Author Archives: B. Amarilis Lugo de Fabritz

Bakhtin and Dostoevsky…

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Just listen to the name: Bakhtin. The –kh-, by the way, sounds like the “h” sound that Ernie the Muppet from Sesame Street makes when he laughs. If you are going to write what amounts to a nerdy fan letter to an author who has been dead since 1975, it helps that said author has the kind of name that belies the gravitas of his oeuvre.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (Михаи́л Миха́йлович Бахти́н) wrote the kind of serious literary criticism that makes you know that you are engaging in no holds barred, honest to goodness, heavy duty intellectual pursuit. I remember when I first heard about Bakhtin in graduate school. We were introduced to two of his main concepts – chronotope, the intersectin of time and art, and the picaresque hero. The term “picaresque” comes from the sixteenth century Spanish narrative El lazarillo de Tormes. Bakhtin took the image of the underclass rascal who uses his wits to gain upward social mobility and applies it to novels at large. I always found his preference for French Renaissance, rather than Spanish narratives, when discussing this term rather disconcerting. His development of the concept, however, proved very useful.  There is, simply told, an intellectual world before Bakhtin and an intellectual world after Bakhtin. He wrote about ideas in a way that illuminated the relations between the real world and the world of creative prose. Never mind that he packed it in the form of linguistically scintillating neologisms, such as dialogic, heteroglossia, and chronotope, among others.

Bakhtin also gained the academic equivalent of “street credibility” through the extremes he endured to write his theory. Bakhtin’s works “came of age” during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev era. He lived a challenging professional life, and taught in a wide range of institutions. [i] His works were hard to come by, since he found himself teaching far away from the intellectual centers of (then) Leningrad and Moscow, and since his works were considered controversial during his time. This only added to the cache of clandestine Soviet writing that made Russian literature such a heady affair during the Soviet period.

Bakhtin took the time to explain the origins of literary forms – both as descendants from earlier forms and as originators of new forms. Which brings me – finally! – to the reading for the week. I have been skimming – for skimming is all one can do when closing the books on a four course load teaching semester – Bakhtin’s writings on Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky, by himself, is another one of those Russian writers whose every piece of writing tries to challenge a reader’s conception of the world. His Grand Inquisitor, for instance, is still one of the most exhilarating treatments of free will.

Bakhtin saw Dostoevsky as what best be described as a “founding innovator.” The way that he took previously existing structures and metaphors and integrated them with specific philosophical content turned the novel into what Bakhtin considerd the most advanced literary form.

“Dostoevsky is the creator of the polyphonic novel. He created an essentially new novelistic genre. Therefore , his work cannot be fit into any kind of frame, does not obey any of the hiistorico-literary schemes, which we have become accustomed to attribute to the European form of the novel. In his works, a hero appears whose voice is constructed like the voice of the very author in a novel of the normal type, and not like the voice of his hero. The hero’s voice regarding himself or his world carries as much weight as the normal authorial word…” [ii]

One of the Dostoevskian heroes that Bakhtin analyzes is the one derived from Gogol’s works. One only need to compare Gogol’s Diary of a Madman to Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground to see both Gogol’s influence on Dostoevsky, and how Dostoevsky could take what had by his lifetime become a classic literary figure and innovate the figure into a new generation, if that is not too egregious a rhetorical sin to express. Dostoevsky adapted Gogol’s grotesque characters and gave them a greater level of philosophical and moral depth, leading to his take on the Nietzschean superman in Crime and Punishment in the form of Raskolnikov.

Granted, Dostoevsky’s literature does not easily merit the adjective of “pretty.” If you want seductively pretty prose, look to Nabokov, who is constantly trying to show how rhetorical beauty and rot a moral soul from within. Dostoevsky’s universe leaves you unnerved as you wonder if there is any real beauty left in the world. His endings always prove reassuring in that they point to the face that morality can reappear even in the most unlikely souls. It does leave you wondering how out of place society can be if it can morally disorient people with such ease. All of this and more is reflected in Bakhtin’s discussion of Dostoevsky’s contribution to world literature, and why he sees him as the novelistic author above all other novelistic author.

 

[i] I usually try to avoid Wikipedia as a reference, but in this case the information is so general, and truth is stranger than fiction in Bakhtin’s case. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakhtin

[ii] М. М. Бахтин «Бахтин под маской: Маска четвёртая: Проблемы творчества Достоевского.» Алконост: 1994 p. 7 Translation my own.

 

ON LITERATURE ABOUT LITERATURE.

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One of the things literary critics get to do is to write commentary on literature about literature, where we ponder the nature of the writing craft. Writing differs according to its form and function. Some forms of writing have gained a place in our culture as intrinsically challenging, like poetry, drama, and “serious” belletristic literature – think Ulysses and James Joyce.

All good writing, however, contains some basic traits. Lidiia Korneevna Chukovskaia, in her book «В лаборатории редактора,»[i]  In the Editor’s Workshop, spends a lot of time discussing what makes good writing, and what makes a good reader of literature. In this case, she contemplates the kind of reading skills that make a skilled editor.

«Интерес к языку, постоянные попытки осознать, осмыслить перемeны, происходящие в нём, тонкий слух к индивидуальным особенностям, присущим языку и стилю того или другого писателя, -вот что характеризует мастера редакционной работы…»

“Interest in language, the constant attempts to understand, to comprehend the changes that occur in it, the delicate sound of individual features inherent to the language and style of one or the other writer, that is what distinguishes a master of the editorial labor…”[ii]

Chukovskaia points out that truly gifted writing can come from a great range of sources, but what it needs is a respect for the words themselves. The style of a work, its form, reflects the totality of the writer, down to the writer’s sincerity or insincerity. What matters most is for a writer to be truly committed to the depth of the words s/he writes, their meaning, and the way they function stylistically to reflect the segment of life from which they derive. The words should serve as the eyes of the world that the writer sees. Total honesty and total mastery of the grammar of the world s/he is trying to depict.

«Искусство – орудие изучения жизни, орудие воздействие на жизнь не в меньшей степени, чем наука. А без ясности – какое же изучение и какое воздействие?»[iii]

“Art is a tool for the study of life, a tool that impacts life no less than science. And without clarity  — what kind of learning or impact can there be?”

