Literary Candor, Straight From Latin America

Literature is the other great migrant north from Latin America. As the recent census confirmed, the movement of Spanish-speaking people into North America during the last decade has transformed the United States’ demography. So too the translation of Latin American poets and novelists into English has exercised a profound influence on many U.S. writers and readers.

But Latin American literature has been undergoing its own transformation: The long-dominant genre of magic realism--with its distinctive mixture of the fantastic, discursive and arcane--is giving way to a bracing realism, at once gritty and elegant. Historicism, linguistic frankness and a willingness to engage sexuality and eroticism realistically are hallmarks of this style, examples of which are being translated into English in increasing numbers.

Earlier this year, for example, Farrar, Straus & Giroux brought out a striking translation of one of the new realism’s classic texts, Elena Poniatowska’s “Here’s to You, Jesusa!” originally published in 1969 as “Hasta No Verte Jesus Mio.” It is an extraordinary novel that recounts a harrowing half-century in the life of Jesusa Palancares, an aging Mexican Indian woman who is both a participant in the Mexican revolution and a victim of its aftermath.

“We write the way men leave their names carved on the walls of their cells,” Poniatowska, the grande dame of Mexican letters, has said. “We write in order to explain to ourselves what we cannot understand. . . . We write so as to be seen, so as to be part of the human vision of the world, so as not to be erased so easily.”

Like Poniatowska, many of this new Latin realism’s leading advocates are women. Recently, the Mexican writer and two of her colleagues, Cuban-born Mayra Montero and Mayra Santos-Febres, a Puerto Rican, talked jointly about their work. The three were completing an American reading tour sponsored by Latina, a bilingual monthly magazine, and the Assn. of Hispanic Arts.

At 68, Poniatowska is the eldest of the trio and the author of more than 40 books. The Paris-born daughter of a Polish nobleman and a Mexican aristocrat, she spoke only English and French when she returned to Mexico with her mother at the age of 9. Her first knowledge of Spanish was acquired from the household servants. She is a journalist and political activist, as well as a novelist. Her best-known works, “Here’s to You, Jesusa!” and “Tinisima”--the fictionalized biography of photographer, communist agent and revolutionary heartthrob Tina Modotti--draw deeply on the traditional Mexican testimonio--spare, chronological personal stories of survival.

Montero is 20 years Poniatowska’s junior. Born in Cuba, she now lives in Puerto Rico. She is the author of “In the Palm of Darkness” and “The Messenger”--an imaginative reconstruction of an actual incident in the life of Enrico Caruso. Her most recent novel, “The Last Night I Spent With You,” has been widely praised as a classic of graceful erotic fiction. Its protagonists--Fernando and Celia--are a middle-aged couple who attempt to recapture their marital passion on a Caribbean cruise only to find themselves involved with a third party.

Younger than Montero by a decade, Santos-Febres is also a poet and professor of literature at the University of Puerto Rico. The protagonist of her recent novel, “Sirena Selena,” is a transvestite cabaret singer looking for the main chance on the Dominican hotel circuit.

In conversation, the three tend to finish each other’s sentences--sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English--though the two younger women leave the last word to Poniatowska.

To most North Americans, contemporary Latin American literature is synonymous with the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and many others, yet there is nothing of it in any of your work. Is that merely coincidence or does it suggest something distinctive in your common identities as women writers?

Mayra Santos-Febres: Magic realism is not part of my work because I am not interested in the fantastic. I’m interested in Latin America’s cities as places where power of all kinds is negotiated and exchanged. I’m interested in them as places where the meeting of exiles--of all sorts--occurs. To me, these realities are more magical than an imagined realism.

Mayra Montero: We Latin Americans now are beyond magic realism. I want to tell readers what our realities and our countries really are like. If they sound exotic, it still is a reality. One reason North Americans are only now beginning to understand this is that our literature draws on oral traditions that Americans haven’t discovered until now. Americans’ exposure to other popular Latin American cultural expressions, such as music, has helped in this. I’m sure many readers have come to our work because they have been seduced into it by Latin American music.

