Brown Girls, a novel by Daphne Palasi Andreades, does something that I have never seen in a full-length book: it narrates from a second-person plural position. “We” go to fancy schools, or not. “We” marry white men, or not. “We” have children, or not. It’s an interesting approach that both individuates experiences of the multiple main characters and collapses their individuality into a collective identity, despite their differences. “Brown girls” encompasses any number of Pakistani, Indian, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican, Trinidadian, Thai girls, and so on, yet Andreades captures the similarities that unite their experiences.
The story can be summarized fairly quickly: Brown girls grow up in Queens, New York. Brown girls’ paths diverge as they go to different high schools and universities. Brown girls’ brothers deal drugs and go to jail. Brown girls marry white boys and have affairs with old flames. Brown girls’ cousins die in a car crash and brown girls are haunted by dreams of her. Brown girls have sexual awakenings about the perfect white Jenny. Brown girls grow up, have kids, and brown girls die. Far be it from me to assess the authenticity of a brown woman’s experience, but the whole story feels extremely real. I feel like I’ve seen each of the tropes in the book in the real world more than once, and the specific events and variations give the book a universality that rings true and is, often, heartbreaking.
For instance, the scene that describes the death of the brown girls’ cousin is gruesome and the account of her funeral tragic. The dreams in which she returns sting like the death of a real person. Given that we are not attached to any specific character makes it that much more surprising when these moments contain such emotive power. Imagine reading Anna Karenina without Anna Karenina—just a “we” women. When the different experiences of brown girls converge into a simultaneous voice, it’s a hotwiring of your brain. For example, in one scene, old brown girl friends are recounting the various racist experiences they’ve had. The narration reads as follows: “Alright, y’all, get this: This girl from my psych class? I kid you not, she came up to me one day and said (here, we pinch our noses to mimic her nasally voice), It must be sooooo hard being---And I said, Being what?” (82). It’s a bizarre moment to imagine the collective voice to be both listener and speaker, and moreover for the speaker to be a collective voice imitating the character in the story to which they are listening. They all pinch their noses to voice a character of a story they haven’t yet heard? Andreades pulls off a kind of magic trick, which is even more fun when there are contradictions. From sentence-to-sentence, on occasion, there are brown girls that go in different directions and yet exist on the same plane: both/neither are made one through the phrasing of the premises.
The narrative voice takes me back to some studies I did in my Master’s on Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation: essentially, the State says, “Hey you!”, you turn around, and thus you’ve become-subject. I thought about the scene in Spartacus in which all the characters rise up and declare “I am Spartacus”, breaking the State’s conception of interpellation by producing false responses to the call of “hey you!”. Here, we have a similar approach through the collective “we” that allows the brown girls to escape the limitations on their identity imposed by State apparatuses. It’s material for a future essay—you heard it here first!
One of the most powerful lines in the book is when some of the brown girls in the book abandon their business degrees to pursue art (cough. Can’t think of a real-world corollary, nope) and actually become successful in it. The artists then become representatives for their respective races, expected to speak on behalf of their communities, and so on. Andreades lists a number of the questions they are asked and ends the chapter as follows: “We are so visible that we have become invisible. Odd that in this moment we dreamt of, we are faceless” (108). The book exposes that there are different brands of erasure. Erasure by others or erasure within a community—with two very different results. Again: future essay to follow.
The contradictions within their identities also seem to be produced by their families. I’ll offer a lengthy passage here to demonstrate the disconnect between the main characters’ experiences, the reception they get from the their peers, and the reception from their parents:
We love the way the lead sluices the page like butter in a hot pan. We join our classmates and teachers to take customary, nerve-racking walks around enormous art studios to view everyone’s work. When our teachers stop at our portraits, they remark, It’s all in the eyes, and we watch our classmates nod in agreement. We bubble at their approval.
