THE ARCHIPELAGO: New Writing From and...

The Caribbean Sea has turned into an ocean. Not because of global warming but because a flood of cariben~os from at least three language groups has inundated the literary scene: Kamau Brathwaite and Jamaica Kincaid (English); Edwidge Danticat and Maryse Conde (French); and Junot Diaz, Julia Alvarez and Cristina Garcia (Spanish). These writers join an already powerful heritage that includes Derek Walcott, V. S. Naipaul, Claude McKay, Aime Cesaire, Alejo Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Luis Rafael Sanchez, Jean Rhys, Wilson Harris and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Traditionally, language has divided the various Caribbean cultures. We can see the problems this creates in the publication last year of “Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century,” edited by Edward J. Sullivan. This valuable volume covers Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and other Spanish-speaking nations but says nothing about Haiti, the rest of the French Caribbean or the English-speaking islands. The fact is, language is not the only factor that determines cultural unity. In the case of the Caribbean, there are other shared or parallel historical experiences--slavery, politics and economic dependency--that shape the region’s artistic production despite the enormous differences among its ethnic and linguistic groups.

Miscegenation is the key, a fusion of races: the fusion of Africa with Spain, France, England, India and China; the fusion of Europe with the tropics; and the fusion of Christianity with African religions. Starting in the 17th century, the islands of the Caribbean and the mainland territories bordering it became factories for sugar, tobacco, coffee and bananas, rendering them elements in a global economy, defining the economic and political relationship between purveyors of agricultural products and consuming nations. The social effects of this agribusiness--slavery and a caste system--generate the themes that dominate Caribbean literature: race, class and ethnic resentment, violence, degradation, the consolations of sex, religion and music.

Many Caribbeans write in Spanish or in French, but more and more writers with roots in the region are writing in English. The Caribbean diaspora--Puerto Ricans were scattered as far as Hawaii by the hurricane of agricultural capitalism--has seen vast numbers of cariben~os in Great Britain and the United States. Ironically, their writing, an important chapter in 20th century exile literature, will enrich the English-language heritage. Nobel laureate Derek Walcott is from St. Lucia, but he belongs to the tradition of Milton and Whitman.

The anthologies “The Archipelago” and “Growing Up Puerto Rican,” and the novels “Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada” and “The Aguero Sisters” show the region’s diversity.

“The Archipelago” is an anthology of 31 authors, whose editors “are pleased to be the first to bring together three generations of [Caribbean] writers.” Their reach unfortunately exceeds their grasp. It wasn’t really necessary to include non-Caribbean writers, even as fine a one as Madison Smartt Bell, for instance, simply because they set works in the region. However, placing Garcia Marquez’s wistful note on airline stopovers in Paramaribo in northern South America at the head of this parade is an appropriate introduction because his vignette documents the sense of roots and rootlessness characteristic of Caribbean life, where economic need precipitates voluntary exile and, with it, nostalgia and melancholy.

Politics inevitably interferes with the best editorial intentions. The Cubans included here (Antonio Benitez Rojo, Severo Sarduy, Cristina Garcia, Mayra Montero) are almost all exiles (voluntary or not); only Senel Paz, whose story “The Wolf, the Forest and the New Man” is the origin of his screenplay for Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s film about gays in Cuba, “Strawberry and Chocolate,” lives on the island.

The anthology also creates its own peculiar distortions. Severo Sarduy is described in the “Notes on Contributors” as a novelist, poet and essayist who worked at Editions du Seuil in France. This is rather scanty documentation for one of the most innovative and difficult writers in Spanish, who introduced structuralist and post-structuralist literary analysis to the Spanish-speaking world. Sarduy’s literary writings, including the pieces here, demand an introduction, but the editors don’t even mention that Sarduy was Cuban, that his juxtaposition of AIDS and the Gulf War is relevant to his “Journal of the Plague” pieces, that “Lady S.S.” is a kind of autobiography in drag or that he died of AIDS in 1993.

To appreciate “The Archipelago,” the reader will have to possess considerable prior knowledge of its authors and the region. For instance, without more context, Mark Dow’s translations of songs by Haitian Manno Charlemagne and his essay on Charlemagne and Bob Shacochis’ article on the situation in that country in 1995 seem disturbingly incomplete. Dow, however, does help the reader not versed in the relationship between music and politics in Haiti (a constant in the contemporary Caribbean world, as the career of Jamaican reggae artist Bob Marley demonstrates), but Shacochis’ Michael Herr-style journalism makes the singer Richard Morse into a novelistic character. This is not to fault Shacochis, but we need a context for Charlemagne and Morse and for Haiti as well. In short, this volume is comprehensive but not always comprehensible, though in the hands of a teacher, it could be the nucleus of a course on Caribbean culture.

“Growing Up Puerto Rican” is a more tightly focused anthology of 20 authors. Carefully prefaced by Ed Vega’s foreword and Joy L. de Jesus’ introduction, with excellent notes on each author, “Growing Up Puerto Rican” is not only a self-sufficient entity but also points the reader to other possibilities. This collection is an ideal starting point for anyone interested in Puerto Rican culture, and its strengths--primarily the historical context--underscore the shortcomings of “The Archipelago.”

Mexicans lament, “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States,” but neither Mexico nor any other Latin American society is as inextricably bound to America as is Puerto Rico. This is not only the Puerto Rican dilemma but the source of Puerto Rican identity. Puerto Ricans are, in effect, denied any either/or (either Puerto Rican or American) nationality. They are both by law (the 1917 Jones Act declares them to be United States citizens whether they like it or not) and by 99 years of obligatory association with the victors of the Spanish-American War.

