A House of Our Own: We Are Owed. by Ariana Brown

Photo Credit: Ariana Brown via http://www.arianabrown.com/we-are-owed.html

“we thought / by wearing the name / of our conqueror, / we might somehow / become him”
—Ariana Brown, We Are Owed. (Grieveland, 2021)

Ariana Brown’s We Are Owed. investigates identity at the intersection of cultures, countries, and languages, illuminating a gap in the archive. Through poems that experiment with use of space, voices, and historical anecdotes, Brown brings about themes of antinationalism, namelessness, and loss of history to show readers the internal turmoil that comes with being Black and Mexican.

In “There Are Güeros & Then There is Me,” Brown asserts that, in Spanish, “there is no word / to describe [her] with grace.” This namelessness resurfaces throughout, expressing the anti-Black racism in Latinx cultures, which exists even linguistically; in “Mexico City, scenes: III. Arena de México,” the speaker’s crush, a güero (white Mexican), uses a racist slur. Without “graceful” names, Black people become a segregated unit within the Latinx and other communities, resulting in a loss of identity and promoting the spread of racist perceptions of Blackness.

“Borderlands suite: Nightmares” shows how the speaker’s Blackness influences her relationship with her family and culture: “Mom yells, breaks a hairbrush on my head. / Every Spanish word I learn is an insult.” Here, the language’s violence comes from its mundanity; who doesn’t curse when their hair won’t cooperate? This moment speaks to a larger issue: every aspect of Blackness is rejected, in this case, curly/kinky hair. The following line break from “There are Güeros & Then There is Me” stood out to me: “The first day of first grade, / three pencils & a set / of hands I found in my hair.” The words “a set” create an expectation of school supplies, but the next line highlights the everyday nature of this subtle racism. Again, the lack of positive language for Blackness results in a negative experience. In response, the speaker reclaims that language in “Alternate Names for Pelo Malo.”

Hair appears repeatedly as a symbol of the speaker’s isolation from her country. In “Don’t Know Nobody from Ellis Island,” her “exiled hair was a harbor” that she and the only other Black Mexican in her classroom “both could have moored in.” This poem features an extended metaphor using the Statue of Liberty, a symbol of American nationalism, to explore why allegiance to a country does not constitute identity. Although I am not Black and my hair is far from kinky, I, too, draw my identity in part from my hair, especially, as Melissa Lozada-Oliva writes in Dreaming of You, “to separate [myself] from whiteness.” As a white Latina, the history of my identity is uncomfortable, as it is for Jessica Alba in “There are Güeros & Then There is Me” when she realizes that she and the narrator are “on opposite sides of the sword.” My curls, however loose, somehow justify my Latinidad, in addition to my language. No such connections to country and culture exist for the narrator. Thus, she constructs a new identity.

We see the power of hair again in “Mexico City, scenes: VI. Universidad Iberoamericana.” Spanish, a symbol of the country that rejects her Blackness, fails the speaker as she tries to explain her hairstyle to a fellow “negrita.” However, this kinship over hair supersedes language. Spanish appears throughout We Are Owed. but is never italicized. I suspect this was meant to strip the language of any additional power over the speaker, who has been oppressed by it all her life, left wishing “daily” for an accent to tie her to her culture (“There are Güeros & Then There is Me”). As the speaker says, she “had a choice—to erase the words that erased [her] already or make new ones.”

Throughout the collection, the narrator explores the erasure of Blackness from Mexican history. In “Case Study, ” she struggles to dance like the güeras. Here, internal rhyme and alliteration mimic musical rhythm: “Without a buzzing in my blood, drunk only with dream, I think.” These sounds express her familiarity with the cumbia moves, though she cannot own them until she’s learned they originated in the shackled steps of slaves. Another such erasure appears in “Field Notes,” which experiments with space on the page to combine experiences on a trip in Mexico with historical text. Here, country has failed the speaker, excluding her from what should have been her history: “the exhibit on racism al museo de la ciudad de / méxico mentioned black people three times.” The poem also explains her fascination with Yanga, the creator of “the first free African settlement in the Americas,” a man who lived in the same intersection of identities she does. In Yanga, she finds a family member who understands, who could teach her “to be a person without a nation.”

Other family members cannot understand her. In “Volver, Volver,” the speaker distinguishes her grandmother’s struggles with racism from hers: “my grandmother / is an essay on shame… I recognize but cannot read.” Her culture keeps her outside of its “beautiful fist,” forcing her to look elsewhere for identity: “to love no nation, to kiss / my mirror with the mouth / I own.” Upon rejecting nationalism, she reimagines her experience, creating a family of Black women to support her in “Lotería de la Negra”: “i wished for a mother that looked like me / so i find las negras & give them names here.”

We Are Owed. fills in crucial gaps in the history of Black Mexicans, showing readers how the narrator has been forced to reject country and culture and define herself anew. In “Inhale: the Ceremony,” she admits that her exclusion is not exclusive to her: “The elders … know / everything I am / going to say.” The line break after “I am” expresses the narrator’s identification with those who share her forgotten history, assuring readers that this story is not new, but has merely been buried, leaving people isolated at the intersections of cultures, countries, languages, and identities to construct a new reality. One where they belong.

Thanks to Grieveland for providing a review copy.

Brittany Torres Rivera is a Puerto Rican writer whose work deals with culture, family, and (un)belonging. She has a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Florida International University. She is based in Orlando, FL.