The key to this learning, to this impact, lies in the word «естественность» — which the dictionary defines as “natural,” but which means so much more.  In Chukovskaia’s parlance,  “natural” involves not only a sensitivity to language style that reflects the elements of nature it portrays, but also moral and artistic sincerity and integrity in its utterance.

The emphasis on sincerity and sensitivity should come as no surprise to those who Chuckovskaia as The Memory of Soviet literature. Not only did she serve as guardian of her father’s work – his insistence on sincerity and sensitivity in his literary criticism earned a “demotion” to the children’s literature division, where he and other talented writers created some of the most memorable children’s literature in the world – but also of Anna Akhmatova’s works. Her efforts to keep Akhmatova’s literary memory alive ensured that some of the most riveting poetry of the Stalinist period made it to the era of perestroika and to this day.

At the same time, in true Soviet style, Chukovskaia never utters the words sincerity or sensitivity explicitly. What she does is to create the rhetorical equivalent of a picture of the negative space around these words, forcing the reader to fill in the positive space to obtain its meaning. Rather than speak directly of the need for sincerity and clarity in Soviet literature, she speaks about the problems of Soviet literature and its intrinsic “didactic” tone, the imprint of the Soviet bureaucratic way of thinking, чиновничье мышление. The only antidote to that was a scientific approach to language that maintained its reflection of life. “Clarity, clarity, and clarity again is the demand of the editor in the name of the reader on the style and language of scientific language…” Left unsaid, of course, is that this bureaucratic language lacked a lot in the area of clarity. At the same time, Chukovskaia warned of the dangers of assuming too reductionist a stance when it came to grammar. “Editing an artistic text from the narrow position of elementary school grammar means to destroy it.”[iv]

What Chukovskaia tries to encourage is a critical stance that avoids selfish ideological reductionism and encourages sensitivity to the nature of language. The goal is to create a text that will transcend the limitations Socialist Realism placed on Soviet literary production, and which would make it possible to record the reality of life following the Stalinist regime. Thus, true art could emerge from any form of art – novels, poems, children’s literature – as long as the editor and the writer worked together as a dynamic duo and presented a language that clean and true and pure.

 

[i] Лидия Корнеевна Чуковская, «В лаборатории редактора.» Арханьгелск: АОА «ИПП» «Правда севера», 2005

[ii] Чуковская, 89

[iii] Чуковская, 89

[iv] Чуковская, 92.

A LITTLE ABOUT QUINCEAÑERAS, AND A LITTLE ABOUT INTERESTING RESEARCH IN LATINO STUDIES…

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Last weekend I had the honor of presenting my paper, “Se robaron mi qiunceañera: Female Performativity and Coming of Age in Latina Narratives,” at the conference of the Mid-Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies, at American University, Washington, D. C. In my previous post I presented part of the research I had conducted in preparation of the presentation at the conference. As with any conference paper, you end up with a whole bunch of regrets. Like I would have liked more time to edit a little better, instead of reading from two copies, the “big glob” with all the data on it, and my blog entry, which helped to summarize my arguments in a really useful way, at least useful to me.

Another pleasure of such a conference is the intellectual pleasure of moving into a state of a Virginia Woolf-sian “Room of One’s Own,” at least for a weekend. At work, I have to split my time among my Russian and Spanish classes, and the bureaucratic demands of my home institution, in addition to the demands of everyday life (who would think fitting in filling up the gas tank at the local cash-only gas station would be so complicated?). The result after interacting with over 90 persons in one day in three languages, as well as trying to answer emails and keeping up with paperwork is a headache and a state of existential headache. A conference allows me the opportunity to sit, center, and figure out where my research fits within the general landscape of contemporary scholarship, as well as providing inspiration for future topics of research. The weekend ended up with an entirely refreshing visit to one of my favorite Washington, D. C. getaway places, the Politics and Prose bookstore on Connecticut Avenue.

So first to the interesting presentations/cool stuff I experienced at the conference. The most suggestive/interesting/energizing panel I attended was panel 11, titled “Confronting Stereotypes: Women and Image in 20th Century Latin America.” The first paper proved personally exciting. Ivette Guzmán-Zavala from Lebanon Valley College presented the paper “Fotografía del siglo XX en Puerto Rico: Delano, Rosskam y el sujeto femenino.” This paper proved exciting for a number of reasons. First, as an alumna of the Ivy Leagues in the 1980s, I lived in an institution where the Puerto Rican presence was miniscule. Furthermore, Caribbean and Puerto Rican studies still had to find their way as a well-represented discipline in the curriculum. We did have a few Puerto Rican graduate students in the Spanish department, which worked more as an “aliento,” a moral encouragement, more than a marker of the presence of the discipline in a visible way on campus. As an undergraduate, being Puerto Rican meant being active with the Federación de estudiantes puertorriqueños, know by its initials F. E. P.

Professor Guzmán Zavala’s presentation used materials from the National Archives and showed a wide range of images from across the island, including some from my family’s home town, Guayanilla. The images showed a lifestyle gone with the advent of “modernization,” which meant some good things: clean potable water, rural electrification, public education. It also meant some bad things, most specifically the treatment by the federal government as a second class territory and its assumption that they could get away with a fair amount of things that would not work in the mainland, like running a bombing range in one of the most pristine waterfronts of the island. The United States returned the bombing range to the island after years of activism by islanders and Puerto Ricans on the mainland – I would say newyoricans, except that I have spent so little time in New York City that that really does not apply to me. The images were evocative, nostalgic, and a visual reminder that if I some days I feel the rupture necessary to negotiate mainland English culture a little more heavily than others, that I am not necessarily going mad.

Compartmentalization of cultural identity – putting those things assumed as givens in Puerto Rican culture but not accepted in mainland “Anglo” culture – is a necessary survival strategy. At the simplest level, it is necessary to come to peace with the fact that Folger’s coffee, fine, now Starbucks coffee, is the cultural standard for morning drinks, and not a nice cup of Puerto Rican espresso, is a simple, evocative, physical marker of this necessary compartmentalization.

