"Brown Girls" and the power of female friendships
Daphne Andreades Palasi's novel, "Brown Girls" is an inspiring exploration of friendships, family, love, and women in color growing up in the "dregs of Queens".
The colonized, the colonizer. Where do we fall?
Is the most powerful quote I found from “Brown Girls” - a coming-of-age novel, written by Filipino-American author Daphne Andreades Palasi, that speaks to the experiences of women in color growing up in the outskirts of Queens, New York. The sentence is so simple, yet it explores many conversations that surrounds the immigrant experience: intergenerational trauma, assimilation, racism, identity crises, relationships with friends and families, people, people of color. It challenges you to think: who are you in America, the supposed land of the free and opportunities?
Brown Girls Brown Girls Brown Girls. What poetically flows throughout the seven part novel is the experiences of immigrants, children of immigrants, and people of color. Something I found interesting is that the novel doesn’t focus on a specific narrative of a character; rather, it touches inclusively on all experiences - from South Asian, to South East Asian, to African, to Middle Eastern, to East Asian, the story blankets these experiences and hugs them as one so as to speak to you, the reader, and make your own experience, or add your own personal touch, from the lives of brown girls like Ruth, Tasnim, Glory, Beatriz, Constanza. Also Irene, Salome, Fabiana, Helen, and Priya (pg. 151).
The most profound recurring theme that I found was female friendships (she also addressed transgender and queerness as these relationships evolved) and how different aspects of life, as you trudge through it, affected these relationships. One example is when the girls graduated high school; they were in the position to choose between staying at home, in the dregs of Queens, or moving elsewhere to pursue bigger aspirations and find themselves. This created different life paths that, when reunited at some point in the novel, makes the brown girls question their identity, who they’ve become, and their own environments that influence their sense of self.
Reading this book was like reading a reflection of myself and Palasi does an amazing job illuminating the conversations we have to ourselves, bringing it to life and highlighting some of the issues that immigrants and children of immigrants face growing up in America. Told through the lenses of the lifelong bonds of girls and women is this coming-of-age story that is an ode to girlhood, and waves of nostalgia come and go as I read about sexual awakenings at the tender age of fourteen, or reading about the complicated relationships with our mothers and fulfilling certain expectations.
The hotheaded of us, however, shouted back I DON'T WANT TO BE STUCK HERE FOREVER! and gestured to the greasy kitchen stoves, the faded couches, the fake, dusty plants, and china plates only used on special occasions (i.e. never). Houses – hidden, peripheral – our parents worked so hard to obtain.
Through these lenses, we see a tender and intimately intricate evolution of an immigrant girl with brown skin. From the nuances of white/brown relationships, brown brothers and their encounters with crime in the city, assimilation and being “good brown girls”, navigating school and classes in high school and beyond, going back to the country where their families are from. As they move around in each stage of their lives - where some moved to the West Coast, some moved to Brooklyn or Manhattan, or the Midwest - they never forget where they came from at heart: the dregs of Queens.
Unlike most stories that portray New York City - typically as this glittery life, filled with temporary love-lessons and a career-forward narrative of an individual trying to make it in NYC - Palasi’s Brown Girls sheds a different light on the bustling and hustling city. Instead of the glitz and the glamour, it gets to the grittiness parts, panning to the immigrant families and multi-culture that Queens is so well known for. Between the perfectly lined road, Palasi looks at the cracks and crevices, showing us a side of New York City that most who idealize or aspire to move here don’t know about: the dregs of Queens.
After finishing the book, to which I almost cried towards the end, the lesson I learned from it was to never forget the place you came from that made you who you are, and to be proud of it. Despite the chaos of navigating girlhood and the immigrant experience that the brown girls grew up in, they always drew back to their neighborhood in Queens, its smoking-pot-holed roads and varied ethnic restaurants and markets and brown kids running around the bursting fire hydrant lingering in their minds as they grow up, finish school, pursue their careers, make and lose friends, and start families.
It certainly reminds me of my own experience of growing up in the suburbs in the UK, trying to figure out who I am amidst my Filipino family in the almost-all-white neighborhood of Tunbridge Wells. Through The Kultura, I do the same thing of maintaining my core memory, tightening the thread that holds together the seams which is that I am a Filipina woman who grew up in the outskirts of London.
Have you read Brown Girls? What are your thoughts?
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