Elena Poniatowska: In Mexico, reality enters the windows of our houses with the air and has nothing to do with magic. What work of imagination could be more magical than the Zapatistas? No guerrilla fighter comes to the capital without guns to ask for peace, to ask that Indians receive back their lands when--ever since the Conquest--these people have been exploited by the whites. The reality of such a sight may be surprising, even fantastic, to the United States or to Europe, but not to us. My own stories are of real women. All true literature comes from reality. We don’t make up a lot. Everything of value is already there for us to discover.

How do you see the role of women writers in the formulation of this emerging literature, particularly in its candid engagement of the erotic?

Montero: I have written six novels and only two are erotic. Eroticism for me is an excuse. It is an excuse to dip more deeply and intimately into the characters and personalities of people. When I am writing I am never conscious that I am a woman. Paradoxically, I think all of my best characters are men. As a writer, I am absolutely comfortable speaking in a man’s voice. The voice of the writer must always be androgynous.

Santos-Febres: The question of women’s roles is particularly important in Puerto Rican literature. The most important writing of our previous generations was all done by women. When I started writing in Puerto Rico I could look back and around me and see women in positions of artistic and even political power. I am lucky in this way to be the receiver of a centuries-old tradition of women writers and of women as leaders of our politics. This is not true in much of Latin America. But in the Caribbean, our experience has had a wider influence. Because Puerto Rican women have been leaders in politics, literature and culture within our history, it has changed the way in which we think of the roles of women and of men in the Caribbean. The more we think through our literature about the different roles to be played by men and women, about the sharing of power, the more change we see. We see the consciousness of men change along with that of women.

Poniatowska: We women writers of Mexico are locas. We are loca--crazy--about writing and about suffering and about people. Women in Mexico have always been forgotten, pushed to the shadows at the margin. And yet, it is literally ‘the violated one,’ the Indian chosen by Cortez for violation who our tradition recognizes as the mother of our race--el chingado, the child of the Spanish conqueror and the Indian woman he raped. Even so, it has been the man who is the only one free to leave the house for experience and adventure; women bore children and cared for them. Globalization and the extension of the market economy have changed that in Mexico not only for the poor, but also for the middle class. The demands of the market have forced many women out of their homes and into the workplace and allowed others to choose to go there. This has changed the role of women in our society and in our literature.

Do you agree that one of the characteristics of this emerging Latin American literature evident in your work is a new--often unexpected--sexual and linguistic frankness?

Santos-Febres: Yes, and it has to do with our struggle with silence. For the longest time, the relationship between we women and language was mediated by the most stringent rules. This was because people would think badly of you if you failed to behave as you were expected to. So, a lot of women writers have come to their work with the desire to express ourselves clearly to a world in which we were supposed to be silent. Speaking for myself, I love the challenge of finding new ways to break all those rules of language, and shatter the silence. For me, it is a game to find fresh ways to say all those things that were ruled out before. Frankness in all things is an imperative to me. There is also the fact that I am a black women. The slaves from whom I am descended were forbidden to write. When I write, it is an act of homage to them. I attack silence in memory of all those who were forced to go silently to their graves.

Montero: I agree with Mayra that this frankness is new only because before there was such deep silence. But now we have more women writing, and sexuality and its discussion as an aspect of the human condition are as important to them as it is for men. This exploration is more visible because there are more women writing.

Poniatowska: The influence of Spain has a lot to do with this new eroticism in Latin American literature. Remember, that Latin American writers always have hoped to belong to Europe and its culture too. This new frankness really has to do with the liberation of sex and of women that began to happen in Spanish society and culture after the death of [Gen. Francisco] Franco [in 1975]. The transformation since then has been profound and profoundly influential. It hasn’t had that much of an impact on Mexican women, but within Spain and particularly in the Caribbean the change is revolutionary.

