Puerto Rican Literature The Land of the Brave Lord

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.