Longing for What It Is: On Ariana Brown's "We Are Owed."
Ariana Brown | We Are Owed. | Grieveland | 2021 | 98 Pages
We Are Owed. requires us to sit up straight and pay attention. Ariana Brown is talking. Beginning with the book’s title, Brown shows us that she knows how to tactfully demand attention. The title is a clear and direct statement—We Are Owed. There is nothing else to discuss, says the period within the title. That period reveals the collection’s urgency, force, and queer Black Mexican-American clap-back. It signals us to take a breath before entering the collection.
Accordingly, pacing seems to be another requirement for reading Brown’s stunning debut collection. The book’s structure is layered. It doesn’t read like a traditional book of poetry. We don’t get poem after poem. Instead, these pages are filled with poems, epigraphs, section breaks, Brown’s college course notes from 2014 and 2015, and lots of white space. In this way, We Are Owed. feels part diary, part notebook, part canvas, part study guide, and part history book. The poems praise and question and remember and imagine.
In the collection’s first poem, “At the End of the Borderlands,” a speaker tries “rituals for healing”—simmering rosemary and drinking “its tea”—because “countries are killing everyone” the speaker loves. This is our speaker’s fight. In an attempt to fight back, she tries to grow her hair “thick as a plague.” She recites poems so often that her “throat blistered & waned” but she “still could not curse colonizers enough to undo their work.” Despite this struggle, the speaker’s loved ones make sure she has eaten, even though no one “has enough money to live.” Instead, they “feed each other [their] blackness.” Like many of the poems throughout the collection, “At the End of the Borderlands” leaves us with questions. “Who are you without your country?” “Would you fight for those you don’t love?” The poem’s direct, inquisitive, and tender tone is a mainstay of this collection.
Brown positions her deceased father as a central figure in the book, even though he only appears a few times—in the very beginning and towards the end. In this sense, Brown’s father is a shield, a protector. In “Quick Study,” the second poem of the book, Brown explains how her parents met: “William Tyrone Brown III / wound up next to my mama / in Air Force basic training.” Three pages later, we learn of her father’s untimely death: “Witnesses said the accident / lit up the sky, two planes colliding in the air, killing / everyone onboard. National news, flags at half-mast.” By honoring her father and “everyone’s ancestors,” Brown seamlessly defines the “we” voiced in the book’s title.
Much of We Are Owed. is about honoring and linking us to the past. The poems for Gaspar Yanga and Esteban Dorantes demonstrate Brown’s refusal to erase these two historic figures. Their history is Brown’s history. In one of the collection’s most tender moments, a six-year-old Ariana writes to Yanga in “Letter to Yanga, from Six-Year-Old Ariana.” Of course the speaker’s tone is tender and innocent, but it is also heartbreaking because we know these moments are only imagined and their requests will never be fulfilled. “Yanga I wanna know what you look like. Can you send me a picture / please. We don’t have a porch but you can sit on the step by the front door until I come home.” Just as a six-year-old would, Ariana spits out question after question to Yanga: “Have you ever seen someone being born?” “Do you have a garden?” “Do you have a favorite fruit?” In the poem’s final line, Ariana pleads for a photo of Yanga. She writes, “Can you let me know when you get this. I really want those pictures.”
Longing for what it is that “we are owed” resonates throughout this entire book. And despite the burdens of white supremacy, Brown still finds it in herself to comfort us with couplets such as:
every morning, i listen to chance the rapper’s coloring
book. hum to myself, we know, we know, we got it
And:
i can’t find an image of yanga online. instead, i
try harder to love my own face, nose, lips, hair.
Toward the end of the book, in her poem “Borderlands suite: Names,” Brown tells us point-blank: “I am proud to be Black.” If we didn’t have the formula for how to love ourselves and who and where we come from, we do now. Brown has given us her all and we are here listening, paying close attention.