THE CONTINENTAL BLOG

TU QUOQUE, BRAZIL?

2009-11-25T19:24:00.005-03:00

This week, President Lula has welcome and honored the Iranian President Ahmadinejad. No one expected it, and few dare to guess what is beneath the fanfare around this man, who has already visited Venezuela, engaged in military and nuclear power talks with Chavez, the man who wouldn’t mind a South American war with the United States, if that allows him to remain in power. Is Brazil stabbing the U.S., looking for the South American Imperial throne? Or, rather, are we in a different play, in which there are more things in heaven and earth, and also in the Americas, than are dreamt of in any political philosophy?

A few months ago, President Lula and Brazil could be quoted as the best example of diplomacy in South America. Neighbors of Venezuela and also friends of Chavez, Brazil and its president made a point to underline their unaltered friendship with the U.S. When the American military bases in Colombia were discussed, Brazil showed a vague concern but felt somehow relieved that Chavez found an enemy with enough power to maybe dissuade him on his war games. A slight switch was later observed in Honduras, when Brazil hosted within its embassy the former Honduran President Zelaya, as if intending to play a bigger role than the United States and its ambassadors and mediators. The move looked suspicious to some but still was labeled by the most relevant political pundits as a mere blunder of the oldest and most efficient chancellery in South America. The cheerful meeting with the happy Ahmadinejad has put now Lula under a different light: his large, sincere smile could hide a bluff or a sense of genuine victory. Brazil won the Olympic Games over the U.S.; why wouldn’t it win the lead of foreign policy in the Americas? Over Chavez, in the first place, and over the U.S. were it possible. Evo Morales in Bolivia joined, receiving in joy the Iranian president. If this is a version of mice playing while the cat is away, we wonder where the cat is, and when will he be back. As of now, President Obama has expressed to Brazil some concern, as if he didn’t believe all this is actually happening, or as if he knew more –he should- and had everything under control. Mysteries under the rug begin to pile up.

What is Ahmadinejad doing in the Americas? Who brought him and who the Middle East wars to these shores? None other than Iran itself. It carved its way into the Americas with patience, since 1992 and 1994, when they bombed the Israeli Embassy and later the Jewish organization AMIA in Buenos Aires, at a time when the United States and Argentina were the closest friends in the world, and Argentina the best performing capitalist country in South America. Struggling for positions in the backyard to better assail the house. Then, we had 9/11, still Muslim terror under a different disguise. All seems then to be about an attack on the Empire of freedom and wealth and its allies in the Americas, which are more than one. In that case, a strong emperor will do better than a weak one, left to the saddest of farewells, a stab from a loved one.

VENEZUELA’ S WALL

2009-11-10T16:08:00.007-03:00

At this point, we wonder if the United States decision of letting down the Free Trade Agreement for the Americas as a top foreign policy has been wise. Emboldened, Hugo Chávez created his own continental fantasy, the ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, and, angry with the U.S. military bases in Colombia, persists with his speeches on an imminent war to defeat the U.S. In his fight against what he continues to see as an imperialistic power, he has even found friends in the United States, who, as enemies of any type of military power the U.S. may exert, are ready to support his views. Chavez, his friends and even some officials in the United States administration firmly believe that the U.S. is to be blamed for all what is wrong in the Americas and the world, and are not ready to accept the good that the U.S. has done to the world, yet the good that it still can do. The idea of war blinds one side and the other, and war is the core of speeches that should rather address a new rationale on progress, economy and state administration. An imaginary wall is parting right now countries and people in the Americas, and creating a divide between those who believe in freedom, free markets and genuine democracy, and those who cannot believe in these values as the only possible road to progress.

The liberal point of view is not new to Americans and Chávez’s left-populist point of view has been largely sustained for half a century by Fidel Castro and others. We were all used to deal with this subtle cultural wall that parted the political continent in two since communism ceased to be a threat, twenty years ago. It seems that now we need to get trained to accept that the cultural wall can become, at any moment, a military wall that parts the continent in more than different types of economies or political administrations. Venezuela’s leader is working very hard to build that ideological wall with weapons that could set the Americas on actual fire if things get out of control, as the Honduran case has shown in a modest scale. To make sure, his ideas are understood, Chávez didn't hesitate to partner Iran’s President Ahmadinejad as the necessary nuclear scarecrow.

