A writer wrestling to describe what it’s like to straddle two cultures, Danticat is “living on the hyphen,” to use Cuban-American critic Gustavo Perez Firmat’s felicitous phrase. And she has lots of company. In the last decade, American literature has been invaded and enriched by a host of young immigrant writers who may or may not call any place home but who are itching to redefine and expand just who and what we are as Americans. At first these poets, novelists, memoirists and critics were largely ignored by big main-stream houses. But since 1989, when novelists Amy Tan and Oscar Hijuelos hit the best-seller lists with “The Joy Luck Club” and “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” (and Hijuelos won a Pulitzer Prize), the publishers have come calling.
In the last five years, these writers have performed a radical makeover of the whole genre of immigrant literature. The only thing this new breed has in common is the English language, but it’s using it loud and clear to talk back to the American dream. The new immigrant writers have conjured up a square-peg/round-hole world, both “mongrel” and nomadic, where ethnic diversity rules and where movement is not upward but lateral. When Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros declares, “I’m really a product of the planet,” she speaks for legions. In their rude yet often poetic vision, there i s no room for “steaming up the Hudson dreaming of a new life” stuff. In its place we find an America where, for better or worse, people rarely share the same cultural assumptions.
Listen to the voices of a new America. In her poetry and fiction, Dominican-American Julia Alvarez struggles to forge a bicultural identity, calling herself an “ethnic Dorothy” who never gets back to her tropical Kansas. Dagoberto Gilb, the son of an Anglo Kentuckian and a Chicana from East Los Angeles, writes mostly about working-class Hispanics in the Southwest and about raging bosses, cars that break down and marriages that fall apart. Chinese-American poet Li-Young Lee’s memoir “The Winged Seed” is a remarkable coming-of-age journey: he chronicles his relationship with his father, a theologian and historian, who, before immigrating to Pennsylvania, also happened to serve as Mao Zedong’s physician.
Jets, not steerage: Calcutta-born novelist Bharati Mukherjee, whose characters are as apt to pop up in Jamaica or the jungles of South America as they are in Michigan or Queens, N.Y., points out that “the new stories about America are coming from people like me, who’ve come in jets rather than in steerage.” And there is nothing quiescent about such newcomers. “You don’t routinely say of John Updike or Russell Banks that they are European-American writers. How dare you insist on categorizing me as an Asian-American?”
Collectively, Latino writers have worked the greatest changes on our image of the immigrant writer. “These immigrants are already of the Americas, already from the New World,” points out Cuban-American critic Enrique Fernandez. Paradoxically, this has not always worked in their favor. A lot of Latino writers argue that their immigrant-writer status is a perpetual condition. “You’re here for three or four generations–and I know people who’re been here for seven–and we’re still made to feel like immigrants,” says novelist Helena Maria Viramontes, who was born and raised in East Los Angeles.
Cuban-American Perez Firmat believes in assimilation. But he notes the price. In “Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way,” he wryly dubs “I Love Lucy” “the great Cuban-American love story,” pointing out that “by ’loving Lucy Ricky distances himself from his native language and culture; in this respect he becomes ’less’ Cuban. Perhaps biculturation always entails some degree of deculturation.” Still, he thinks the price is worth paying. “I will make no attempt to hide my bicultural bias. I love Ricky because he loves Lucy. In the Cuban-American tradition, one calls this a ‘Desi Chain’.”
But even for Perez Firmat, the questions of cultural identity never stop coming. In a forthcoming memoir, “Next Year in Cuba,” he writes of singing the American national anthem at a ball game “with feeling and conviction,” only to wonder, “But how is this possible? How can I feel at home in North Carolina, given my heritage? Is my feeling the result of a part I’m playing or a part of who I am? A pose or an identity?” These questions pervade the literature of the new immigrant writers; indeed, they are the inspiration for most of what gets written. As such, they also imply an answer: for these writers, no matter how drastically they may differ, home is where the art is.
