“Brown feelings,” writes José Esteban Munõz, “are not individualized affective particularity…” but rather a “larger collective mapping of self and other.” For the minoritized subject, to “feel brown” is to feel, alongside and with others, a collective alienation from the dominant white scripts of being and behaving. We leap and we are caught by each other. We pull away as a means of being pulled toward. Sandra Ruiz, in her deeply resonant Left Turns in Brown Study, provides a productively scattered template for how one might begin to document this communal brown melancholia, and in the process, shows us how to walk arm in arm with the dead. In this text, which is both theoretical and poetic, Ruiz’s language holds rigor and beauty in the same palm; and her wrist flickers so that her chosen subjects are held up to us from various, sometimes distorted, angles. 

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In “The Preturn,” a textual introduction of sorts rendered into poetic form, Ruiz asks us to reconsider our notion of study as a solitary act, and to instead lift our heads from the desk in the hollow of whatever university library we find ourselves in, so that we might tune into the chattering of our sources, our dead, our kin:

 

To intentionally say when

studying: “I turn

“to,” “I turn away from,”

“this turn marks,” or “to

turn to this theory

signifies” all designate

intellectual & ideological

direction, a rotation in

thought that spins a

movement but also a

relationship with others…

 

Here, Ruiz’s “turn” constitutes a multidirectional view, one that acknowledges, even as it creates, a tangled knot of dialogue; the sharing and enmeshing of discourse that occurs between ghosts. In her work, Ruiz uses citations like doorways, affording her spirits—her sources—the agency to move in and out of the page at will. In this sense, Ruiz’s citations do not simply behave as static markers of past influence. Rather, they expand their work into the present and color in the field from where Ruiz’s poems bloom. For if study, as she articulates, is “an aggrieved force,” the pen that settle on the page is what keeps the spirits of the past in present view, illuminating those who “…pass on & / through & return to re-/return…”. The dead, in Ruiz’s work, are restless—they push through speech, settle into the body that is not dead, and guide the hand.

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To study in this way is to sit at an ever-expanding table surrounded by empty, yet always multiplying chairs. This practice offers a kind of complicated comfort to me as a reader. To be brown in the academy is to experience, again and again, the pang of isolation, even when surrounded by other people. As a salve, I’ve taken to leaping, headfirst, into the bibliography of my people when the white noise of my institution reaches an unbearable pitch. As such, Left Turns in Brown Study reads, for me, as a kind of medicine; not because it necessarily underscores or speaks to, in a literal sense, that same lonely plight, but because the text reorients my looking so that it lands somewhere beyond my office, my classroom, my body, my dull grief. 

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In the poem “Juango & Roland,” grief arrives in the form of a photo. The subject of the picture is irrelevant—what matters is the feeling the photo conjures, having been found “tucked thoughtfully into forty-year-old plans—/ bereft, subtly cracked, barely a belief but she speaks, / susurrations, intense vibrational mmmmmms…”. Like Barthes’ refusal to show the reader “The Winter Garden Photo” featuring his mother as a child in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Ruiz’s obscured poetic rendering of a photograph productively refuses a quick and literal glance of subject. In her citation of Barthes’ text, she plays with Barthes’ words on mourning, scattering quotes out of order as one might dirt upon a fresh grave. This is one way grief becomes study—the work of description must rise to fill the gap of image, must somehow render its contents in language so that one might feel close to it, even if they cannot see it for themselves.  Ruiz, in her citation of Barthes, writes that “there is no real temporal or numerical order to mourning or loss.” As such, Barthes’ presence in the poem is a rupture, an unruly voice. It is within this space of poetic unclarity that the speaker’s photo becomes most legible.

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Ruiz’s citational practice lends the poems a kind of double life. Rather than siphoning her sources to a Notes or Works Cited page tucked out of view in the back of the book, Ruiz opts to bring them forward, directly following each poem. The interactions between source and poem amplify the multiplicity of voices throughout so that reading begins to feel a bit like eavesdropping. The citations offer a lifeblood to the poems so that we leave the page not only having absorbed the poem’s contents, but the poem’s history as well. 

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For example, in the poem “To Be Soft,” Ruiz’s footnote identifies Marlon Riggs’ film Tongues United and Gloria Anzaldúa’s seminal work Borderlands/La Frontera as inspirational pillars, noting “this poem sat with these two objects in order to soften the words that extend from the tongue.” Sat, not placed. Here, the poem sits between its sources, as if having chosen its own origin points, divorced from the bind of authorship. In a similar vein, the poem’s first stanza frames a marching of tongues “soldering / toward the sea en masse, en three. Tippy-toe struts, intangible / wings & pearl sweats in ripple sway.” Unbound from the mouths that once housed them, the tongues strut out of view, into the water. To be soft, perhaps, is to relish the quiet our tongues leave in their wake, and to see how the world might choose to fill it: “eventually the sky will drink. Bloated soft. Communal echoes / without cheeks…”

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Elsewhere, Ruiz has chosen to give written instruction at the beginning of a poem to help guide the reader to perform and create sound alongside the work. In “I Guess I Forgive You,” the poem instructs the reader to “read without pause; every sound is a space for them.” Tumbling out in one breathless stream, the poem builds a cacophonic rhythm of anxiety, hunger, and lament. The stanza, compact and brief, signals a communal turn where utopia is at once imagined, hoped for, and ruined in the face of “dehydrated ponds with bomb lines & liquid shores / leaking into our tongues…”. The poem asks dutifully: what do we do when study is not enough? What actions must be taken to make tangible the ethos of our art and speech? Ruiz offers windows in lieu of answers, frames where our ancestors sit amongst the sprawl—the pain, the pleasure—of all our brown histories. 

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Ultimately, I read Left Turns in Brown Study as an abstracted handbook for the living, on behalf of the dead The poems here do not cast loss entirely out, but tether loss to instructions on how to live freely and beautifully within grief’s perpetual shadow. This is to say that one cannot fully escape from beneath the weight of sorrow; rather, one can make something akin to peace, even as the bones grow weary. Grief, that intangible thing, becomes, in this text, a shape we must hold, and hold dear; while study becomes the means with which we shape and reshape that grief until our lives—all of them—are bearable.