Book Review: Left Turns in Brown Study by Sandra Ruiz
Book cover with black background the title written in bold red letters, Left Turns in Brown Study. Author’s name, Sandra Ruiz, written in the center in white below a beam of light shining in the darkness. Design by Duke University Press.
Review of Left Turns In Brown Study, by Sandra Ruiz, published by Duke University Press, August 2, 2024 as part of the series, Writing Matters! 152 pages. Available for purchase at Barnes and Noble, Duke University, Amazon.com, and Amazon Kindle starting at $24.95.
“Left Turns is an invitation to turn back to turn forward to turn left again & return–for the swivel redirects the ungovernable route…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…”(24)
Left Turns in Brown Study, a book of theory and poetry by Sandra Ruiz, opens with two tables of contents: the first, written as a run on list of titles repeated twice with no punctuation; the second, traditionally formatted. The first, reads as a poem titled, C O N T E N T S. It’s fitting, given that it serves as an introduction to the viscera of this book. Written twice, the words fall in a different place on the page changing the phrasing and forming new relationships among subjects. The two tables foretell what’s to come: multiple ways of containing, holding, existing, and being with.
In THE PRETURN, Ruiz presents her thesis, engaging scholarship as relational; study an act of love and kinship. She introduces brown study as,
“A position of being that arises from a combination of colors that comprise brown…a spectrum of colors & a metaphor for racial mixture, not a stationary or stable identity marker but one that exceeds the dialectics of racial formation & designation; & subsequently welcomes encounter, exchange, flows into otherwise ways of being upon touch, crossing, falling, talking, being, doing things together as together.”(27)
Difference contains multilayered histories, is incomplete, and forever evolving. To brown study is also to mourn, to experience the heartache of deeply contemplating the past while listening with curiosity and compassion. Ruiz calls for a turn towards brown study as a simultaneously personal and collective act alive with possibility which, “binds suffering to light, which turns left into something otherwise wiser than our present hostile condition.”(125)
In this book, “turn” appears as a command, return, reorientation, choreography. “Left” exists as a direction, a social and political leaning, a sense of being left with what’s left, and/or a resistance to what has been taught as the “right” way to be or do something. From the beginning, Ruiz examines institutional exclusion and trauma. She recalls how her father couldn’t use the pen as a weapon because he was unschooled, but he was not uneducated. Turning to “belated mentors”, “illiterate ancestors” and “victims of colonial violence across institutional sites”(5), she asks, who is a scholar? If study is relational, who are we turning to? And what do we need to unlearn?
“Left Turns grapples with all types of institutional grief, grievance & giving(s), or the ways we learn to carry these legacies as minoritarian subjects of/with the dead in constant acts of mourning.”(5)
Ruiz’s academic critiques are witty and scathing. The poem, WHERE THE TIMID TAKE THEIR NOSES FOR A WALK, conveys a pretentious, self-serving separation from authenticity in academia while NECROPOLITICAL FEMINISM portrays a masochistic relationship with the institution; violence and forced forgetting palpable. Ruiz’s writing refuses to forget. In, TEN SCENES IN GARGOYLES, she returns to a meditative poem written for a class while walking the streets of Paseo Boricua in Humboldt Park, Chicago, recalling her teacher’s criticism that good poems shouldn’t contain explanations or footnotes. Left Turns is a defiant act of unlearning that lesson. Rather than relegating citations to the back of the book, there are footnotes with explanations immediately following the poems, ever present. They act as windows into the creative process as well as references readily accessible for readers to turn to. Left Turns is a source of generative and compelling study. Each poem, an invitation to be in conversation with the author and her sources of inspiration. While reading, I desired to reread Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes, re-watch Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied, and look up Basquiat’s painting Riding with Death on Google Images. Turning back to the sources, allowed me to reread the poem again, differently. It left me with the wish to read it again with my friends, turning to each other about what we saw, touched, smelled, and heard with each reading.