Some of us are voice majors, and we prepare ourselves to sing French and Italian arias by warming up our larynxes. La la la LA la la laaaa! Shift smoothly from one key to the next, higher and higher. We are sopranos, altos, prima donnas in training. Open your mouths like this, our teachers say. Dutifully, we reposition our tongues. Even in song, we become fluent in the language of our colonizers. Our English, impeccable. Our mother tongues, if we were taught them at all, become atrophied muscles, half-remembered melodies.
Our parents, who don’t care for capital A Art, or the pursuit of beauty, or so we believe, say, We don’t understand, slow down, can you explain it again? when they ask about our days. And when we see the confusion clouding their eyes, we feel powerful. Reckless. Mean. (45)
The idea of “bubbling” at the approval of peers, to find that sense of community after being somewhat ousted offers that glint of hopefulness (even if the art teacher’s assessment is somewhat cursory). Art is presented as a bittersweet experience: initially seen as freedom. It becomes a way of co-opting brown girls into colonization, as “we” see when “we become fluent in the language of our colonizers” when singing in their form. The grandiose ideas of art are dismissed by parents, and it becomes a double-edged sword. That twist at the end of the passage where parents’ confusion is turned against them by children who can be reckless and mean in response encapsulates that complex and tense relationship between immigrant parents and their children, and the conflict in their dreams, in such a concise way.
You may also have gotten a sense from the passage above that Andreades’ work incorporates a great deal of evocative imagery. In fact, the first passage in the book is a wonderful representation of the lively and imagistic voice of the work. The book begins with the following passage to set the scene:
We live in the dregs of Queens, New York, where airplanes fly so low that we are certain they will crush us. On our block, a lonely tree grows. Its branches tangle in power lines. Its roots upend sidewalks where we ride our bikes before they are stolen. Roots that render the concrete slabs uneven, like a row of crooked teeth. In front yards, not to be confused with actual lawns, grandmothers string laundry lines, hang bedsheets, our brothers’ shorts, and our sneakers scrubbed to look brand-new. Take those down! our mothers hiss. This isn’t back home. In front yards grow tomatoes that have fought their way through the hard earth. (3).
The specific details of the scene are limited, but chosen with a curatorial eye. The image of the tree and its sprawling roots work as an effective symbol for the different strands of the brown girls’ lives branching outward, as well. Andreades also uses language in a clever way to note that “yards” are not to be confused with “actual lawns” — there’s a nuance to the language that is worth recognition. The passage instructs the audience to pay attention to these minor differences in word choice. It’s a great way to start the novel.
Actually, the ending of the novel does an exceptional job with its imagistic qualities as well. Andreades presents a conception of the afterlife, alternatingly involving exploding stars, decomposition, becoming fragrant magnolia trees, existing on clouds, existing on digital clouds as “every item we’d ever ordered” (202). There’s an incantatory tone as Andreades lists all of the possibilities for brown girls after their deaths; there’s also a powerful scene in which the long-dead cousin returns in a dream as an escort to the afterlife. The list towards the end of the afterlife is gorgeous and haunting: “We discover that we are now a pool of water within a cave, black and unknowingly deep, the translucent onion skins that cling to our grown daughters’ or our granddaughters’ palms. We are the vertebrae of our grandparents’ curved spines” (202) and “We are the gnarled tree on the block. The one we’d biked past as children” (203). There are echoes of the opening passage, which serves as a nice bookend, of course, and I audibly gasped when Andreades wrote something that I myself have thought (and actually had a poem published about it in 2015 p.66): “Death sounds like a wind chime and a croak and the faintest whistling noise” (203). Wind chimes are the sound of death. Prove me wrong.
Ultimately, Brown Girls is a book as unique in its narration as it is accessible and universal in its messaging. I suspect that the main audience for the book is brown girls themselves, who (I think) will see themselves written into every page, but I saw so much in here that rang true in a stylistically inventive mode. It’s very likely worth your time. “Our” time. “We” should probably read it.
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