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T A B L E_ T A L K How did you come to terms with the differences between you and your parents? Discuss making familial peace in the Mothers area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Recipes make the woman Conception by deception First Pick by proxy Time For One Thing: Fly-Fishing Who needs experts? BROWSE THE MOTHERS WHO THINK FEATURE ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto
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SOMETHING TO DECLARE | PAGE 1, 2, 3
It seems like your parents had very strong ideas about the kind of woman they wanted you and your sisters to be. Well, I don't think it's just my parents, I think it's our culture. I was growing up in the '50s and '60s in America, and the women's movement really didn't get started until the '70s. There were very definite ideas about what a nice woman did, what a good girl did. But I think it was especially strong in my own native culture, which was probably 50 years behind what this culture was. Your essay here about the Miss America pageant is fascinating. When you watched the pageant with your parents as a girl, you saw it as a liberating force in many ways -- it helped you envision freedom and options. For many American women, the pageant has long meant the opposite. It's funny. I have this friend who is trying to get funding for a series that she wants to do. It's about different aspects of women's history, and one of the episodes is on the Miss America Pageant. Her theory is that the Miss America Pageant represents a real marker in our culture of women having brains and getting scholarships and talking about who they were besides being good looking women, though that always was included with it. In some ways it was a much more surprising force for change than we think. And imagine for us, coming from the Dominican Republic ... the fact that these women were going to college! And were out there talking and did talent shows and things like that! For us it represented, gosh, the advancement of these women. Your family, you write, wasn't particularly literary. Yet wasn't your grandfather a cultural attaché to the United Nations? Oh, yeah, but what was that? I don't want to undermine my poor papito, but I mean, at one point one of the people sent [by the Dominican Republic] to France as an ambassador had never worn shoes on a regular basis. Do you know what I mean? These titles don't mean the same thing. I think that my grandfather probably was given the post because he was identified as one of the people that did love poetry and music and so forth. And that is in the book. But we were not a reading family. We were not a literary family. It was more like we knew that there was such a thing as opera, as opposed to not knowing that there was such a thing, but we didn't know a thing about it. We knew that Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel was a great work of art, but we didn't know why. It wasn't a literary family, but it was within a culture where 80 percent of the people couldn't read at all. So to have once read Shakespeare was a big deal. To know what Shakespeare meant and to have aspirations. So you have to put it in a different plane. When did you begin to know that books and writing were important to you? It was really coming to this culture. And coming to another language and losing everything and looking for an anchor somewhere. I found it in books. And you know how it is: Read a wonderful book that stirs you and then you want to try to do that too. And having to learn a language, of course, really makes you pay attention to why people are saying things one way as opposed to another. Why they're using one word as opposed to another. And that's what we do when we're writers -- we have to relearn the language and do that kind of listening to the language that happens when you're also learning a new language in order to survive. Because you know that if you say something one way, you get the stern look or you get a bad reaction -- and then you wonder why this instead of that. You moved to America at age 10, and at the time your family was facing political persecution in the Dominican Republic. How real did that persecution feel to you? It's interesting, you know, because I didn't grow up feeling terrified. I think my parents really kept a lid on what was going on. But I sensed a kind of tension and nervousness and I knew that certain things couldn't be talked about. And I remember that whatever we wrote to anybody, the letters were carefully looked at and we had to rewrite them. I thought often it was because of spelling or something like that, but it was my parents' monitoring because there was very bad censorship and a police state surrounding whatever was written, whatever was said. And so I remember that kind of monitoring, but you know, it's funny, you just think of it as "That's the way it is." That's what parents do to kids or that's the world we live in. When you moved to the U.S., you write that you faced a different kind of persecution -- from boys on the schoolyard who mocked your accent. It was terribly hurtful, the way things are big and hurtful when you're young. This kind of rejection was hurtful and scary. At one point it involved kids throwing stones at us. It was a school that I was finally removed from because it was not a great place for us to be. I don't know how I responded. All I can say is that one of the reasons that I really felt this need and this desire to find a belongingness in books, in the world that I got through just opening a book, was because of that experience. You say in "Something to Declare" that you wanted to become a writer, at least in some small part, to say the things you didn't have the language to say back on the schoolyard. In part, it was the desire for revenge. To show them that I had a story, that I deserved to be alive and that I was just as good as them. But as I say in the essay, that soon turned into something else. I think that if you're going to love a craft and devote yourself to it, it's got to be more than out of petty vengeance. So who knows what fills the tank that gets us started? You've been writing for a long time, but your success came relatively late, didn't it? Yeah, I was 41 when my first novel was published. You led a nomadic life, moving between teaching jobs. Did your confidence ever waiver that you'd eventually make it? Oh come on, of course. All the time. And it still does. It's a craft where you always have to keep a beginner's mind to write the next book, or you're just going to be writing the old book again. So you never know. If you do have a beginner's mind and you want that freshness and you want to get at the cutting edge of what you know, then you don't know if you're going to do it, because you're not going to do the same thing again. And you don't know if your skill, your talent, your energy, your character extends that far. Was your first novel, "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents," a book that you had had with you for a long time? Oh, absolutely. And being so nomadic and having no stability, it was a book that I wrote the way many women write their first books. So many of them get up at 5 a.m., before the baby gets up. I didn't have that kind of family, but I had those kinds of jobs. It was really a book that I wrote when there was time to write. And though there was more time to write for me because I didn't have the complications and the demands, I also didn't have the kind of nurture that comes from having a family. So I was really writing it out there on blank air. Are you glad, in retrospect, that your life was as topsy-turvy as it was, with all that moving around and being divorced twice by the time you were 30? I don't know what to say. I think of the Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." The tumultuousness of not finding a steady job and the moving around and the not quite knowing how to put all the pieces together wasn't so bad, because I was part of a whole time in our culture where everybody was questioning those things. And I had a very complicated combination of impulses coming from being neither this nor that. So at the time I certainly didn't feel it was a great thing to be experiencing and I didn't think it was the greatest thing for my work because I wasn't getting it done. But you make out of your life whatever it needs to be. Your work, if it kicks you around and bangs you around a bit, then that's what you make into what you create. Other writers who've had very sane and simple lives make something of that. I think it's more about the desire to make something of it, than it is about the content of what you've had. And I'm talking now about fiction and poetry, not necessarily memoir writing or something like that. N E X T_ P A G E: I don't have children, but I have a coffee farm |
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