Declarations
Modern Essays by East
Coast Latinos
Reviewed by Gary Soto
Zapata’s
Disciple, essays, by Martín Espada
South End Press, $14.00 paper; 142 pages
Something to Declare by Julia Alvarez
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $20.95 hard; 300 pages
Martín Espada, a poet and former bilingual education lawyer
serves up personal interpretations of race and social class, particularly
Puerto Rican. The title, though, leads us to conjure up Mexico with smoking
pistola. Zapata is indeed at the heart of these eleven essays, all tidy
in length, finely rendered in logic, and caring but not sniveling for
his subjects. Espada delivers like the poet he has become. For starters,
his poetic irony is contained in a few titles: “Zapata’s Disciple
and Perfect Brie,” “The Puerto Rican Dummy and the Merciful
Son,” “The Good Liar Meets His Executioners,” “The
Poetics of Commerce: The Nike Poetry Slam,” and “All Things
Censored: The Poem NPR Doesn’t Want You to Hear.” From the get-go,
we’re intrigued.
The initial essay, “Zapata and the Perfect Brie,” pays homage
to the poet’s father, namely Frank Espada, a former electrician and
now noted photographer, who was and probably still is a man of firm convictions.
The essay starts off with a brief description of his father in December
1949, in Biloxi, Mississippi and his refusal to sit in the back of the
bus. It’s this refusal which led to his father’s one-week stay
in the county jail, Espada says, and from “which I evolved, as son
and poet, contributing to my awareness of class and its punishments.”
The essay is in part about his father, but also Martín’s own
years of growing up in the 60s in the projects of East New York and, later,
in the seemingly soft suburbs of Long Island, where he was kicked around
for being Puerto Rican. Adolescent hazing? Ethnic hazing? Who knows, finally,
but such taunts led him to write poetry in order to “explain myself
to myself.”
We are engaged by Espada’s personality; we learn about his odd jobs
as janitor, door-to-door salesman, pizza cook, car washer, bouncer, and
caretaker in a primate laboratory; he lets us in on his literary leanings
toward Neruda, Clemente Soto Vélez, Claribel Alegria, Eduardo Galeano,
among others.
We pick up on Espada’s hatred of snobs, particularly literary snobs.
He writes about judging a literary contest and coming across a manuscript
of vacation poems and the poet’s claims of having gone to Paris and
“lunched on perfect Brie.” The problem, of course, is not brie
in itself (hell, I like it), but the poetic expenditure of savoring brie
on crackers in a foreign country. Is this the epitome of travel? This
irks Espada to no end. It irks him because it’s a literary life that
rings of fakery.
Espada presents opinions about bilingual education, Rodney King, NPR,
Nike the shoe maker, politics and the poetic imagination, and cultural
warfare — not unlike Zapata, he intends to defend ground no one else
dares touch. And unlike other poets from his generation, poets who relish
literary gibberish, Espada bravely confronts issues that others only read
about in newspapers. He argues in favor of multiculturalism, which he
thinks scares universities as well as the middle class; he argues that
institutions, no matter how muscular with talent or academic brilliance,
are not immune to the forces outside their confines, meaning the world
outside the classroom. Universities are, indeed, think tanks — mobile
at times when the scholars take the show on the road — and Espada
believes it’s time for the academy to bring some knowledge to the
people who, after all, help sustain it in such places.
Alvarez’s
essays — all twenty-four, equally divided under the headings
“customs” and “declarations” — are what
I can describe as delightful. I feel as though I’m sipping a cup
of Earl Grey as I describe her books with such a word — ah, simply
delightful. But it’s about the truest observation I’m going
to make today. These essays, elegant but never pretentious, examine her
life from her childhood in the Dominican Republic and New York to her
completed promise of being a full-time writer living knee-deep in the
Vermont snow.
The “customs” part scans her years in the Dominican Republic
and her life in New York and beyond. The section advances more or less
chronologically, beginning with the whimsical essay, “Grandfather’s
Blessing,” which is a preamble of things to come. As a child of six,
she wished first to be a bullfighter, next a cowboy, then an actress (well,
of course, for she is described by her mother as a chatterbox), and, finally,
a writer — all of these career leaps within a single year.
Alvarez is one of four daughters from a family of intelligent and worldly
folk. Her father was a doctor and her grandfather a world traveler who
had seen London, Madrid, and Rome, and enjoyed a stint as a cultural attaché
with the United Nations. Her mother was schooled in Boston. Books crowded
her household; her grandfather recited poetry in clips here and there,
and her spinster aunts enjoyed the opera.
But her sweet childhood comes to an abrupt end in “Our Papers,”
a piece about her family under the political watch of the SIM, Dominican
dictator Trujillo’s unofficial regiment of thugs. They move to the
United States where Julia discovers almost immediately that she likes
her new surroundings and wants to be “American,” in spite of
spats of racism from her classmates. During her adolescent years, as she
reflects, she felt “embarrassed by the ethnicity that rendered me
colorful and an object of derision to those who would not have me be a
part of their culture...” — a common experience of immigrant
children of the sixties. In time, Alvarez loses her ability to speak Spanish
(“Did you eat an English Parrot?” her grandfather asks) and
falls into the readily available American pastimes, including The Miss
America Pageant on television. The program had a hold on everyone in the
60s, and her family was no different, all gathered on the bed, her father
convinced that “personality” was the ultimate gauge for beauty.
But his eyes bugged out at the fuller-shaped women.
There are essays about first opera, the loss of her native language Spanish,
being a picky eater, and an imagined motherhood — she never had children.
While these essays are charming recreations of her childhood and adulthood,
this reviewer is drawn to the “declaration” part, in which she
offers opinions regarding writing, literature, the monk-like poverty of
writers, teaching, and, in short, her ars poetica. Perhaps Alvarez did
swallow an English parrot, as her grandfather said, because there is so
much to chew on in her handsomely wrought prose. There is literary ambivalence,
too. She wavers about where she stands as an ethnic writer, admitting
that she sweats over the questions audiences will at times ignorantly
ask — does she write on “Latino subject matter,” in a “Latino
style,” about “Latino concerns.” They won’t let her
be just a writer.
We learn in “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” of her vagabond teaching career
of eighteen years, she a migrant scholar of sorts who went from one part-time
teaching post to another in a half dozen states. Finally when she finds
a home in a university and tenure, she gives it up — adios to the
regular paycheck in spite of her own warnings that it’s a tough world
out there for writers.
Unlike Espada, who seems a willing candidate to poke around politics
and kick up dust at the drop of a hat, Alvarez is leery about spreading
herself too thin. She is a writer first and foremost, and says that maybe
a writer can do two things but no more. Playfully she takes roll of human
abilities, summing up that she can write and be in a family; she can write
and teach; she can write and do political work. But she can’t write,
teach, fall in love, learn to cook new and fancy dishes, do political
work, or take in a waif from the street. In other words, writing is at
the core of her soul or, that old fashioned word, her “calling.”
Readers will be so pleased with her calling that when they reach the last
page they will want to close the book for a day and open it once more
and begin again.
Gary Soto is a poet, author of children's books and a frequent contributor to El Andar.
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