American Book Review

"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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