Global Authors: Voices From the Caribbean and Latin America

WWriters from the English-speaking Caribbean islands have been shaped by the British literary curriculum and colonial rule, but in recent years their focus has shifted from London to New York and Toronto. Themes include the beauty of the islands, the innate wisdom of their people, and aspects of immigration and exile -- the breakup of family, culture shock, changed gender roles, and assimilation.

Two forerunners merit mention. Paule Marshall (1929- ), born in Brooklyn, is not technically a global writer, but she vividly recalls her experiences as the child of Barbadian immigrants in Brooklyn in Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959). Dominican novelist Jean Rhys (1894-1979) penned Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a haunting and poetic refiguring of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Rhys lived most of her life in Europe, but her book was championed by American feminists for whom the "madwoman in the attic" had become an iconic figure of repressed female selfhood.

Rhys's work opened the way for the angrier voice of Jamaica Kincaid (1949- ), from Antigua, whose unsparing autobiographical works include the novels Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), and The Autobiography of My Mother (1996). Born in Haiti but educated in the United States, Edwidge Danticat (l969- ) came to attention with her stories Krik? Krak! (1995), entitled for a phrase used by storytellers from the Haitian oral tradition. Danticat evokes her nation's tragic past in her historical novel The Farming of the Bones (1998).

Many Latin American writers diverge from the views common among Chicano writers with roots in Mexico, who have tended to be romantic, nativist, and left wing in their politics. In contrast, Cuban-American writing tends to be cosmopolitan, comic, and politically conservative. Gustavo Pérez Firmat's memoir, Next Year in Cuba: A Chronicle of Coming of Age in America (1995), celebrates baseball as much as Havana. The title is ironic: "Next year in Cuba" is a phrase of Cuban exiles clinging to their vision of a triumphant return. The Pérez Family (1990), by Christine Bell (1951- ), warmly portrays confused Cuban families -- at least half of them named Pérez -- in exile in Miami. Recent works of novelist Oscar Hijuelos (1951- ) include The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien (1993), about Cuban Irish Americans, and Mr. Ives' Christmas (1995), the story of a man whose son has died.

Writers with Puerto Rican roots include Nicholasa Mohr (1938- ), whose Rituals of Survival: A Woman's Portfolio (1985) presents the lives of six Puerto Rican women, and Rosario Ferré (1938- ), author of The Youngest Doll (1991). Among the younger writers is Judith Ortiz Cofer (1952- ), author of Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990) and The Latin Deli (1993), which combines poetry with stories. Poet and essayist Aurora Levins Morales (1954- ) writes of Puerto Rico from a cosmopolitan Jewish viewpoint.

The best-known writer with roots in the Dominican Republic is Julia Alvarez (1950- ). In How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), upper-class Dominican women struggle to adapt to New York City. !Yo! (1997) returns to the García sisters, exploring identity through the stories of 16 characters. Junot Diaz (1948- ) offers a much harsher vision in the story collection Drown (1996), about young men in the slums of New Jersey and the Dominican Republic.

Major Latin American writers who first became prominent in the United States in the 1960s -- Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges, Colombia's Gabriel García Márquez, Chile's Pablo Neruda, and Brazil's Jorge Amado -- introduced U.S. authors to magical realism, surrealism, a hemispheric sensibility, and an appreciation of indigenous cultures. Since that first wave of popularity, women and writers of color have found audiences, among them Chilean-born novelist Isabel Allende (1942- ). The niece of Chilean president Salvador Allende, who was assassinated in 1973, Isabel Allende memorialized her country's bloody history in La casa de los espíritus (l982), translated as The House of the Spirits (1985). Later novels (written and published first in Spanish) include Eva Luna (1987) and Daughter of Fortune (1999), set in the California gold rush of 1849. Allende's evocative style and woman-centered vision have gained her a wide readership in the United States.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 980