Thus, Puerto Rican identity is like life in a frontier, an unhappy synthesis perpetually at war with itself. “Growing Up Puerto Rican” reflects that sense of oscillating identities in its four sections: “Neither Here Nor There,” “Survival on the Streets,” “Once on This Island” and “Family Ties.” While the quality of the stories varies markedly, mostly because the editor has had to choose stories that best exemplify each category, the writing is excellent, especially the contributions by the women writers: Aurora Levins Morales, Ana Lydia Vega, Rosario Ferre and Esmeralda Santiago.

Levins Morales recounts the experience of being a Puerto Rican with a Russian-Jewish father and growing up in Chicago. After sorting out her genealogy, she has no need of either surrealism or magic realism; just the fact that she is the scribe for the collective memory of so many different pasts makes her chronicle worthwhile. Vega, one of the funniest women ever to write in Spanish, is uncharacteristically serious in her literary collage, which focuses on the 1937 slaughter of Puerto Rican nationalists near the city of Ponce. Ferre provides an example of friendship and loyalty between two convent schoolgirls, one white and upper class, the other mulatta and plebeian. Ferre orchestrates a complex series of metaphors to represent Puerto Rico, from the convent school itself to a special kind of mango. Santiago’s “Why Women Remain Jamona” (jamona is a pejorative term for spinster) dovetails nicely with Ferre because it deals with the fate of Puerto Rican women, who are married, condemned to fidelity and faced with the spectacle of unfaithful husbands.

Zoe Valdes and Cristina Garcia are two facets of the Cuban dilemma: Both were born in Havana, and neither lives there. Valdes’ text reflects the neo-existentialism of late 20th century European writing, and her writing appeared first in Spain and France before being taken on by an American publisher. Garcia grew up in the United States and deals with themes typical of late 20th century women’s writing in America.

Valdes’ “Yocandra in the Paradise of Nada” is not a novel but a novella. Like the 16th century picaresque novel “Lazarillo de Tormes,” “Yocandra” is a satire in the form of an autobiography and, like its forebear, is a tale of desengan~o, the loss of illusions, especially those related to the Cuban Revolution, which has degenerated into empty slogans echoing in empty stomachs. The female protagonist-narrator is literally a child of the revolution: Her mother goes into labor on May Day in 1959 during a speech by the comandante, collapses and is draped with a Cuban flag by Che himself as she is carried off to the hospital. Unfortunately, our narrator is born two minutes after midnight, just a tad late to be an absolute patriot. Her father, devoted to the revolution, compensates for this by naming her Patria--fatherland.

Patria, as is the main character in “Lazarillo de Tormes,” is plagued by two things: her name and her hunger. She changes her name to Yocandra, a name she filches from a writer nicknamed the Traitor. The Traitor is a paradox, an artist who prospers in Cuba by parlaying connections, bribes and trips abroad. A total fraud, he symbolizes official art, and through him Yocandra will discover her true calling: literature. Perhaps writing (ecriture) is a better, more postmodern term to describe Yocandra’s and Valdes’ combination of fiction and nonfiction. But the thrust here, echoing Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando,” is to turn the disillusioned new woman of socialist Cuba into a writer. Thus we are not surprised when, after a series of political and erotic adventures, she must write her story:

“Because I have had friends who have died, others who have fled, still others who have remained. They are all inside me. Inside the words. I no longer know if I have written them. Or if they have written me: ‘She comes from an island that had wanted to build paradise. . . .’ ”

The last sentence of the novella is also its first sentence, and its repetition helps emphasize that this is a story about the triumph of art over the perverted language of politics. A nice trick, superior to the ersatz erotic picaresque it frames.

By some coincidence, Garcia employs the same device in her novel “The Aguero Sisters,” though in her case, the beginning, which is also the end, is a reading rather than a writing experience. Garcia inscribes her novel in the space of memory, but the memory, like that of a patient undergoing psychoanalysis, is full of rifts that can be knit together only with the help of someone else. So memory is also mystery, in this case, the mysterious death of Blanca Aguero, mother of Constancia and Reina Aguero, the sisters of the title.

The sisters have the same mother but not the same father, and in this, Garcia neatly inverts and retains a device Fenimore Cooper uses in “The Last of the Mohicans,” in which one half-sister embodies racial purity and the other miscegenation. The inversion derives from the fact that it is Blanca, a woman, who has a mixed-blood child out of wedlock rather than the traditional philandering male.

This is a novel about women, and it uses every imaginable myth of womanhood: that women are closer to nature than men and, therefore, participate in nature’s secrets; that women, therefore, possess a kind of magic aura; and that women are the repository of memory and, accordingly, are the means to pass on that memory. So what we have is a quest story, to resolve the mystery of Blanca, whose story is intertwined with Cuban history, from the beginning of this century until the present. Enmeshed with family and national history are natural history and meditations on Cuban nature, especially ornithology, a predilection of the Aguero family.

We have here all the elements of contemporary women’s writing, from Isabel Allende’s yoking of magic realism and national history to Mary Gordon’s unmasking of her hypocritical father. The problem is that it’s all too neat, too formulaic, and ultimately unconvincing. Take this scene-setting passage for instance:

“The evening gowns flaunt their hothouse colors, as if forced to bloom in artificial light. Jades and saffrons, vermilions, glamorous backs. The women inside them turn and hesitate, rustling their skirts with a deafening allure.”

The prose is so self-conscious that it becomes an end in itself, serving no purpose but musicality. Garcia has all the tools but is still searching for the appropriate vehicle.

We are awash in writing from the Caribbean, good, bad and indifferent, but one lesson emerges from this survey of two anthologies and two fictions: These writers are here to stay and are destined to change the direction of New World writing.