While Chávez speaks, the U.S. should think and act, in ways Chávez couldn’t contest and with tactics he couldn’t match. The ALBA actually means nothing but a stratagem for Chavez to gain power. People who have listened to him or even used his oil money, such as the Kirchners in Argentina or Evo Morales in Bolivia, are paying very expensive political bills, since they couldn’t benefit their people with any substantial progress, less to create more wealth. The ALCA (the Spanish for FTAA) was instead a solid proposal of partnership, not with the poor or the rich for a day, like Venezuela, but with the wealthiest country in the world, owner of the best technique to create wealth. Venezuela’s wall, like the communist wall in Berlin, is the wall of unacknowledged impotence to create wealth in freedom and to rule a country in an open and participative democracy. However, the United States refusal to use that fantastic weapon of the FTAA to win hearts and minds in the Americas represents another type of blindness, that which prefers not to get involved in what is seen sometimes as a sticky friendship, if friendship and trust in the idea of a common future don’t prevail.

Venezuela’s wall was born from the United States mind, which has so often denied the idea of unity in the Americas, fearing the Hispanic majority. It will fall not when armies are deployed, but when the idea of the wall itself becomes nonsense. It will fall when the people of the Americas don’t see themselves abandoned but included in a project that involves all the countries, including Cuba and Venezuela, whose people wouldn’t accept any kind of aggressiveness, confronted with a better and possible dream of progress and prosperity. Berliners got the message, but there was a message for in the European community and the tenacity of the United States to sustain a continuous technological progress. Latin Americans, even if deaf to Chávez ‘s rants and raves, are not hearing any one else speaking to them.

THE CENTURY OF THE AMERICAS

2009-10-07T19:45:00.008-03:00

The 20th century was the century of the United States of America as the emerging and, by the end of it, sole superpower on Earth. At the beginning of the 21st century, the idea that the new century would belong again to the uncontested power just because of its merits, lasted only a couple of years. Since 9/11 and all its consequences, which include two not yet won wars, the United States had to fight again not only for its supremacy, which would only be of American people’s concern, but to keep its role model for wealth and progress; also for what the United States means as an example and inspiration to the rest of the world.

This fight is not a minor subject for Latin America, which has always been strained between capitalism and socialism and hasn’t made completely up its mind yet about which of them is more convenient to grow and to spread social justice. Sharing the same continent, most of Latin Americans cannot yet see the United States' failure as affecting their own interests and often rather rejoice on it, wrongly thinking that the difficulties of the main actor in the continent will bring them new opportunities or represent the announced death of capitalism. There is not a clear consciousness, neither in the United States nor in Latin America, that the century of America can only be continued by the century of the Americas. The pending commercial, political and military union is the only one that can give to both the United States and Latin America the necessary volume and strength to grow.

What happens in the States, doesn’t stay in the States. It spreads all over the world, but with a greater weight, on neighbors used to a strong and well defined leadership. When the United States speaks, there is an effect. When it remains silent, its attitude is equally noticed. Liking words more than actions, Latin Americans still weight their fate according to what is proposed as a plan, a blue print to meet success, and nothing seems more tempting to many of them than leaders who dare to defy the United States. The macho style enjoys this type of verbal war explaining the short road to heaven and Chavez represents the perfect example of a “courageous” leader to follow, as Fidel Castro did in the past. When the United States chooses to avoid confrontation –like these days à propos of Chavez’s nuclear deals with Iran – or confuses which is the right thing to do –and in Honduras supports Zelaya and not the Supreme Court -- Latin Americans don’t understand. Those who are against the United States, no matter what the United States does, continue to mistrust, and those who want closer ties and shared plans, feel abandoned. Enemies or friends, they want to be confirmed in their roles. When Chavez in his anti-imperialistic brutality is so clear, they would like to see the same transparency in the United States’ strategy and speech. The lack of a visible appointed official in the American government who can explain the American point of view only worsens the current situation, characterized by a certain hope on President Obama, which is contradicted by his actions.

