Boricuas:
A Puerto Rican Anthology of Literature
edited by Roberto Santiago
One World/Ballantine, $15 paper
Here is a collective
ethnic American voice that has been systematically silenced and shoved aside by
the mainstream of American letters, even as those same teachers, professors,
and critics scramble to hear the wakening wail of Asian, African-American, and
female voices and clamor for token “diversity” in classes — and it is long
past overdue that we begin to listen for the rich “spanglish” sound of this
Puerto Rican literature clearing its throat and shouting its presence on
subways, streets, little inner-city porticoes of paradise. Even as I welcome
it, however — and I realize the loaded gun I am about to level at myself — I
must sadly point out that, based on the slim evidence of this admittedly anemic
anthology, Puerto Rico does not yet appear to have a literature.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not trying to burden Puerto Rican writing with the
same second-class status that we (and the Spaniards before us) have bestowed
upon the beautiful island, denying it true statehood even as we refuse to
relinquish control of it. As a document of protest and discrimination, it is
wonderful; as a record of a proud people struggling to find themselves in a new
land, it is marvelous; as a simple, profound, multilingual howl against
oppression and the stark, killing concrete of the street, it is delicate and
powerful all at once, but it is not yet a fully developed literature. In these
ways, it is not so different from American writing before Walt Whitman
illuminated and energized it, gave it direction and purpose, set down the new
scale of notes by which we would sing and new spectrum of colors with which we
would paint.
So who will be the Walt Whitman of Puerto Rican letters? It might be someone
like Edwin Torres, the New York city judge who wrote the crime suspense novels
Carlito’s Way and Q&A, both of which have been made into
films. In perhaps the volume’s most insightful and remorseless analysis of the
discriminatory dilemma posed by the mixed cultural heritage of Puerto Ricans,
Torres writes (in an excerpt from Carlito’s Way) that “You’re better off
having a little bit of everything. That way you are what you have to be
whenever you got to be,” describing the philosophy of his hustler-hero Carlito,
who must find a way to blend in on the hoodlum streets of New York to survive
even while maintaining something of the identity of his race and soul.
Torres writes of crime and the streets, not out of a desire to pander to
publishers and the film industry (as have certain other American writers who
have a legal background), but because, quite simply, it is what he knows. He
uses a stripped-down street language in his writing that is unadorned but never
dumb, sprinkled with Spanish terms his characters use when there is simply no
other way to describe the confounding predicament of being a Puerto Rican in
New York, and his Carlito is a road-weary but exuberant hood who guides himself
by a twisted but true set of morals. The pulse of his writing is pushed by
violent action, but the purpose of the violence is not to beat the book
awkwardly along from one scene to the next, or to set up some elaborate,
convoluted “plot”; rather, there is little sense of plot at all, and the scenes
of violence are drawn with a calm and understated hand, with the aim of
illuminating the dark soul of the main character.
The Puerto Rican Walt Whitman could also be someone like poet Julia de
Burgos, who is described by the editor of the anthology as “Puerto Rico’s
greatest literary icon,” and who displays in her work perhaps the most genuine
sense of sheer earthy exuberance at being black, being Puerto Rican, being poor
and American and alive. Many other authors included here display a dark and
bitter confusion about the discrimination they have faced due to the color of
their skin, the curl of their hair, their thick Puerto Rican accents, and while
this is an important type of writing for any culture to struggle through and
produce, it is only a beginning of something, an angry spark, only a seedling
and not the strong roots from which a greater literature can grow. DeBurgos’
work is the stuff of the roots. She cuts through the thin surface shadows of
discrimination down to the dark silent core, the sacred silence within us all,
touches it trembling and shivers it out into the light, as in her poem “Ay Ay
Ay, of the Kinky Negress”:
Negress of intact hue, I cry and laugh
the vibration of being a black statue;
a chunk of night where my white
teeth sparkle;
to be a black spike
that gets entwined to the black
and twists in the black nest
wherein the black crow lies…
Thankfully, de Burgos is the most anthologized writer in the volume, with five
poems published here. There are many other fine authors, however, who are only
represented by one work or a fragment of work, and one can only hope that a
more complete collection of Puerto Rican writings will be available in the
future.
This seems especially appropriate given the deliciously diverse nature of
Puerto Rican culture and writings, which is at times so eclectic as to seem
schizophrenic (always an inviting quality in a literature, and again in keeping
with the American tradition), divided as it is between idyllic island life and
inner city slums, between the African-descended black Puerto Ricans and the
lighter-skinned, Spanish-descended ones, between the oppressed males who are
expected to be delinquents and criminals, and the females who are expected to
be servants and sluts — and this is evidenced by the roster of writers whose
work is published here, including such surprises as Jose Torres (former light
heavyweight world champion and bestselling boxing biographer) and talk show
king Geraldo Rivera. Neither of these two will likely be hailed as the Puerto
Rican Walt Whitman, though both contribute interesting essays to this
collection.
But perhaps the new Walt Whitman is alive today, and perhaps it is someone not
unlike the editor of this collection, journalist and fiction writer Roberto
Santiago. Santiago writes in the introduction of his childhood in New York, of
the sharp sense of envy he felt at the clear cultural identity he observed in
the other ethnic groups with whom he came in contact every day on the street
and at school, of the simple-minded cruelty of a teacher who told him that
Puerto Ricans don’t have a culture. Like most good students, he didn’t take his
teacher’s word for it, and stubbornly pursued and finally stumbled upon the
rich evidence he was looking for at a city library. It was also there that he
discovered the meaning of “boricua,” a word he’d always heard Puerto Ricans
casually calling each other much in the way of blacks calling each other
“brother.” It means, he discovered, “Brave Lord,” and is derived from the
indigena name of his homeland, Borinquen, or “Land of the Brave Lord,”
from which it was changed to its current name by Spanish conquerors, who saw it
only as a “Rich Port.”
Jack Kerouac once wrote, in celebrating the gift of his own place in the
continuum of American letters, that “there could never have been a Whitman in
Europe and the Whitman of Africa is yet to come.” It appears that another
culture is ready, with tingling tongue and bursting throat, to sing itself a
whole new literature, to crown its Whitman. It remains to be seen if this will
happen in the current climate, or if it will be necessary for Puerto Rico to
win its independence, as it was for this country, before the transformation can
take place.
This article appears in February 2 • 1996 and February 2 • 1996 (Cover).