Rupture and compartmentalization leads to negotiation: negotiating language, politics, gender roles, and pretty much every other major aspect of everyday life. Sometimes, on a good day, it leads to hybridity, as when I discover my local Korean supermarket not only expands my cooking options by adding hoisin sauce to my pantry, but also when I discover I can find everything to make pasteles there. I guess it is cultural progress when my personal reply to Esmeralda Santiagos’ question of whether liking pizza more than pastelillos made her any less Puerto Rican is that I wonder if liking Korean barbeque sauce better than KC Masterpiece barbeque sauce makes me any less Americanized?

Toss S. Garth from the United States Naval Academy (Annapolis) presented the paper “The Self-Possession of Evita: Woman, Citizen, Leader, Patient, Corpse, Saint.” It really highlighted how the use of popular culture for the popularization of political ideology and agendas was not a singularly Soviet phenomenon. Meredith Glueck of American University presented “The debate over street vendors’ clothes: baianas of acarajé, authenticity, and tourism in Salvador, Bahia’s 1960s.” Outside of showing the important of clothes as political markers, it made me hungry in spite of the fact that the panel immediately followed lunch.

This panel, as well as the other panels, indicated that my interest in Latino studies as an intellectual pursuit is not illegitimate. It did show that there are some ways in which my insights as a Slavic scholar can help expand and innovate research methodologies – as in the case of Cuba. Cuba now would not be so without their engagement with the Soviet Union. To do that, however, requires a trilingual approach – English, Spanish, and Russian. And that is something I can do, when I am not overwhelmed with all my Spanish I midterms or Russian cinema essays.

It is time to restock my Korean barbeque sauce.

 

 

Se robaron mi qiunceañera: Female Performativity and Coming of Age in Latina Narratives

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A lot has been going these last two weeks. Putin swept into office, as everybody expected. Demonstrations have continued in Moscow. Our favorite aggregator of Russian news, Johnson’s Russia list, http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/default.cfm, has a few articles to help bring us all up to date. It also seems like the Putin administration will be turning control of the media to the Ministry of Culture, in a move that sounds suspiciously Orwellian…

This week, however, I am mostly focusing on a presentation I will give at the Mid-Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies, MACLAS, conference this weekend. I will be focusing on structural aspects of Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman, and Julia Álvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accent. I want to focus on a structural aspect of both authors’ works: the importance of the transition from girl to woman, the moment marked traditionally by a quinceañera, but which both are deprived by circumstance.

I would like to focus on a moment that becomes a shared moment of insight by both authors: the moment of liminality when a young woman transitions into a young woman, and the challenges posed by the simultaneous rupture and knitting together that occurs at that time. In this case, I use the term liminal as used by anthropologist Victor Turner:

” Liminal rites. Liminality is the term used by the Belgian folklorist van Gennep to denominate the second of three stages in what he called a “rite of passage.” Such rites are found in all cultures, and are seen as both indicators and vehicles of transition from one sociocultural state and status to another — childhood to maturity, virginity to marriage, childlessness to parenthood, ghosthood to ancestorhood, sickness to health, peace to war and vice versa, scarcity to plenty, winter to spring, and so on. He did, however, distinguish between those rites performed at life-crises, such as birth, puberty, marriage, death, and those performed at crucial points in the turning year, or on occasions of collective crisis when a whole society faces a major change, peace to war, health to epidemic, and so forth. The first set were mainly performed for individuals in secret or hidden places and related to upward mobility. The latter were performed for collectivities, were public in character, and often portrayed reversals or inversions of status or confusion of ordinary everyday categories. Van Gennep distinguished the three stages as (1) separation (from ordinary social life); (2) margin or  limen  (meaning threshold), when the subjects of ritual fall into a limbo between their past and present modes of daily existence; and (3) re-aggregation, when they are ritually returned to secular or mundane life — either at a higher status level or in an altered state of consciousness or social being.”

Victor Turner: “Frame, Flow  and Reflection: Ritual and Drama  as  Public Liminality.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6/4 December 1979 466-467

In the case Santiago and Álvarez, they focus on the trauma that results from trauma derived from their radical displacement to American culture at the time when they were emerging to the liminal age of fifteen, the age of the quinceañera. Fifteen is an age heavy with symbolic weight in literature. Even the short story recognized as the first surviving short story in Russia features a female protagonist whose life has become traumatized when her father dies at the age of – you guessed it – fifteen. Even Álvarez observes the seeming cross-cultural consensus of fifteen as the age when a girl becomes a young woman, available for presentation to society, in her non-fiction  Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the U. S. A. Both highlight the ritualized aspect of growing up tweener, adolescent and Latina. They focus on the level of sometimes stifling overprotection provided by the entire family unit – the battle for individual agency in a culture that stresses chaperones and escorts until marriage, the comfort provided by the familiar cocoon of abuelos and abuelas, tíos y tías, primos y primas. Both cases also highlight the tension between the comfort of this familial environment, the pride of mastering that cultural set of gender expectations, and the equal thrill and appeal of mastering the English language culture that surrounds them outside their house. Rupture is severe and significant. Geography, language, clothing, and eventually self, are replaced by a new individual that combines both cultures, the hybrid being.

While they point to Caribbean elements of their upbringing, what fascinates me is the commonality they share with other coming of age narratives.  In this case, I want to call up Vladimir Nabokov, who in Speak Memory  made the following observation about forced dislocation at a young age:

“I would moreover submit that, in regard to the power of hoarding up impressions, Russian children of my generation passed through a period of genius, as if destiny were loyally trying what it could for them giving them more than their share, in view of the cataclysm that was to remove completely the world they had known. Genius disappeared when everything had been stored, just as it does with those other, more specialized child prodigies – pretty, curly-headed youngsters waving batons or taming enormous pianos, who eventually turn into second-rate musicians with sad eyes and obscure ailments and something vaguely misshapen about their eunuchoid hindquarters. But even so, the individual mystery remains to tantalize the memoirist… [i]”

What Nabokov would attribute to the power of the Russian Revolution to displace a whole generation of young people – the ability to hoard up impressions – is actually reflected time and time again in the autobiographical narratives of émigrés.  I have been looking at autobiographies mostly from Slavic and Latino immigrants into the United States. They provide an interesting point of contrast due to what I call the “permeability factor.” By permeability, I mean the ability of the person to hope for an opportunity to return, or at the minimum visit, their homeland. Most Slavic immigrants were denied this opportunity, due to the laws government immigration during the Soviet period – the result of the “cataclysmic” take over by the Soviets in 1917, which led to Nabokov’s exile, and their expansion throughout Eastern Europe, which led to the exile of many others. Once exiled, these immigrants into the United States had no hope to return to their homelands.