In the United States as well as in Argentina, to mention only both extremes of the Americas, people live gloomy days, full of uncertainties at a time in which the world is changing faster than it can be thought. There are fears that globalization will take this time its toll on the United States. Considering that there is no possible globalization without a strong leadership of the stellar country, the role model for that world process, all the stakes should be on reinforcing its power and not in minimizing it. Latin America has to play its role in this process, understanding that a strong United States will make a stronger and safer continent and will increase the chances of the whole continent, if united. The United States needs to play its complementary role in the continent, making a clear commercial, political, and military proposal, attentive to the fact that Latin Americans like to be considered and that, for them, there is no stronger cultural mark of interest than being addressed in words that express thoughts of appreciation and plans. Latin Americans understand political silence as a lack of interest and as spurning.

It could be that the Obama administration gets too busy with Europe and the Middle East and that Latin America represents, indeed, an uninteresting region to waste time in it, and that it is actually spurned because the interest lies somewhere else. Then, still, and since the 20th century America cannot be continued but by a larger one, other Americans in the United States should reconsider the two centuries old Pan-Americanism as an option, and prepare the ground for a near future. The Republican Party and think tanks devoted to the permanent reshaping of the nation, could substitute the administration in the dialogue and project for the Americas. Latin America, which only needs to grow, a positive reflection in the mirror of the powerful and a chance to play its part, will respond if positively addressed.

In the meanwhile, instead of sensible words pointing out to a common future, we will continue to hear the speech of hatred and disunion by the Chavez, Kirchners, and Zelayas of Latin America. How Latin Americans who really are friends of the United States can talk in its favor, expecting to be given credit, when the one who is supposed to be the example to follow and the chosen friend, turns its back on them and remains silent?

CONTINENTAL FELLOWS

2009-09-18T16:13:00.001-03:00

In 2006, Oliver Stone directed a moving homage to the 9/11 New York heroes in the film World Trade Center. A few days ago, he was sitting at the Venetia Movie Festival by President Chavez of Venezuela, who has just signed agreements with Russia, Syria and Iran, purchasing weapons and tanks to support him in his mythical war against the United States “imperialism.” Indeed, the world has changed; and so have the Americas, but changes aren’t over yet. Those who cannot think fast and accurately on continental issues risk staying behind and with the wrong friends.

Stone presented his film South of the Border, where he interviews South American presidents. In the cast, Stone credited all those who share Chavez’s views on the continent and who are against or reluctant to an association with the United States. These presidents, as well as part of the American and Latin American intelligentsia seem to be behind facts, at a time when President Obama is adding a military diplomacy to the global trade agreements, and while he strives to keep Colombia military strong against Chavez, he also cancels the plan for an antiballistic missile system in Eastern Europe to assure the closer cooperation of Russia against Iran. The United States is now going globally global: besides financial and trade issues, military issues are exposed and require world leaders’ commitment to solve them. Some of the Latin American leaders seem aware of this fact. Others, like Argentina, are kidnapping their people’s will, without truly understanding or explaining what the global stakes are at this moment.

The 9/11 attacks modified the previous optimistic view that changes in the world, after the fall of the Soviet Union, could actually happen just through trade and soft diplomacy. We woke up from those Fukuyama dreams of the end of history and blind faith in the new world order, by the new axis of evil, terrorists of several Muslim organizations. Soon, two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq postponed the former progress in trade, and took a military slant that the world soon credited to President Bush and the United States conservative and imperialistic strategy. No one was ready to commit to a global change in rules; less to enforce it with military power, but the United States and a few more countries which shared the effort and losses.

In Latin America, those were the days also in which the dream of the Free Trade Area ended and was seen as a failure from the United States by its traditional enemies in Latin America, who soon took advantage of the situation, building their own association of Latin American countries against the United States. Pursuant to this situation, all the reforms toward modernity and global trade gained in countries like Argentina, were discredited in the public opinion and politicians and intellectual who supported a close friendship with the United States and the enforcement of global rules, were displaced from power and media.

