Kendra Allen’s Learning & Unlearning

Kendra Allen’s literary debut, the essay collection When You Learn the Alphabet, is a relatively short but densely packed portrait of a Black life, a raw rendering of familial relationships inflected by race, gender, trauma, and disability. The book explores grown folks’ business in great detail, business that Allen is caught precariously in the middle of as a child. Allen’s parents’ relationship, her childhood in Dallas, Texas, and the fallout of their coming together, burning out, and pulling apart are the central events that the book orbits. The second essay in the collection, titled “About American Marriages,” details her parents’ seven-year separation and eventual divorce: “This is what happened: What I’ve been told: Which is what always happens: Your husband begins having sex with a woman, who isn’t you and he doesn’t even care enough to hide it well.” The essay goes on to describe the separation that allows her mother to keep hope alive and allows her father to come and go as he pleases, often without seeing Allen. Allen painfully draws out the rising tension as her father builds a life with the other woman and her child in Houston, unbeknownst to her mother, and mandates that she participate in the cover-up. It leads to this heartbreaking culmination: “When my mama finally files for divorce, it feels like she not only divorces my daddy, but every once in a while, when the subject is brought up, it feels like she’s divorced me too.”

As the book develops, we learn more and more about this triumvirate. We see moments of physical violence and manifestations of post-traumatic stress disorder—both of Allen’s parents have been diagnosed as disabled veterans, although her father’s diagnosis is “100% disabled veteran” while her mother’s is “90% disabled veteran.” It’s clear that even this diagnosis is not free of the influence of race and gender: “She’s been shooting for 100% for a couple of years now, but even after working at the VA for 28 years, and even after all her apparent symptoms of forcefulness, forgetfulness, and injury, they just won’t let her have it. Her wounds ain’t physical enough. She ain’t pale enough. She ain’t male enough.”

We’re never quite on settled ground in When You Learn the Alphabet. Allen makes all the beautiful and painful contradictions of humanity, of the individual, plain in her essays. One of my favorite examples comes in the titular essay, “When You Learn the Alphabet,” which is presented as an abecedarian, with each new vignette beginning with a subsequent letter of the alphabet. H begins this way: “Horror story: Your childhood friend goes to jail for not snitching.” The section continues by detailing the conditioning, from childhood, that puts the highest priority on not snitching. Yet, the most compelling part of the section is how Allen feels about this life- altering decision: “He was just doing what he was told. But part of you blames him he’s still in a small cell years later for a crime he didn’t commit. Part of you blames him for committing to be loyal only.” But even as Allen makes this point, there is this honest admission: “Part of you that follows the impossible expectations of the hood praises him for being some obscured version of a real nigga.”

Allen slips in and out of genres in this collection, from the abecedarian essay to a short section, “Boy Is a White Racist Word,” organized as a contrapuntal poem. All the while, she mixes personal narrative with cultural critique, placing her work invariably in conversation with the work of writers like Hanif Abdurraqib and Kiese Laymon. Allen often references pop culture, most notably music and film. True Blood, Moonlight, Monster’s Ball, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Behind the Music, Jay-Z, Boyz n the Hood, and Everybody Hates Chris (among others), all get a mention. This familiarity with popular media allows her to...