One particularly interesting memoir from the Soviet period is Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation.[ii] Eva Hoffman is a Polish born writer who immigrated to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1959, at the age of fourteen. She later came to the United States to study in college in Houston, and she then continued graduate studies at Harvard University. She basically matches Nabokov in the area of demonstrable erudition, down to her studies in music in Cracow before she was forced to flee Poland. In her memoir, she contemplates the effects of the adjustment to her new language, English, on her view of the world around her.

“I am becoming a living avatar of structuralist wisdom; I cannot help knowing that words are just themselves. But it’s a terrible knowledge, without any of the consolations that wisdom usually brings. It does not mean that I’m free to play with words at my wont; anyways, words in their naked state are surely among the least satisfactory play objects. No, this radical disjoining between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance but of its colors, striations, nuances – its very existence. It is the loss of a living connection.”

Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation. 107

Both writers depict a double language, code switching world,  where in some ways the young adolescent females – right at the point of liminality into adult Caribbean state of womanhood – get thrust into a much more different process of transition, where they need to master the new codes of language, morality and behavior not only for themselves, but also for their parents, whom they often surpass when it comes to language mastery. They are these walking avatars, playing with their new English words as they play with their dolls, but lacking the living connection to the rich traditions and family history that the Spanish discourse carries within itself. The immature narrators become the mediators for themselves as for their families, as their school educations become a means through which their own parents – particularly their mothers – come to master their new roles in a new language.

One of the greatest challenges facing the writers, then, is how to represent these marked moments of drastic cultural transition. Structurally, their management of narrative time becomes one of the main ways in which they highlight the depth of their transition.

Julia Álvarez approaches the presentation of liminal reconciliation, How the García Girls Lost Their Accent, by dividing chapters into discrete chronological blocks that reflect the voices of her multiple protagonists. The book evolves in reverse chronological order, as if trying to lull the reader into a sense of comfort, gradually stripping away the levels of American familiarity and increasing the levels of dvoekul’turnost’, dual culturality, which reflects the depth of the narrators’ cultural dvoeverie – the dual belief system that emerges from the merging of both Spanish and United States cultural orders. Internalized, naturalized dual code-switching emerges as the state of being.

The García Girl follows the stories of the four García sisters, Carla, Yolanda, Sandra and Sofía, and the challenges of adapting to the at times contradictory social expectations of the Dominican and United States cultures. The novel progresses in reverse chronological order. This chronological arrangement allows the author to focus on a different configuration, a different cultural moment, in the life of the family. The last chapter shows the family at the point of emigration from the Dominican Republic. The narrative voice suddenly gets shifted to Chucha, one of the family’s servants on the island, as she reflects on the departure of the family.

“I have said prayers to all the santos, to the loa, and to the Gran Poder de Dios, visiting each room, swinging the can of cleaning smoke, driving away the bad spirits that filled the house this day, and fixing in my head the different objects and where they belong so that if any workman sneaks in and steals something I will know what is gone. In the girls’ rooms I remember each one as a certain heaviness, now in my heart, now in my shoulders, now in my head or feet, I feel their losses pile up like dirt thrown on a box after it has been lowered into the earth. I see their future, the troublesome life ahead. They will be haunted by what they do and don’t remember. But they have spirit in them. They will invent what they need to survive. [iii]”

How the García Girls Lost Their Accent, 223

It is very interesting that it is left to Chucha, the voodoo trained servant, to put an intellectual spin to the existence that the girls’ merely experience: “They will invent what they need to survive.” The girls constantly struggle to interpret the new codes and symbols around, particularly when it comes to gender relations. The most explicitly analytical of this process is Yolanda, the daughter who becomes a teacher. When Yolanda speaks about her boarding school days, she says:

“Back in those days I had what one teacher called ‘a vivacious personality.’ I had to look up the word in the dictionary and was relieved to find out it didn’t mean I had problems. English was then still a party favor for me – crack open the dictionary, find out if I’d just been insulted, praised, admonished, criticized…”

How the García Girls Lost Their Accent, 87

Outside of “cracking the code” of conversational English language,  they also must master the code surrounding relationships outside of the understood parameters of Dominican society. Hoffman describes the cognitive challenge of cracking this code in the following manner:

“Dating is an unknown ritual to me, unknown among my Cracow peers, who aside from lacking certain of its requisite accessories – cars, private rooms, a bit of money – ran around in boy-girl packs and didn’t have a ceremonial set of rules for how to act toward the other set. A date, by contrast, seems to be an occasion whose semiotics are highly standardized and in which every step has a highly determinate meaning and therefore has to be carefully calibrated…”

Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation.  149

“How do you talk to an alien? Very carefully. When I fall in love with my first American, I also fall in love with otherness, with the far spaces between us and the distances we have to travel to meet at the source of our attraction…”

Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation, 187

By the time Yolanda manages to crack the basic codes for dating, she realizes that there are some American norms she does not wish to adopt, particularly when it comes to sexual promiscuity.

“Why I couldn’t keep them interested was pretty simple: I wouldn’t sleep with them. By the time I went to college, it was the late sixties, and everyone was sleeping as a matter of principle. By then, I was a lapsed Catholic; my sisters and I had been pretty well Americanized since our arrival in this country a decade before, so really, I didn’t have a good excuse…”

How the García Girls Lost Their Accent, 87

Esmeralda Santiago literally breaks her narrative in half by dividing the narrative of her coming of age into two volumes, When I Was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman. The books break apart at the line between thirteen and fourteen years of age, when Esmeralda moves from the poor neighborhood of Macún to New York City.