Stone’s views on Latin America are very close to those exhibited by the anti American intelligentsia in these countries. In the same way they don’t serve well the United States’ interest, even from a Liberal point of view, they don’t serve either the best interest of Latin American countries. Instead, they seem to feel very comfortable with each other: Stone and Chavez can be seen in the pictures smiling to the cameras, wearing the same red tie of the Venezuela revolution, as the continental fellows they look glad to be. The problem is that the continental brotherhood seems limited to those sharing the ultra liberal and usually festive and irresponsible points of view of the continental left. Whereas we see many intellectuals and media, promoting delinquent terrorist behavior by the name of outdated economy and military theories and also spreading as much hatred as possible against the United States’ power, we don’t see equivalent voices in the Americas and in the United States promoting common interests in finances, trade and the military.

From the past, we keep habits that have not been conveniently revised at this time in which a strong defense partnership is required to face common threats, not only in the finances and the prospects of growth, but specifically in the military. Some countries like Venezuela, Brazil and Chile are updating their weapons and a country, Venezuela, powerful in oil dollars and by the way of weapons, is introducing Russia and Iran into the continent, as if we could soon be back to the old Cuban days of the Soviet missile deployment against the United States. Are the people in the Americas fully aware about these military movements that could involve them in a war?

The left in the United States always had a fling for Latin America, its exotism and esthetically attractive poverty, its sexy leaders like Fidel Castro and now Hugo Chavez, but the right in the United States never had too much of an interest in countries perceived as from a different culture, race, and historic background, that could even be a threat if allowed to grow. The left in Latin American countries hated its own right, as should be, but this right was never embraced as an equal partner by the United States. Since conservative governments had been very rarely incarnated in democratic elected officials and, more often than not, in military dictators, the usual relationship had been bribery and some degree of corruption to keep at least Latin American countries at bay. The right in Latin American countries has often been in the past very much pro-U.S but not always pro its own people at the same time. All these traits have left marks, wounds, and above all, patterns that need to be removed to build a renewed relationship, more in tune with current continental challenges.

War times require reliable friends and trust. A renewed continental fellowship based on the recognition of common interests in financial, commercial and safety strategies. The public opinion in the United States as well as in Latin American countries needs to learn how to see the world as a whole and the continent as a part of that whole. The world is on the mend, the continent should be, too.

COLONIAL WARS: A SEQUEL

2009-08-28T23:12:00.002-03:00

Two months ago, former President Kirchner and his wife, current president, were beaten at an election seen as a plebiscite on their policies. Seventy percent of Argentine voted against them, supporting other parties, including a dissident fraction of Kirchner’s Peronist party. Today, as if such an astonishing defeat had been erased from public memory, both Kirchner are in full possession of power. No one will stop them in Congress, since elections were advanced several months from the original date of October, and the new elected representatives have to wait until December to take their seats. This intermezzo works like a magic key and extends to all spheres of government: every Kirchner’s policies can still be voted or applied, even if a huge majority of Argentines is against them. Some of these policies have an incidence on the local economy poor performance but some others have a great relevance beyond Argentine borders, such as the policy toward military alliances in the Americas. What Argentina does or does not in regards of the United States bases in Colombia, matters.

Today, in Bariloche, during the new summit of Unasur, the Union of South American Nations, wife Kirchner, in her hostess role, always enjoying the light of international cameras, and engrossed with the recent victories at Congress, explained her point of view on the Americas. For her, the United States is an imperialistic military extra-continental power which aspires to control Colombia as a colony, in the same way Great Britain exerted its extra-continental power over the Falklands-Malvinas Islands and fought a war to keep the colonial status. President Chavez of Venezuela, instead would be the new champion of freedom and independence, and the Kirchners, his proud friends in the liberation task. The ideological trick always works well for many Argentines still hurt by the lost war in the islands, but it seems a rather poor comment for a president who, as a head of state, should know better who is who in this world. Pundits and onlookers usually laugh at her, because of her absurd school teacher style, her obvious ignorance of Argentina best interests in the continent, and, above all, because of her submission, shared by her husband, to Venezuelan President Chavez, a sub product of Fidel Castro’s speech and bad reads on Perón, a leader also misunderstood by the Kirchners, who haven’t got yet that the fifty years old peronist theory of Continentalism, never denied geography. The Argentina President’s reference to the United States as an extra continental force makes us wonder if she has ever seen a map, or if she has been the innocent victim of some not innocent foreign intelligence briefs that convinced her that South America belongs politically to a different continent from North America.