Santos-Febres: Elena is correct, and that has a lot to do with the way in which people from outside always have thought of the Caribbean as a sea of sex. But we who write there now are saying we are not just about that. As Mayra Montero said, eroticism and sexuality are excuses to deal with human psychology and, in particular, the relationship between women and power within intimate relationships. For Caribbean writers, candidly exploring sexuality is a way to talk about reality, since we are the sex symbols of the world. The weakest always bear the responsibility of being the sexiest. So, writing about sex is a way of thinking about power.

Globalization is a factor in culture, as well as in economies. With that in mind, may we discuss some of the influences on your own work?

Santos-Febres: I come from an island, and the sea connects us to other cultures. Two of my favorite writers are an American, Toni Morrison, and a Mexican, Elena Poniatowska. Right now, I am particularly interested in a large number of Latin American detective writers. Throughout Latin America, the detective story has been used to talk about the organization of cities and the exercise of power within them. The genre has been used quite skillfully to criticize from within--and with respect--the politics of our countries. In Latin America, the detective fiction is not just a fight between good and evil. It is an exploration of how our cities work as places where power is exercised over people and institutions. Otherwise, I like Sandra Cisneros, and I love Graham Greene.

Montero: I think a writer can be influenced by many things, but with regard to literature, my main influences are Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, of course. For people of my generation as a whole, there is Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortazar, Hemingway, Faulkner and many writers of their generation, including John Dos Passos. They were very important, the main influence on the writers of my generation. So, too, were Truman Capote and John Updike. I believe it is important to read more than you write.

Poniatowska: Malcolm Lowry always has been an influence in Mexico. But during the McCarthy era we were influenced in very important ways by the writers and filmmakers driven into exile among us by the blacklist. Dalton Trumbo was very important to all of us. “Johnny Got His Gun” moved many people. His film “The Brave Bull” was not good, but it meant something important to us. American writers have given us Mexicans a wonderful idea of ourselves. Katherine Anne Porter, Hart Crane and Jack Kerouac all influenced us. Now we follow Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer, surely one of the greatest American writers. I love “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, and I think it was a kick that Toni got the Nobel Prize. Alice Walker is awfully good too.

You all are widely traveled in the United States. What impressions have you formed of the Latino writers working here and, particularly, of the expressive culture emerging from the great migration northward over the past decades?

Santos-Febres: My study of Latino writers, who I admire a lot, began when I came to Cornell to do my PhD. I am 30-something, and that generational fact colors my experience of the Latino community. While I, as a Puerto Rican, acknowledge differences between us, there also is an important common experience. It is similar to the one ancient colonists had in relation to the Roman empire, which at this moment is the United States. Perhaps because of that common relationship to power, the warmth and understanding I’ve received from Latinos is greater than I would have expected. Reading in Los Angeles or San Jose, I can see nods of agreement from the audience, hear laughter and see eyes shining. This is true even though most in the audience were Americans of Mexican descent. But our common reality is greater than our differences, and that fills me with hope.

Montero: We could speak many individual names. But it is more important to recognize that the sheer number of Latino writers in the United States has created a special moment. It is un momento luminoso--a glowing moment--especially for Chicano and Cuban-American writers. It is this, as much as a particular book, that strikes me.

Poniatowska: I think Chicano writers and those of Central American descent--and especially women--have had to fight to find a place between two cultures, both of which have rejected them. Americans reject them because they see them as Mexicans and Mexicans reject them precisely because they are not Mexicans and the women do not behave like Mexican women. As a result, they have had to build their writing in circumstances totally against them. This has made them self-assertive and determined to tell the truth about themselves. They are very outspoken. I have had young Chicana writers introduce themselves, and within two minutes declare to me that they are lesbians. I wouldn’t come up to anyone and say, ‘I am a heterosexual and a grandmother.’ This happens only to people surrounded by a culture trying to destroy them and who have created themselves out of this destruction.