Almost a Woman focuses on Esmeralda’s coming of age as a student at a high school for the performing arts in New York. While Álvarez does express the difference in socio-economic status when they moved, Santiago experiences it in a much more physical manner as she becomes her mother’s interpreter at the welfare office.

“I was grateful for Mami’s faith in me but couldn’t relax until we heard from the welfare office. A few days later, our application was approved. By the I’d decided that even when it seemed like my head couldn’t hold that many new words inside it, I had to learn English well enough never again to be caught between languages.”[iv]

Almost a Woman. 20-21

Being caught between languages, and its real implications for daily survival, is a theme repeated again and again in numerous immigrant narratives. Santiago’s narrative stands out for the way that it explicitly breaks out the challenges specific to life in the late twentieth century for a working class family, unlike Álvarez, whose professional father manages to retool his skills and provide them with a more protected middle class life. Santiago’s work as family interpreter, as the mediator between her family and the public welfare system in New York makes her ponder much more explicitly the sharpness of the cultural division.

“It was good to be healthy, big and strong like Dick, Jane, and Sally. It was good to learn English and to know how to act among Americans, but it was not good to behave like them. Mami made it clear that although we lived in the United States, we were to remain 100 percent Puerto Rican. The problem was that it was hard to tell where Puerto Rican ended and Americanized began. Was I Americanized if I preferred pizza to pastelillos? Was I Puerto  Rican if my skirts covered my knees? If I cut out a picture of Paul Anka from a magazine and tacked it to the wall, was I less Puerto Rican than when I cut out pictures of Gilberto Monroig? Who could tell me?”

Almost a Woman 25

You can feel the personal, moral and psychological weight placed in Santiago, as the eldest and the first in her family to master the American educational system, to play the mediator for her family. The term interpreter, in this case, really understates how active her role becomes within her family, a role that her mother cannot fulfill because she finds mastering the language a much larger challenge due to her age and the need for her to work to support her family.  The fact that Santiago ends up attending a fine arts high school almost works as an ironic undertone to her struggles in performing her role as an emerging English language wielding individual.


[i] Vladimir Nabokov. Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) 25.

[ii] Eva Hoffman. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. (New York: Penguin Books, 1989).

[iii] Julia Alvarez. How the  García Girls Lost Their Accent. (New York, Plume, 1991)

[iv] Esmeralda Santiago. Almost a Woman. (New York: Vintage, 1999)

WRITING ABOUT THE LIVING…

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So, close to the top of my things to do during my spring non-break is to write an article for the Mid-Atlantic Conference of Latin American Studies, MACLAS. I proposed a paper that will include Esmeralda Santiago’s work When I Was Puerto Rican, Cuando yo era puertorriqueña, and Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent.

What was I thinking? I actually chose to write about someone who is living, who writes about events experienced by contemporary living people. Furthermore, I write about authors who have written other opinion pieces and books on topics related to those on which I want to focus. This is almost as stressful as writing about Vladimir Nabokov, who had an opinion about pretty much everything under the Sun, and left behind writings about his opinions about pretty much everything under the Sun. He is also the one who inspired me to write this paper. In his autobiography, Speak, Memory, he talks about childhood memories and the effect of severe change on those memories.

“I would moreover submit that, in regard to the power of hoarding up impressions, Russian children of my generation passed through a period of genius, as if destiny were loyally trying what it could for them giving them more than their share, in view of the cataclysm that was to remove completely the world they had known. Genius disappeared when everything had been stored, just as it does with those other, more specialized child prodigies – pretty, curly-headed youngsters waving batons or taming enormous pianos, who eventually turn into second-rate musicians with sad eyes and obscure ailments and something vaguely misshapen about their eunuchoid hindquarters. But even so, the individual mystery remains to tantalize the memoirist… [i]”

What Nabokov would attribute to the power of the Russian Revolution to displace a whole generation of young people – the ability to hoard up impressions – is actually reflected time and time again in the autobiographical narratives of émigrés.  I have been looking at autobiographies mostly from Slavic and Latino immigrants into the United States. They provide an interesting pint of contrast due to what I call the “permeability factor.” By permeability, I mean the ability of the person to hope for an opportunity to return, or at the minimum visit, their homeland. Most Slavic immigrants were denied this opportunity, due to the laws government immigration during the Soviet period – the result of the “cataclysmic” take over by the Soviets in 1917, which led to Nabokov’s exile, and their expansion throughout Eastern Europe, which led to the exile of many others. Once exiled, these immigrants into the United States had no hope to return to their homelands.

One particularly interesting memoir from the Soviet period is Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation.[ii] Eva Hoffman is a Polish born writer who immigrated to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1959, at the age of fourteen. She later came to the United States to study in college in Houston, and she then continued graduate studies at Harvard University. She basically matches Nabokov in the area of demonstrable erudition, down to her studies in music in Cracow before she was forced to flee Poland. In her memoir, she contemplates the effects of the adjustment to her new language, English, on her view of the world around her.

“I am becoming a living avatar of structuralist wisdom; I cannot help knowing that words are just themselves. But it’s a terrible knowledge, without any of the consolations that wisdom usually brings. It does not mean that I’m free to play with words at my wont; anyways, words in their naked state are surely among the least satisfactory play objects. No, this radical disjoining between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance but of its colors, striations, nuances – its very existence. It is the loss of a living connection. [iii]”

It is the experience of “living avatar of structuralist wisdom” that all of these writers seem to share, whether Slavic or Latino. Particularly, when looking at Santiago’s memoir and Alvarez’s novel, what strikes one the most is their shared hyperawareness of the role of language in their performance as women in a new environment. Esmeralda Santiago ends up attending a high school for the performing arts, as if to publically display the challenges of communicating in her new world. And a common fear among all of these women is the concern with staying jamona, the pejorative term for an old maid. Fictionalized, autobiographical, or based on interviews, they all share the fear and challenge of mastering he rituals of adolescent womanhood, which implies mastering the female rituals of courtship.