Traditionally, there have been three different projects on the union of the Americas. The first one, which goes back in history to President Monroe with scales in Presidents Sarmiento, Perón, Kennedy, and both Bush, looks for a Pan-American union in which all the countries from Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego would be equal partners. It was always based on the common identity of American countries which won their independence from European countries, and which built their political identities with alike Constitutions, based on freedom and democracy. The second project, which surfaced mostly during the Twentieth Century as a reaction, often a communist reaction manipulated from the former Soviet Union, exhibits Latin Americans closely united by language and religion against Anglo-Americans; it aims to a cultural war that would defeat the United States from within, with Latinos taking power over Anglos; this project expresses a fantasy dear to Hispanics still in pain from the wars between Great Britain and Spain, and also represents the greatest nightmare of Anglo’s demographists. The third project is a split disguised as a union and was originated in the true master imperialistic minds of some British nineteen century officers, which imagined South America as a different continent from North and Central America, the brightest idea ever thought to control the increasing hemispherical power of the United States. When an Argentine president refuses to be part of a Pan-American project that includes the United States, sabotages Colombia’s President Uribe’s effort to include the United States and obeys Chavez’s wishes of a powerful South America in war with the United States, she is rather functional to old colonial British desires for the region. She is also, very, very far from Argentina’s best interest: the support and friendship of the United States to counterbalance the otherwise too powerful Southern giant of Brazil. Sometimes, United States presidents have fallen into the same trap, rushed by more urgent wars in other places in the planet, or simply misled by some not too independent local agents about politics in a region that, only in the past decades, has gained the full geopolitical attention it deserves from the first country in the world and the continent.

In Argentina, there is a saying that the best never reach power precisely because they are good and decent, and politics in the region request lies and deceit. The Kirchners are masters of this art of lies, leading Argentines into the uncertain path of war, the clumsy apology of enemies taken as friends, and the aggressive speeches against who should be instead the main ally. There is not yet a strong leader who personifies the opposite position and who can be clearly perceived on the side of truth and best Argentine interests. In the coming weeks, continental affairs may get sour, because of the wrong doing of leaders as Chavez and his partners. It would be time, in Argentina as well as in the United States, to give again some public space to the traditional and democratic project of a Pan-American union , such as the now forgotten Free Trade Area for the Americas. In this union of the Americas, military alliances would be openly considered and discussed along with the usual trade issues.

In the 21st century, the politically uncultured chatter about colonial wars and paranoid sequels looks definitely misplaced and describes well the lack of modernity of many of Latin American leaders, who still see the world with a nineteen century mental frame. Continental safety matters to all the people of the Americas, and contradicting Clemenceau, we could say this time: "War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to politicians." Less to those who actually haven’t learned history’s lessons, or updated those they heard a long time ago.

A CONTINENTAL ROMANCE

2009-07-01T17:33:00.007-03:00

I have written so many continental love stories inspired on my own that I cannot believe one which looks like issued straight from my pen is actually happening! I had been close, though, with one story that showed the love of an Argentine journalist for an American married Senator. My character was married to a British lady and the whole story, shaped as a long email (yes!) the journalist wrote to the Senator who wouldn’t pick her phone calls, was about the sad feelings my Argentine woman had when not succeeding to get him divorced. Every character worked as a living metaphor. The story was, of course, a pretence to develop a sort of essay on how Americans often prefer Europeans as partners instead of choosing what by many ways would be the natural and closest partners: Latin Americans. My story was a bit depressing and it didn’t end exactly well, with Latin America neglected in favor of the legitimate British wife, but, hey!, now the romance between the Governor of South Carolina and a beautiful Argentine woman who happened to be also a news anchor, shows that reality can be much better than my poor writer’s imagination.

