• The Essential Nonessentialized Brown Girl
• Christine Imperial (bio)

"Brown Girl Fields Many Questions," the first poem of Barbara Jane Reyes's sixth full-length collection of poetry Letters to a Brown Girl, confronts the reader with the brutal reality of Filipino brownness. It begins:

If you want to know what we are whose body parts are scattered to the winds, dispersed as heirloom seeds into the beaks, stomachs, and dropping of migratory birds, broken through our clear film of rage to leaf and fruit, no matter what territory or terrain.

Reyes does not allow this eloquently rendered lyric to dissolve into a universal reading that allows anyone to take on the persona of the poem. She immediately deconstructs her own lyric to expose the ways in which the New Critical mode of close reading widely used to understand a poem devalues the subjectivity the poem is birthed from. "iii. In which English 'we' is crude lacking in the specific exclusive and inclusive distinctions of the Tagalog 'tayo' and 'kami'" stands out for it illustrates the persona's awareness of what English lacks as a means of expressing the specificity of the Filipinx identity. Reyes recognizes that the brown girl must work harder when writing in English for what can be in one word in Tagalog must be stretched out and re-articulated. What follows after this deconstruction of language is a decompression of the opening lyric through a long list of images and experiences that exposes the conditions surrounding the brown girl's subjectivity:

what it's like when they ask whether your mother was a green card hunting whore,a nudie dancer near the military base, a drug addict, a welfare cheatwhat it's like when they say you are an illegal, when they say fucking monkey, when they ask why you eat dog, when they call you a dirty Filipino.What it's like when they tell you you should be grateful.

Here we see that the brown girl cannot be a blank slate. She cannot be a universal figure. Her lyric is not everyone's lyric. Knowing her poems are going to be read by a white audience, Reyes exhausts the reader by showing the ugly reality of oppression against brown bodies. Instead of allowing the white reader to feel sympathy and passively consume, she forces them to confront the ways in which their privilege has come at the cost of bodies of color. By listing down these experiences, Reyes lays the framework for the brown girl's reclamation of her identity. Throughout the collection, Reyes's language is direct and unflinching as it rallies against disguising language in the figurative. In "Brown Girl Manifesto: #AllPinayEverything," Reyes writes, "Because so much depends upon vacuous speech" she is reminding the reader of the power of voice. She asserts her writing is not metaphor. It is not a tropical fantasy nor is it wholly an experience of laborious subservience. It is who the brown girl is, and the brown girl is not afraid to scream. The brown girl who must tell her own story, because nobody else can. As Reyes writes in "Track: 'You're the One,' Fanny (1971)," "Hell yeah, let this Brown Girl be, ruby rock and roll gypsy in a big man's dirty world. I make ovaries of stone. I make the hottest blood. I'm the one. I'm my own thing."

Throughout the collection, the poems take on the form of lists that name the collective experience of brown girlhood. The list simultaneously accumulates and de-accumulates experience. It allows for the reader to process each item both as individual experience and part of a larger one. This is significant for it reflects the text's tension of trying to illustrate the collective experience of the brown girl while also recognizing the individual character and narrative of every brown girl. The text's final poem "Dear Brown Girl" is a massive list where this tension is most palpable. She writes:

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• 基本的未归化的棕色女孩
• 克里斯汀·帝国（生物）

芭芭拉·简·雷耶斯（Barbara Jane Reyes）的第六本全长诗集《给一个棕色女孩的信》的第一首诗《棕色女孩的问题很多》以菲律宾棕色的残酷现实面对读者。它始于：

如果您想知道我们的身体部位是随风散布的，是作为传家宝种子散布在喙，胃和滴落的候鸟中的东西，无论是什么地区或地区，都被我们清晰可见的对叶片和果实的愤怒冲破了地形。

雷耶斯（Reyes）不允许将这种雄辩的歌词分解成一种通用读物，任何人都可以接受这首诗的角色。她立即​​解构了自己的歌词，以揭露广泛用于理解诗词的“新批判”近距离阅读模式贬低了诗词的主观性。“ iii。英语的“我们”简陋，缺少他加禄语“ tayo”和“ kami”的特定排他性和包容性区别”之所以脱颖而出，是因为它说明了角色对于英语缺乏什么的认识，以此来表达菲律宾人身份的特殊性。雷耶斯（Reyes）认识到，棕色女孩在用英语写作时必须加倍努力，因为他加禄语中一个单词中的内容必须拉长并重新拼写。语言解构之后的结果是，通过一连串的图像和体验对开头的歌词进行解压缩，从而揭示了棕色女孩的主观性周围的状况：

当他们问您的母亲是否是打绿卡的妓女，在军事基地附近的裸体舞者，吸毒者，福利作弊时，他们会是什么样？当他们说您是非法的，当他们说他妈的猴子，当他们当他们称您为肮脏的菲律宾人时，请问您为什么要吃狗。当他们告诉您应该感激的时候，这是什么样的感觉。

在这里，我们看到棕色女孩不能是一块空白。她不能成为一个普遍的人物。她的歌词并不是每个人的歌词。雷耶斯知道自己的诗将被白人听众阅读，他通过展示对棕色身体压迫的丑陋现实使读者筋疲力尽。她没有让白人读者感到同情和消极地消费，而是强迫他们面对特权以牺牲有色人种为代价的方式。通过列出这些经验，雷耶斯为棕色女孩的身份复垦奠定了框架。在整个系列中，雷耶斯的语言是直接而坚定的，因为它与人物形象中的伪装语言齐头并进。雷耶斯在《棕色女孩宣言：#AllPinayEverything》中写道：“因为很大程度上取决于虚假的言论” 她在提醒读者声音的力量。她断言自己的写作不是隐喻。这不是热带的幻想，也不是完全艰苦的从属经历。是棕色女孩子是谁，棕色女孩子不怕尖叫。棕色的女孩，必须讲自己的故事，因为没有其他人可以讲。正如雷耶斯在《追踪：'你是那个，范妮（1971）》中写道，“是的，让这个布朗姑娘成为一个在一个大男人肮脏的世界里红宝石摇滚吉普赛人的人。我让石头变成卵巢。我制造最热的血液。我就是其中之一。我是我自己的东西。” 棕色的女孩，必须讲自己的故事，因为没有其他人可以讲。正如雷耶斯在《追踪：'你是那个，范妮（1971）》中写道，“是的，让这个布朗姑娘成为一个在一个大男人肮脏的世界里红宝石摇滚吉普赛人的人。我让石头变成卵巢。我制造最热的血液。我就是其中之一。我是我自己的东西。” 棕色的女孩，必须讲自己的故事，因为没有其他人可以讲。正如雷耶斯在《追踪：'你是那个，范妮（1971）》中写道，“是的，让这个布朗姑娘成为一个在一个大男人肮脏的世界里红宝石摇滚吉普赛人的人。我让石头变成卵巢。我制造最热的血液。我就是其中之一。我是我自己的东西。”

在整个收藏中，这首诗以清单的形式列出了棕色少女时代的集体经历。该列表同时积累和积累经验。它使读者可以将每个项目既作为单独的体验又作为较大的体验的一部分来处理。这很有意义，因为它反映了文本在试图说明棕色女孩的集体经历的同时也认识到每个棕色女孩的个性和叙述的张力。文字的最后一首诗“亲爱的布朗姑娘”是一首巨大的清单，这种张力最明显。她写道：

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