Jewish father’s home in Malvern.

That she learned to play Chopin’s Nocturne in B-flat minor while a student at Central High, yet also observed her mother practice the ancient Afro Cuban Lukumí rituals, is at the heart of My Broken Language: A Memoir, the Free Library of Philadelphia’s One Book, One Philadelphia selection for 2022. One Book is a city and library-sponsored literary program that encourages Philadelphians to read the same book and discuss it. This year, those discussions will take place in person and virtually.

One Book celebrates its 20th birthday this year. My Broken Language is only the second One Book selection written by a Philadelphian. The first was The Price of a Child by Lorene Cary back in 2002

Brittanie Sterner, the One Book’s program’s director, said My Broken Language took the selection committee by storm. “It’s gorgeous, lyrical, and poetic,” Sterner said. “And there are so many opportunities for Philadelphians to see themselves. To see your own families and communities in literature is such a powerful thing.”

Philadelphians will love Hudes’ shout-outs to our city: the Route 34 Trolley, the Odunde Festival, the Italian Market’s cheese shops, the Black Lily, and yes, the Free Library are described beautifully. Each chapter is an essay about important moments in Hudes’ life: in Chapter 7, Hudes realizes that while she studies at Yale, her cousin can’t read. There is also Chapter 33, when she comes to the painful conclusion her father doesn’t respect poor, single mothers, many of whom are a part of her family. These events illustrated the dual reality that seasons her work.

When it’s read in order, My Broken Language is a spirited memoir and delicious Philadelphia coming-of-age story.

“It was important for me to end the book before I became successful,” Hudes said to me via Zoom from her home in New York City. “If it went any further and I had a play on Broadway, it would be come a rags-to-riches vibe and that wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. It wasn’t an American dream-pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps. It was a process of loving together, struggling together. Separating from each other and finding each other again. That’s what I wanted to focus on: all the hard knocks we had on the way to being better.

I chatted with Hudes about the One Book honor and why My Broken Language is a love letter to her hometown. These answers have been edited for clarity.

» READ MORE: An upset Pulitzer win for West Philly's Quiara Alegria Hudes

The library was a sanctuary in my adolescence. I had heard of the Walt Whitman Bridge; in the library I looked up that name. ... So to be formally acknowledged by the Library, it’s significant for me. When I had other forms of “success” like having a Broadway musical, the Tony Awards, having a major motion picture, interviewers would ask, “Is this your dream come true?” But to be honest, I didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but my answer was “not really.” The writing itself, the life dedicated to storytelling, the everyday push towards imagination and artful mischief and good trouble, is the dream come true. But the One Book, One Philadelphia, ... it is a special acknowledgment, one of the most special I’ve had. The notion that I’ll be in some kid’s backpack as she waits for the Broad Street line? That’s amazing to me.

The book touches on things that were dizzying and amazing to be around during my life, like when Black Lily was in the city. I talk about street artists like Adimu Kuumba, who made instruments out of recycled materials and garbage and put on concerts for neighbors in West Philly. The joy of throwing offerings like melons off the South Street Bridge during the Odunde Festival. I talk about the network of Lukumí practitioners who offered me a spiritual education as a child.

It is also an indictment of a city that is the fourth most racially segregated in the nation. Growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, mass media really did not cover the fact that HIV/AIDS was affecting my community — we were made to be invisible in our joys as well as our struggles. So I had no way to contextualize the loss around me, and I lost loved ones. Addiction was vilified back then in a way that made communities and families feel like pariahs. It is not the same with opioid addiction now, which is treated with more grace and empathy by mass media.

So yes, it is a love letter. But it is also something I grapple with.

West Philly was a special place. It was at least half African American. The rest of us were first-generation families from a multiplicity of places — my friends were African American, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, and there were two Philly Ricans on the block, too. There was a smattering of white hippies in the neighborhood. It was a place where neighbors mixed and mingled and gentrification hadn’t yet taken hold. I felt at ease in this mixture where all us kids played together in the street.

In North Philly, where my extended family lived, it was exclusively Puerto Rican. But of course, within Boricua diaspora communities, there is tremendous diversity. None of us spoke English or Spanish the same way, because we had all learned one or the other at different ages. Our accents were as varied as our hair textures, skin tones, thigh thickness. It was empowering to grow up in a family where there was not one consistent beauty mold or mother tongue. We had to be creative to talk to each other! And we used body language as much as spoken language. We danced. We cooked. We healed each other.

My dad lived out at the end of the Main Line and when I went to visit him on weekends, I entered a very different segregated space — white suburbia. I knew that if my Perez cousins simply walked down the street in Malvern, cops would be called or at least, neighbors would be suspicious as hell.

I grew up traversing these diverse yet segregated spaces. It didn’t even feel like code switching, I got so used to the whiplash.

There wasn’t much natural wilderness in North Philly, so our bodies were our nature, our plots of land. [In the book] I describe our fatness, our scars, our body hair, our breasts, I pull no punches. It is a complete and total celebration of the real women’s bodies I grew up around, that were so much more interesting and varied and gorgeous than the banal homogeneity of supermarket glossy magazines.

In my large extended family, our numbers were weighted heavily toward women, and my vision of life and culture is largely matriarchal as a result. Abuela had a second-grade education but was a powerful community confidante. She also raised her radical daughters to pursue activism in the face of ostracism. One daughter organized against police brutality and for community services for those in need, another a pediatric nurse and community garden pioneer, and another a Lukumí priest and a shamanic healer who worked at the state capitol and was a community activist.

Women were not expected to be polite, meek, or virginal. We were all messy, complicated creatures to whom collective joy mattered tremendously. When I learned about the white feminist notion of “having it all” I was quite shocked and repulsed. The goal of having it all in a nation where so many of us have so little ... it’s deranged. To the Perez women, the goal was to share as much as possible.