Since I heard about this brand-new continental actual romance, I couldn’t help following the story in all the details the Governor, wife and lover have generously delivered to the press. I cannot stop dreaming now about what the development of this story will become and if, contradicting the story I had invented, this new continental couple will not finally show to the world that Continentalism is possible. The fact that the Governor is a Republican adds its political spice to it, for none other than both Bush pushed for the finally failed Free Trade Area of the Americas, that first step toward continental union. Why then the Republicans are asking the Governor to resign when he could become the most important and attractive asset for a new policy in the Americas?

I cannot stop raving. Why would the political career of this loving man being ruined just because he happened to fall in love? Doesn’t it also add a previously unsuspected quality to Republicans letting us know that they can put their hearts and bodies aligned with the universe acknowledging that God has more ways to express his will than we can imagine? Why wouldn’t he divorce in full honesty, faithful to his true feelings and marrying later his soul mate? If we were within a Latin soap opera, this is the way the story would end, because Latinos are prone to follow love where it’s met and also to forgive those who had to take their time discovering what true love is.

On the opposite side of the cultural continent, many American voices are calling to scandal, not noticing that the complete naiveté of confessions is taking what could have been a deplorable affair to the highest level of romance. We are also being slightly and slowly led into the most exquisite international political arena, with the hidden promise of a higher creativity in the U.S. and Latin American relationship. What if this couple became an instrument of history to unite those parted because they never suspected love could exist between them? Latin America the bride, the United States the groom, we can almost see them heading toward a Hollywood ending.

Only a small elegant adjustment needs to take place: the groom has first to become a free man, not to show himself as irresponsible or without those good manners both Americans and Latinos appreciate. Besides this tiny detail, we are all safe dreaming great days to come by the mysterious ways of love, in the magic land of the Americas, still waiting for common, everyday heroes ready to accept their fate and unknown mission in this world.

LATIN AMERICA'S UNREQUITED LOVE

2008-06-25T01:42:00.000-03:00

I can remember American presidents from the second half of the 20th century only if I link them to Argentine facts. Like many Latin Americans, I tend to like them or not depending on how friendly they were to us. Like everywhere in the world, “us” doesn’t always mean a heterogeneous group of national fellows but rather a group of like minded politicized people. We seldom judge then the United States presidents with regular standards and our options are often incomprehensible to American pundits and politicians. Along with our political ideas, we have our emotional issues and also our sometimes absurd history. Our feelings are usually ignored by common American citizens since Latin America is not something that weighs in their hearts as the United States weighs in ours. Our relationship is uneven.

In the middle of a new American presidential race, we are not sure about who will finally win and less about what the new president will mean to us. At this point, we couldn’t say a Democrat will be better than a Republican or the reverse. In Argentina, we have seen all colors and shades. Carter was wonderful to some of us, because he stood for human rights while the military were still in power, and awful to others, because he was seen as someone validating the defeated guerrilla. For a long time, Reagan was God because he acted like a true man of the people –we saw him as a Peronist- and then Satan because he helped Thatcher during the Malvinas-Falkland war. Bush was seen as an elegant conservative who finally accepted that Peronism could be democratic and even promote capitalism and freedom. While some hated him for being the rich Americans and corporations’ representative, others seized the day and helped to restore the damaged friendship with the U.S., creating new links and also making of Argentina an extra-Nato ally. Clinton was a friend to almost everyone along those same lines, confirming that after Reagan it became harder to stick to the usual distinction that Peronists fit with Democrats while anti-Peronist match better Republicans: in the new century affinity seemed more centered on the recognition or denial of global modernity.
Bush the Second was hailed with great expectations, for he was seen as the one who would unite the Americas in a Continental Union, such as the European Union, going beyond the Free Trade Area for the Americas, that first project installed by his father and followed by Clinton,. After 9/11, President Bush had other worries than Latin America. During the financial crisis of December 2001, he didn’t help Argentina in the right direction, in spite of being the Latin American country most steadily engaged into modern capitalism. It took him too long to react to the new Latin American crisis and to promote again with the required energy a continental trade union: in the meantime Argentina as well as many other disappointed Latin American countries had switched to leftist governments. The Latin American left doesn’t automatically means, as some could think, open minded people in charge, caring for the poor. It is usually represented by anti-progressive populist governors, not prone to democracy or to any kind of capitalism that could create the so needed wealth, and who always perceive government and state as a source for their centralized power. For them, federalism is only a word in the Constitution and they haven’t yet discovered its meaning, less its practice.