Thus, I get to write about living writers, who write about living people and living topics. And at the same time try to say something original, clever and hopefully insightful about the challenges of facing the period of the quinceañera in a new land.

 


[i] Vladimir Nabokov. Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) 25.

[ii] Eva Hoffman. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. (New York: Penguin Books, 1989).

[iii] Hoffman, 107.

Election-Palooza

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So, I missed one week’s worth of blog entries due to election season in Washington DC – but not the type of election you may think about. Granted, the town is all abuzz with the Republican race for presidential candidate. Probably anybody outside of the politics addicted D. C. area thinks that twenty debates is more than excessive to choose a candidate.

However, that is not the elections cycle that has kept me busy. On the other side of the world, on March 4, 2012, there is an election for president that is probably much more significant from the historical point of view: the election for President of the Russian Federation. In a way, elections in Russia have come a long way since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990. Following the collapse of a sixteen country regime, an orderly transfer of power was arranged, and a more or less stable transfer of office has taken place since then.

What has proved much more interesting is the return of Vladimir Putin to the Presidency of the Russian Federation. This will be Putin’s third time occupying the office of President, following a short break as Prime Minister. He has run what has amounted to a non-campaign. Dmitrii Medvedev, the current President of the Russian Federation, could have run for another term as President, but decided – or was persuaded – to step aside for Putin to return to the office. Once Medvedev announced that he was not running, and Putin announced that he was running again, Putin’s return to office became a seemingly unavoidable fate.

First, let us recognize a few facts about Putin’s return to the Presidency. He is actually still popular enough that most experts in the field have had a hard time envisioning any other individual who could have run a campaign that would have seriously challenged Putin’s campaign. Putin did manage to orchestrate the stabilization of the Russian Federation following what had been some fairly stressful and economically unstable years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union.

However, the seeming unavoidability of Putin’s return to power befuddles people who do not follow Russian politics on a daily basis – people like me, and I am technically a professional in the field! Thus, the last two weeks have been spent catching up, since D. C. think tanks that deal with the Russian Federation have been having what amounts to a Russian Election-Palooza (think Lolapalooza, only for policy wonks!) The Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (http://www.wilsoncenter.org/program/kennan-institute) had Matthew Rojansky, Deputy Director, Russia and Eurasia Program, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, spoke on the topic of “The Fate of the “Reset” During Political Open Seasons in Russia and the U.S.: Prospects for Change and Continuity,” an appropriately long wonky title for what turned out to be a very interesting talk. Mr. Rojansky talked about how under Putin, the Russian political system has evolved into a “vertical of power,” which sits above a carefully “managed democracy.” In the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace publication: “The Russian Protests and Putin’s Choices,”[1] Mr. Rojansky points how that in spite of the apparently increasingly visible opposition in Russia, a third of the population is behind Putin for the simple fact that he has brought stability to Russia and, in relative terms, assured prosperity. Furthermore, he gets the credit for shutting down the chaos of rampant criminality, separatism, and terrorist attacks in the 1990s.

At the same time, an increasingly vociferous part of the growing middle class are becoming frustrated by the growing corruption within the system, and their desire to have their civil rights respected. This is horribly oversimplifying the situation, but it is probably an accurate overgeneralization of the most visible part of those who are voicing objections to Putin’s reelection.

On the other side of the debate there are those who are frustrated with United States policy towards Russia. Speakers at the World Russian Forum 2012, at the Hart Senate Office building, on Monday, February 27, 2012, pointed out that the United States has not done much to encourage Russia’s warm regards. Among the most serious points of conflict are the expansion of NATO to what amounts to Russia’s doorstep, the United States policies towards Afghanistan and Pakistan, and last but not least, the continuing existence of the Jackson Vanik amendment, a small but significant legal artifact that came into existence during the Soviet period to provide the United States with a legal justification to try and exert pressure on the Soviet Union and its civil rights record. The amendment was originally drawn to deal with the issue of free emigration, and now it exists for reasons of trade. One of the latest hearings on the issue can be found in the United States House of Representatives record, http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/111/56198.pdf.

What has really proved perplexing from the American point of view is that, in spite of the fact that there have been some visible protests in some of Russia’s major cities, Putin’s reelection has come about as some sort of fait accompli. Most likely, he will be reelected by a wide margin.  He will do so without conducting a single debate. Instead of encountering the other opposition candidates in an open debate, Putin has chosen to explain his views in a series of six long essays. He published these essays in the principal news outlets in Russia, as well as in his web site, http://putin2012.ru/. It will be interesting to see what happens in the streets of Russia over the weekend.


[1] Matthew Rojansky, “The Russian Protests and Putin’s Choices.” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Policy Outlook, December 22, 2011

MORE ABOUT FAVORITE POEMS AND LITERARY MOVEMENTS…/MÁS ACERCA DE POEMAS FAVORITOS Y ACERCA DE MOVIMIENTOS LITERARIOS…

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It is a curious fact that talented groups of writers and artists will cluster during specific historical periods. Their proximity to each other, both temporal and often geographical, works like yeast in bread. The result is a fulfilling and nourishing work. This happened during the nineteenth century, when the West European Romantic movement spread Eastward, leading to what has become known as the Golden Age of Russian literature – Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol stand out as main exponents of this period. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, a group of writers came together to experiment with Symbolist devices, leading to works such as Belyi’s Peterburgand Blok’s “Verses to the Beautiful Lady.” Another group arose shortly after them which strove to counteract their reliance on dense symbolic devices, creating a more naturalist school of literature known as Acmeism, which gave the world the amazing verses of Anna Akhmatova. In the United States, it would seem like somebody tossed something in the water of Walden Pond, since that small town served as the epicenter of the American Transcendentalist movement, which featured Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, to name some of the best known members of the movement. If you have had the pleasure of walking around Concord Massachusetts in the fall, you will be amaze at just how close to each other all of these authors lived. In the twentieth century, Upper West Harlem became the fertile ground from which the Harlem Renaissance arose, featuring such innovative literary figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and way too many influential musicians to even listing. Literary and cultural critics salivate (OK, mostly figuratively, though sometimes also physically) when they encounter such literary movements. They are convenient because they provide them with ready-made boundaries for their work.  A movement generally takes place over a limited period of time and involves a definable group of individuals.This is the case with the movement called “la poesía de la experiencia” in Spain. The movement emerged during the late part of the twentieth century. It arose in response to the passing of Francisco Franco y Bahamonde, el Generalísimo, who ruled Spain from 1936 to 1975. Franco ran a dictatorial regime that derived many of its practices from Hitler’s German regime. Even though it technically does not qualify as a totalitarian regime – he never strove to take over the world with his ideology – he did use totalitarian derived practices to keep control of Spain. His regime censured literature heavily and energetically.

