This Modern Writer: Re(-en)vis(ion)ing: The Obligation of the Latino Writer by Joseph A. W. Quintela

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(Prelude to a Literary Murder)

If it is truth that you desire then let me explain a few things. But be careful. For where truth is involved there will also be complexity. There are no simple truths. Simplicity is the siren song of the lie. That much, I know a thing or two about, at least.

If it is truth that you desire then let me tell you that I am sick to death of this term Latino Writer. It has nothing to do with me and I want nothing to do with it. If you are asking me if I am Latino then the answer is yes. If you are asking me if I am a Writer then the answer is yes. If you are asking me if I am a Latino Writer, then the conversation stops there. Silencio, por favor. Let me write. Let me be.

If it is truth that you desire then let me tell you that I am desperate to be a Latino Writer. I would pepper my poems with brujas, and taos, and hermanas, if only I knew how. But I do not. There was no Spanish spoken in my childhood. No barrio. No viva la resistance. Just a hard-working but distant padre and a blond-haired blue-eyed mother who did the best she could: traditional hat dance on Wednesdays; taco night on Fridays; a Traje de Gallo gathering dust in the closet when the seven year old revolted. Enough! No more living between two worlds.

I chose hers. It was the only world I really knew.

If it is truth that you desire then I’m truly sorry. No se la puedo dar. I have given you what I can. The only way to get at what remains is to stand over my dead body and dig it from my heart.

(At Trial)

<evidence>

I was in a bookshop recently when a young woman approached me.

She told me she was writing an essay on my work and that of Radclyffe Hall. Could I help?

“Yes,” I said. “Our work has nothing in common.”

“I thought you were a lesbian,” she said.

from “The Semiotics of Sex” by Jeanette Winterson

<direct examination>

Winterson addresses sexual orientation but she might as well address ethnicity. Substitute Junot Diaz for Radclyffe Hall, Latino for Lesbian, and the anecdote reads the same. The L-words loom over us dangerously. Lesbian. Latino. Put either before Writer and to which goes the eye? The L-word. Does it not trouble the reader that, as Winterson puts it, “in any discussion of art and the artist, heterosexuality is  background, whilst homosexuality is foreground”? Generations have fought to remove questions of race, ethnicity, and sexuality from the foreground of our daily experience but in literature it haunts us still.

The read-in of autobiography is the problem. That beginners mistake of literature played out to massive scale. No matter how many times we are told to separate our authors from our speakers and our narrators we simply cannot resist. It is far too easy. Far too satisfying to point to similar scenes in art and life thinking we have discovered some easy element with which to alchemize an understanding of the work. But simply because I have lived some simulacrum of a Latino experience does not mean it must be conjured in my ink. “Forcing the work back into autobiography is a way of trying to contain it,” says Winterson, but she, if anyone, knows that literature cannot be contained.

<evidence>

But confess

that you enjoyed the sad sickness

of meek peoples

and you crept up the Andes

to load up on copper, chromosomes, guns,

from “United States” by Marjorie Agosin

<cross examination>

1. Is it not true that the writer is a member of society?

2. Is it not true that without the medium of society the writer’s words are but meaningless vibrations made in silence?

3. Is it not true that this relationship implies an obligation upon the writer to the society of which he or she claims to be a member?

4. Is it not true that if this society has been oppressed by another then it is the obligation of the writer to first address this oppression before addressing any other subject?

5. Is it not true that when you answered yes to being Latino and yes to being a Writer that in so doing you undertook the obligations of the Latino Writer?

6. Well, didn’t you?

<evidence>

The authors’ task or primary responsibility in this category [the literature of exile and immigration] is to represent or voice information that will raise awareness in the host country so that their countries problems are no longer obscured and are present in the minds of those who have the power to help.

from “Exile and Immigration” edited by Jose Gonzalez

We left Cuba so you could dress like this?

from “We Left Cuba So You Could Dress Like This” by Achy Obejas

<redirect>

The exile, the immigrant, and the acculturated. Yes, the acculturated too. We are here. Even if we are left out of Gonzalez’s address. We are here and we grow in number every day. Desperately simmering like the ropa vieja we have never truly tasted. It fills us none the less. It is our blood. Blood may live along the edges of the body for a while but eventually it longs for the heart. So is it with us.

Don’t we have burdens enough? The exile, the immigrant, and the assimilated. Haven’t we struggled sufficiently just to stand here? Just to take our place in an alien world. Should we wish to bequeath a few measured words to the ages, why set upon us with further obligations? Does anyone ask this of the gringo author? The heterosexual? The male? They write and history judges them by their words before their obligations. It is not an equitable treatment.

­ ­ ­ ­ ­The truth is that obligation rarely concerns itself with what is equitable.

All this time, I have asked myself: “What do I owe a society that I have never truly been a part of it?”  But perhaps there is a better question.

How about this: “What do I owe myself?”

<jury out>

Then here is the verdict: guilty of innocence.[1]

If it is truth that you desire then you are going to have to learn to stretch yourself around a world that you may never comfortably encompass. The world is jagged and rough. This is no task for the feint of heart. It will require near constant re(-en)vis(ion)ing. Through death find the birth to live once again. Put like this, in the familiar Judeo-Christian trope, it may sound simple, but simple it is not.

When faced with complexity the first thing to do is to begin making distinctions. Let us start with this. The truth is that the term Latino Writer means nothing. Society gives it one meaning. You must give it another. And then convince the world that you are right. This is your obligation. This is your truth.

Si, la verdad. Se la puedo dar ahora.

[1] Remember: verdict does not equate truth. We have overturned enough of them to know better than that. But verdict is the consensus of society. Even if it is a lie, the truth is that it will be believed by many. That is close enough for our purposes, at least.

Joseph A. W. Quintela wrote this bio between the lines of Virginia Woolf’s  Orlando with the hope he’d be transformed. He wasn’t. There’s just no magic left in the world. So he began to search. One night he closed his eyes and flung himself to sky and didn’t open his eyes until his feet sank into alien soil. The first world was rocky. Barren. He left. The second was made from the tears of his father, shed alone in the night and spun into a planet. He took a breath. Dove into the briny water. Became a golden fish. (http://josephquintela.com/in-writing.html)