The pleasure of reading this book is in its details. Every typographical choice is carefully choreographed and I indulge in reading into it, searching for the subtext performed through form and shape. There are eleven typographical-turn-pages throughout this book committed to the repetition of the word “turn”. Ruiz gifts us with instruction on how to read between the lines:
“Sections of poems, marked by typographical-turn-pages, hold the reader’s hand, asking them to turn left to turn into a sound, phrase, idea, to connect the syllables into meanings for anticolonial ways of reading, writing, listening, mourning.”(5)
On these turn-pages, letters become zigzags, curves, and lines, flowing together in visual patterns. Words are stricken, marked, in unmetered rhythms. Repetition performs a relentless endurance, an “&” count demanding that the dancer keep twirling, “turn & turn & turn & turn…” Spaces between words are gaps and ruptures, splitting distances across space/time boundaries. There are letters written as exponents, making themselves multiple, a reservoir of potential energy. Sometimes, you can read it best if you’re lying down. Other times, it’s written like a wound, slashed across the page. It’s an invitation to trace dashed lines with your finger. Or, “tURN” is a vessel, carrying the ashes. In MIS C A R R I E D, Ruiz writes, “I see form above meaning.”(49) As she writes, letters become symbols; spaces become suspended breaths, silences, free-falls; words become pauses. As we read beyond the words, typographical form inherits a sense of shapelessness that carries the unspeakable and unspoken. Ruiz explains that the “shapeless” is “...you, me, her, him, them, us-all in times & spaces dynamically unseen within the brutal & beautifying confines of difference.”(128)
Left Turns weaves together the personal and academic. Ruiz studies texts, mostly written by Black and Brown scholars, alongside childhood memories, old photographs, films, paintings and ephemera. She listens carefully and writes as they simultaneously speak with one another through her; poetry being the point of contact. This way of listening is a return. “The returns are…always intentional movements in reciprocity that go back to give back to get back, disappear to reappear, implying where we were and will be again.”(4)
As Ruiz revisits the past, she tunes-in to the ways that death connects us and lives through citation. DECEMBER’S THIRD: THE ENDNOTE, reckons with her own death while confronting the reader with theirs,
“I don’t know if everyone else knows dying like they know bodies, or if sharing warm drinks makes us future death-friends, but I pull out a poem from spades of brown sorrow (something about loss being the paradox of love) & I spit out a verse: “grief is where lungs become one”... do you now know you’re a citation?”(101)
Ruiz’s poems are embodiments of her returns, bringing the past to the present and the dead into life in new shapes: a call-and-response with spirits across the boundary between the living and the dead in SPLITTING AIR; a childhood memory of uninhibited joy between father and daughter as they play and dream in INNER CITY JUICE BOXES; wistfully tracing the “common slopes, sleepy letters & lovebird diphthongs”(105) of a signature in EPHEMERALITY’S BREEZE; and reflecting on the grief of parental loss with an old photograph in JUANGO & ROLAND. The past becomes accessible, emerging in connection.
Ruiz unflinchingly returns us to the fragility of the body and the vitality of the senses, tapping into the life force of study. She asks us to listen with the sensitivity of butterfly feet. Through citation, she contacts the dead to bring us to life. END WITH BIRDS (ONCE WE ALL FLEW) looks down into the earth of ancestor’s graves and asks, “ready to soar again?”(112) Left Turns isn’t about hope; it mourns deeply and lies in wait ready to strike, dance, resist, rest, embrace, pause, redirect, reorient, and always to turn & turn & return to brown study.
Black and white photo of Sandra Ruiz, author. Her hair is black and she’s wearing a black sweater. She smiles at the camera on a sunny day with trees behind her.
About the Author
Sandra Ruiz is Sue Divan Associate Professor of Performance Studies in Theatre at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and author of Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance and Tears for Tears: Aesthetics in Grief Minor. She is the creator and producer of the Minor Aesthetics Lab.
Book Summary
In Left Turns in Brown Study Sandra Ruiz offers a poetic-theoretical inquiry into the interlacing forms of study and mourning. Drawing on Black and Brown activism and theory, Ruiz interweaves poetry, memoir, lyrical essay, and vignettes to examine study as an emancipatory practice. Proposing “brown study” as key for understanding how Brownness harbors loss and suffering along with the possibility for more abundant ways of living, Ruiz invites readers to turn left into the sounds, phrases, and principles of anticolonial ways of reading, writing, citing, and listening. In doing so, Ruiz engages with a panoply of hauntings, ghosts, and spectral presences, from deceased teachers, illiterate ancestors, and those lost to unnatural disasters to all those victims of institutional and colonial violence. Study is shared movement and Brownness lives in citation. Conceptual, poetic, and unconventional, this book is crucial for all those who theorize minoritarian literary aesthetics and think through utopia, queer possibility, and the entwinement of forms.