When Franco died, many critics waited to see what wonderful works would jump “out of the drawers.” These metaphorical “drawers” were the places where scholars expected that works long held back due to the fear of censorship resided. However, something very interesting happened after Franco’s death. Instead of a great volume of classically inspired works of literature, a new generation of poets emerged that strove to explore new narrative techniques. The movement has become known as “la poesía de la experiencia.” Even more interesting is the fact that this is one fairly well documented movement. Already in the middle to late 1980s, anthologies had emerged to present the work of these new, and relatively young poets, to the public. Luis Antonio de Villena stands out among the writers/editors who have worked to promote the cause of this group of writers through his anthologies: Postnovísimos from 1986, Fin de siglo (El sesgo clásico en al última poesía española): antología from 1992, and 10 menos 30: la ruptura interior de La poesía de la experiencia, from 1997. Another anthology that helped to define the group was La generación de los ochenta, by José Luis García Martín, from 1988. If la poesía de la experiencia came to define the kind of poetry that emerged from this time period, la generación de los ochenta, “the eighties generation,” became the label that unified all of these writers together.

HOW ISOLATION PLAYS INTO PART OF THE GROWTH OF LITERARY MOVEMENTS…

One interesting feature that seems common to a lot – not all, by any means, but a lot – of these literary movements, is that the writers come together through some shared cultural experience, a cultural experience that in one way or another is made stronger due to isolation that is imposed upon these writers. This is the case with the Transcendentalist movement in Concord in the early nineteenth century, when a group of smart writers found themselves in what was then considered the cultural backwaters of the American colonies, and even worse, away from Boston, the local urban center. In the case of Soviet bard poetry, which flourished following the Second World War, the poets knew each other due to the tight circles through which literature flowed during the late Soviet period. These circles found themselves incapable of publishing their works in the open, so they recorded their poetry set to guitar music and circulated it through pirated Maxell audio tapes.

The Spanish group of young writers that came of age following Franco’s death emerged in part because they had grown up in the highly censored environment following World War II in Spain. Actually, as the title 10 menos 30, 10 under 30 (meaning ten writers under the age of 30 at the time of the anthology’s publication) they grew up during the second half of the Franco regime, so any reference to the Spain prior to Franco existed only as oral tradition or faded history. These writers wrote at the same time that the Spanish scene was undergoing the period known as “la movida,” a movement known  mostly for its hedonistic approach to art, as represented by Pedro Almodóvar’s first film, “Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón.”  The scene was wild and raunchy, as if the cultural media of Spain was flying about as a balloon that has been filled up by a small child and let off to fly until it deflates itself.

This finally brings me to one of my favorite poems from this generation of writers. Luis García Montero was born in Granada in 1958, and is currently on the faculty at the University of Granada, Spain. He writes a lot, including a really nifty Euro-centric blog on the intellectual and political changes of this period: http://www.luisgarciamontero.com/. He also has kept writing poetry fairly consistently since the early nineteen-eighties. One of my favorite poems comes from the collection Fin de siglo(El sesgo clásico en al última poesía española): antología, edited by Luis Antonio de Villena, from 1992.

 Luis García Montero, Fin de siglo(El sesgo clásico en al última poesía española): antología. Colección Visor de poesía. Luis Antonio de Villena, ed. (Visor: Madrid, 1992) 71-72

 INTENTO, SIN COMPAÑÍA,

DE REHABITAR UNA CIUDAD

 Pienso en la solución confusa de este cielo,
la lluvia casi a punto de la mirada
débil que las muchachas me dirigen
acelerando el paso, solitarias,
en medio del acento que se escapa
como un gato pacífico
de las conversaciones.
Y también pienso en ti. Es la exigencia
de cruzar esta plaza, la tarde, Buenos Aires
con nubes y mil cables en el cielo,
cinco años después
de que lo conociéramos nosotros.

 Los que vienen de fuera siguen viendo
ese resumen ancho de todas las ciudades,
ríos que tan grandes
ya no esperan el mar para sentir la muerte,
cafés que han encerrado
la imitación nostálgica del mundo,
con mesas de billar y habitantes que viven
hablando de sus pérdidas en alto.

Mientras corre la gente a refugiarse
de la lluvia, empujándome,
pienso desorientado
en el dolor de este país incomprensible
y recuerdo la nube
de tus preguntas y tus profecías,
selladas con un beso,
en al plaza de Mayo,
camino del hotel.

Testigos invisibles para un sueño,
hicimos la promesa
de regresar al cabo de los años.
Parecías entonces
eterna y escogida,
como cualquier destino inevitable,
y apuntabas el número de nuestra habitación.
Ahora,
cuando pido la llave de la mía
y el alga de la luz en el vestíbulo
es lluvia rencorosa,
vivo confusamente el desembarco
de la melancolía,
mitad por ti, mitad porque es el tiempo
agua que nos fabrica y nos deshace.

(De Las flores del frío)

I ATTEMPT, WITHOUT ANY COMPANY,

TO REPOPULATE A CITY

I think about the confused solution for this sky,
The rain almost at the point of the weak
glance that the girls direct at me
as they step up their pace, alone,
in the midst of the accent that escapes
like a peaceful cat
from their conversations.
I also think about you. It is the demand
to cross this square, the afternoon, Buenos Aires
with clouds and a thousand cables in the sky
five years after
we got to know it.

 

Those who come from outside keep seeing
that wide summary of all the cities,
rivers so large
that they do not wait for the sea to feel their death,
coffee shops that have encased
that nostalgic imitation of the world,
with pool tables and residents that live
speaking about their losses out loud.

