Quiara Alegria Hudes
RAHSAAN: Yemaya's Belly is your first play; it accomplished so much in such a short time, with awards from the Kennedy Center, and the Paula Vogel Award in Playwriting, for example. Yoruba deity worship & immigration weave together a moving story that can be felt & applied universally, with its moments of magical youthfulness, broken innocence, and coping with tragedy. Which theme inspired you first to tell this story: Yemaya or the American Dream?
QUIARA: I had already been writing about the Orisha. I wrote two musicals as an undergrad that explored Regla de Ocha, and Ogun in particular. Having grown up amongst the living room ceremonies of my elders, I grew interested in how to honor the stage as a space of community history and connectivity, too. So, in Yemaya's Belly, I really dug into that.
R: 'Water by the Spoonful', 'Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue' (both Pulitzer Prize-awarded works), 'The Happiest Song Plays Last' and 'Daphne's Dive', all take place in Philly aka the Two One Five. The rest of the world knows the city for its comfort foods, wild sports fans, a fictional boxing hero, a cracked bell, a late-night tv rap band, and a bunch of anti-monarch upstarts who started a "democracy". Besides being your hometown, why does Philadelphia hold such prominence as a location for you and your characters?
Q: It's the fourth most segregated city in the nation. It is on Lenape Haki-nk land. And the United States Constitution was signed there. So, yeah, the history is profound and deeply troubled. On American Street, en el barrio, I used to think that Philly had the biggest stateside Boricua population outside of New York. Nope. It's just, we were all in one neighborhood, and so it felt like a whole universe. In West Philly, the vibe was super-international with immigrant families who had recently arrived from Vietnam, Ethiopia, India. We were the only Latinos on the block. The Roots would be playing Pass the Popcorn on the street corner. I'm still unpacking it, returning to those memories, learning from all the culture I was blessed to come up in.
R: As seen in 'Daphne's Dive', 'Miss You Like Hell', and 'In The Heights', you casted the incomparable Daphne Rubin-Vega, who seems to bring magic to the stage in every musical production. How did you first come across Rubin-Vega: was it from RENT the Musical, or the early 90's Latin Freestyle group, Pajama Party (of which she was a member)?
Q: I saw her as Mimi when I was 18. She was the first Latina I ever saw onstage. Her character was dressed cutting-edge stylish, so it didn't totally fit with my experience of how AIDS was decimating our community in Philly. A few decades later, I found in her a true muse. She hungers for complication and vivaciousness and that jives with my worldview.
R: Of course, we must touch on mega-popular 'In The Heights'. As a Puerto Rican playwright from a major city, how sensitive must a writer be when approaching & utilizing barrio-related narratives? How do you identify the fine line between empowering socio-cultural differences with reverence (niches and all), and parodying the Latinx American 'urbano' experience with potentially-damaging stereotypes?
Q: Growing up, mom gave me books by Marta Moreno-Vega and Esmeralda Santiago. In grad school I was assigned my first Boricua playwright: Jose Rivera. As an adult, I took it upon myself to seek out Piri Thomas and Nicholasa Mohr and Pedro Pietri. From my own work: for years I wanted to address addiction, as it was something my family survived firsthand in the 80s and 90s. However, I was not about to create another "Latino junkie" role. Hell no. So, I didn't write that play for years, until I realized: I can write about a woman in recovery. That was the key for me, that let me be real and engage with dignity, honesty, and love.
R: Like millions have witnessed for many decades, a long list of horrors have befallen & continue to plague Puerto Rico & its people, including (but not limited to) hurricanes, earthquakes, political corruption, femicides, Wall Street debts, commonwealth-related disparities, eco-terrorism, etc.), and it seems this Caribbean island nation can't catch a break as they fight for fairness. How important is it right now to amplify Puerto Rican voices as they call out for justice & change?
Q: En el Grito de Lares, we were loud, we amplified and acted. For #RickyRenuncia we were loud, we amplified. And the diasporic small-scale efforts that came together to save lives in the wake of Maria... it was so beautiful. Organizing for justice and change is in the Boricua cellular and spiritual memory. At this moment, I am putting my efforts into the #AbolishPolice movement, because our brothers and sisters are ensnared in the prison industrial complex. My cousin and I started Emancipated Stories, so people behind bars can share one page of their life story with the world.
R: You have a new memoir coming out in Spring 2021, titled 'My Broken Language'. Without assuming this title is alluding directly to your bilingual, bicultural upbringing, it does conjure the theme of fractured communication. This sense of a 'shattered state' permeates into the majority of your works, reflecting within the narratives & conflicted character personalities. Yet, your works feature a 'safe space'- a bar, a soup kitchen, a neighborhood, and even a spirituality - where characters seek salvation to heal themselves, yearning to become whole again. Has this memoir been a safe space for you, to glue your experience(s) into a whole? Was there a salvation found in the process of writing it?
Q: I don't know yet. I just hit send on the manuscript and I'm too inside it still to have perspective. I tried to write the truth, with rigor and love. Sometimes the truth hurts. But I have found that it heals in greater quantity.
R: what advice would you give to a young person from the diaspora who wants to do what you do?
Q: Build a sustainable writing life. Tell it like only you can tell it, using a language all your own. Challenge yourself to always be more honest, to learn more deeply about the things that fascinate, and speak to you.