Published by The University of Arizona Press, When Language Broke Open is a new anthology edited by Alan Pelaez Lopez which aims to highlight “queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent.” Instead of reviewing the anthology, I want to be in conversation with it, uplift it, and discuss what it’s achieving remarkably well. Because ultimately, as a queer, mixed-race Black and Xicanx nonbinary writer, THIS book is the first time in my life where I’ve read the works of forty-five writers whose identities, experiences, and use of language are similar to mine. The only emotions I could feel while reading stemmed from a sense of kinship, longing, and love. So, I’d like to treat this review as if I’m sitting in a room with all the writers of this anthology as if we’re all best friends and I am doting on how much love I have for them and their remarkable abilities to create language for queer diasporas, ancestry, loss, and hope.
When Language Broke Open is divided into three sections: memory, care, and futures. The works in each section are from queer and/or trans Black writers of Latin American descent, spanning geographies from the Caribbean to Latin America to Latinx USA.
Naturally, first I’d like to start with:
MEMORY
Tender. Longing. Family. Homeland. Origins. Diaspora. Loss.
These are the words that come to mind when I think about the MEMORY section of the anthology. Through poetry and prose, each author reflects on the moments they miss from their homelands, whether it’s remembering a grandmother and her recipes, the way the ocean greeted them and washed away their troubles, or how their cities or homes formed a sense of community, safety, and belonging.
The section begins with a poem titled “Another Diaspora Poem” by Irene
Vásquez, which sets the tone for the section as the poem recounts the speaker’s displacement from their homeland, the loss that comes with it from lost language, the longing to touch beaches they’ll never get to feel rush along their skin, how the body doesn’t naturally feel acclimated to a land it wasn’t born to. The poem, like many of the other pieces in the section, are painful echoes and cries as the writers reflect on where they come from, and ultimately, what they have lost.
The pieces in the collection are in essence a form of remembering — abuelas in the cocina, partners and family members lost to drugs and/or HIV, the grandparent who supported the queer child. The pieces in this section are odes balancing love and grief and capture what it means to love a land, a people, a home, even when they are oceans or lifetimes away.
CARE
The CARE section of the anthology is the longest section compared to the other two, and there are many reasons why I personally appreciate this choice. To purposefully include more works that center on pleasure, love, and care between the self, friends, lovers, and family members feels like taking the deepest breath of air, resulting in an exhale that you’d feel ringing in your body for days.
When the collective pain tips the scales like we see in the MEMORY section, it is incredibly important to reflect on the moments when we feel good, feel loved, feel touched.
The CARE section poetically describes queer sexual discovery, the joys of sex, touch, and bodily pleasure. The section highlights what it means to find true friendship, chosen family, the people who will always have your back no matter what. Now this isn’t to say the section doesn’t have its dark moments. In fact, I read one of the most haunting prose pieces out of the entire anthology in this specific section. “Home Sweet Homeless” by Josslyn Glenn haunted me in ways unimaginable, but it struck this balance of the harsh world we live in (police brutality, poverty) but still learning to care and love one another despite it. That balance is important because in order to show what care truly looks like, we have to witness what it is not.
What the section successfully achieves is it shows us what queer joy looks like for these queer and trans Black Latinx writers and how it manifests for each of them specifically. I loved this section so much. I loved reading about all the ways CARE can emerge, whether it’s learning to love and accept oneself, leaving behind the folks who don’t treat us right, mapping the queer body and pleasuring it in every way it appears, and loving one’s Blackness, especially when coming from culturas y familias that teach you to hide your Blackness, your queerness, your transness, you. The poems, essays, and stories in this section are defiantly queer, Black, bilingual, sexy, and healing. In other words, these pieces are defiant in who they are.
And that shit is powerful as hell.
FUTURES
I think it’s worth mentioning that the FUTURES section is the shortest one of them all. However, I don’t find this to be a bad thing; if anything, it’s inspiring. If this moment in time is the present, there’s still plenty of open opportunity to dismantle our current systems and rebuild towards a future that is the Blackest, queerest, and most intersectional of them all. And this section does what it needs to — motivates the reader and calls upon us to come together and build it. There’s this gorgeous line from the poem “Inheritance 1” by Jeydelyn M that says, “There is no such thing as liberation without grief” and I feel that line describes many of the pieces in this section.
There is no such thing as liberation without grief
Writers such as Ariana Brown who wrote the poem “Black girls deserve” goes on to create a lovely list of what Black girls deserve from safety to comfortability to love — the poem still creates this sense of grief, the idea that this list is FUTURES and not PRESENTS. The same idea echoes the
sentiment of Darrell McBride’s poem “Ain’t I Latina?” which aims to discuss that people who are Latinx are not defined by their ability to speak a colonized language but by their origins, ancestry, and culture.
These pieces collectively call for a future that is Black, intersectional, radical, queer, and full of love. The anthology’s editor, Alan Pelaez Lopez, adds a poem in this section titled “When Dreaming of a Future Means Letting Go,” and I believe it fully captures the essence of the anthology. It asks us to believe in a future where “there are no more nations,” where we can imagine a life beyond cis-heteronormativity, where abolition is a part of our daily lives.
When Language Broke Open is a groundbreaking anthology, uplifting the voices of over forty writers that are queer, trans, Black, and Latinx. I’ve never read anything like it. Reading it instilled a hope in me that wasn’t there before. It gave language to the experiences of a group of people who are not often heard or listened to especially in a time of book bans, censorship, and discrimination. And as the book implies, this is just the beginning. There are futures that need to become the present. Conversations that need to be had. Spaces that must intersect.
At the end of their poem, Lopez asks us in this future: “Who will you be and how will you show up when all that’s left is each other / and the actions we took that we never dared be accountable to?”
Buy your copy of When Language Broke Open here.
How “When Language Broke Open” Gives Voice to Queer and Trans Black Latinx Writers: A Review was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.