While the people run to take refuge
from the rain, pushing me,
I think, disoriented,
of the pain of this incomprehensible country
and I remember the cloud
of your questions and prophecies,
sealed with your kiss,
in Plaza de Mayo
on the way to the hotel.

Invisible witnesses of a dream,
we made the promise
to return after the years.
You seemed them
eternal and chosen,
like any inevitable destiny,
and you wrote down our room’s number.
Now,
when I asked for the key to mine
and the alga of the light in the vestibule
is  a spiteful rain,
I live confusedly melancholy’s landing,
half for you, half because it is time
that is the water that makes and unmakes us. 

(From The Flowers from the Cold)

 This poem stands out for how ordinary the setting is, and how interesting the narrator is. It is very typical of the work of this particular movement in that it gives you the picture of a personal experience, in this case a man remembering his encounter with a woman. There is a distinct separation between the inside, where space and memory is understood, and the outside, where strangers cannot interpret the world around them. I especially like the closing lines conceit of our reality being malleable, like water that shapes a shoreline or a river bank. The intimacy of the memory lives in the three dimensional surroundings – the town square, the room, even the room key. This is a nice contrast from the more historically charged poetry that I usually study in the field of Slavic studies, such as Akhmatova’s exquisite, yet heavy, Requiem.

 

 

MEANINGS AND PASSINGS

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December 18, 2011, while the world was obsessing over the passing of Kim Jon-il, the North Korean ruler, I found myself saddened by a much more momentous historical passing, the passing of Václav Havel, dramatist, intellectual, the last president of Czechoslovakia, and the first president of the Czech Republic. While the American media gave significant air time to Kim Jon-il’s passing, I found myself reflecting why we failed to recognized the perhaps much more significant contribution to our contemporary culture by citizen hero Havel.

Havel did a lot of things that made him stand out in the global political stage of the late twentieth century. He showed the importance of family influence in developing your world view – his parents came from solid Czechoslovak intellectual stock, helping to found Czechoslovakia’s main film studios on his father’s side and a grandfather who was a journalist on his mother’s side. The one thing he did figure out early was the importance of this field, the field of writing, to the development of cultural opposition to an oppressive regime, in this case the Soviet regime. He stood out as a dramatist and as an essay writer.  As a young man, he became involved with the Prague Spring movement of 1968, which landed him in jail for the first, but definitely not for the last time.

The Soviet regime was particularly obsessive in its control of the cultural sphere, since its founders understood at a personal level a lesson that Havel would repeat again and again: how you mean within the cultural sphere, the sphere of civil society, is as important as what you mean. He joined the a number of other influential Eastern European intellectuals, including Czesław Miłosz, Boris Pasternak, Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (all right, these two are Russian, but they share that Slavic/East European intellectual DNA, so I count them in with the others), and Lech Wałęsa in emphasizing again and again that real political change can come from highly symbolic actions that lead to substantial political change.

What does this mean for us today? Well, in his piece for the History News Network, “Occupy Wall Street Isn’t the Same Old Political Crap—It’s Much, Much More,”  Professor James Livingston remarked how the current Occupy Wall Street movement was taking some of its cues from Havel’s writings. He remarked how Havel most of all showed how: “The means and the end of resistance was not to draw up more just demands, write up more pristine platforms, or do more good on behalf of the benighted (“direct political work in the traditional sense”); it was instead to try to live your life free of the claims of necessity, in a “pre-political” space where you learned how to distinguish between the truth and the speech of power.”[i]

For me, however, the real power of Havel’s works – outside of their intellectual and rhetorical elegance, even in translation – is his driving home the point that how we mean is as important as what we mean. In what probably constitutes as Havel’s best known essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” he uses the example of an anonymous greengrocer who chooses to quietly live his opposition to the regime in everyday life. He refuses to vote in elections he considers false. More importantly, he refuses to put flags in his window when his only motive for putting them there would be to avoid being reported by the house warden – one of the low level political operatives in his neighborhood. This type of simple, personal display of political opposition may seem simply symbolic, is the beginning of what Havel calls “living in the truth.” The most significant, most radical, and most invisible effect of this type of individual behavior is that: “Most of these expressions remain elementary revolts against manipulation: you simply straighten your backbone and live in greater dignity as an individual.”[ii] He continues to theorize that this type of “living in the truth” may not amount to much at an individual level, and it may carry a heavy personal price – in Havel’s case a revolving occupancy in Czechoslovak prisons over the course of 25 years, including a five year stay from 1979 to 1984. However, when a whole bunch of people come together and start to share similar ways of displaying symbolic opposition to a regime, well, then you become what is called a “dissident,” and you get to be a large enough movement to bring down a regime that encompassed sixteen countries and about half of Europe. Then you become the president of one of the emerging countries in the new political order that emerges because a whole bunch of like-minded friends decided not to hang their banners during big Soviet holidays.

Which bring us back to the importance of passing, or not passing.  In our society, particularly our youth society, we always find it hammered how important it is not to “pass for something.” Particularly among people of color, it becomes cultural significant not to “pass for.” Sometimes the well-meant feeling behind this injunction can create serious personal consequences. The admonition, for instance, not to “pass for white,” or “pass for anglo,” if you belong to certain groups can sometimes limit the talents and horizons of some. As a Latina who specializes in Slavic studies, for instance, I cannot help but think at how many times I have felt like I should start presentation apologizing for not doing a “Latino topic.” It does not mean that I want to “pass for” a Slav. Equally troubling can be the assumption that a certain personal and cultural positionality is a prerequisite to speak and to research authoritatively in certain disciplines. I would like to think in that choosing an area not traditionally associated with my background or culture, I am standing along with Havel in creating an supporting the independent life of society as an articulated expression of living within the truth.

[i]James Livingston. “Occupy Wall Street Isn’t the Same Old Political Crap—It’s Much, Much More.”  http://hnn.us/articles/occupy-wall-street-isnt-same-old-political-crap%E2%80%94its-much-much-more

[ii]Václav Havel, Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991) 175-176