Obama or McCain? I like Obama because he still has to face the race issue -an endless struggle against prejudice that someone has to win one day- and also because he sincerely cares for those who have less. I like Mc Cain because he is a military like Perón, with a clear sense of national priorities and a great courage to address them. As a modernist, I like Obama because he seems aware that help for the poor and minorities has nowadays to come from something different than centralized welfare and I like McCain because of the same. As a Latin American, I like Obama because Latin American people of equally mixed races will change some of their feelings towards the United States only by looking themselves in him, but I prefer McCain because he understands better the need and benefits of a trade union in the Americas.

Times have changed and minds seem to be finally catching up. Some old passions, like the Latin American anti-Americanism revivified during the Bush era, will maybe fade after November if the new president renews our so challenged friendship. He is welcome to come down South to learn and teach us, once again, how freedom can be the true basis of a society; also, how prosperity can be reached. If he does well, he will have the right to claim that after him there were not so many Latinos knocking at the border trying to get into the U.S. or getting in illegally. He would have applied the basic rule for a U.S. and Latin America successful relationship: to export the American dream. When this dream becomes available across the Continent, every one will stay happily at home.

Democrat or Republican, we will judge the new president according to how well he realizes that when we hate Americans we are just telling them that we love them. Admiration and envy have been intertwined in our souls for two centuries, but as equally Americans in the same continental land, as children of the same independency wars and as partners of the same Constitution, we know at the bottom of our hearts that we are doomed to be together.

Will the American people, after elections and with their new president, reconsider their feelings and reciprocate ours? Not only tango needs two. Foreign policy does as well.

RED LEAVES, YELLOW PAPER

2008-03-21T12:33:00.001-03:00

My imaginary life in New England, more precisely in Concord, Massachusetts, can only be explained by the fact that I grew up as one more of the girls in the March family. Even if as Latin American I lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina, within a real family of my own, Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott, indulged me with a different kind of existence.

Novels create worlds in which we are allowed to live as long as our reading lasts. Some of those worlds linger in our psyches delighting us for a while to fade later. Others, instead, remain embedded in our memory and, as a lived experience they borrow its emotional quality. Literature and language are not innocent at the time of expressing a precise community and its values. Even in translation, Little Women didn’t fail its purpose of educating young girls in the values of freedom and self reliance. In the middle of twentieth century, Latin American families had no strategies to deal with wild rebellious girls wanting to be themselves. Louisa May Alcott did more for women in the world and on behalf of the American dream than any politician would do in the century to come.

Without a name, because the word Concord was not mentioned and less its historical role in the United States independence, this New England Victorian town became my inner promised land. I had no immigration fancies and no endearing links as later in life; I barely knew at that time about the existence of the United States as a different country than mine. I only craved for the love, solidarity and freedom which blossomed in that household ruled by an open minded mother. In the same emotional trip toward freedom, I took Jo as a role model, without knowing that writing was my call. She inspired me because she was boyish and temperamental. She loved books as I did. I was a reader; she was a writer, someone enabled to dream and to give dreams an entity through words. Jo was not my exclusive mirror of a future to come: many other Latin American women writers have reported the same enlightening experience.

Not only mothers and their education in freedom which nurtured literary minds were different in the magic town of Concord. Trees had red leaves during the fall and houses had garrets where Jo would hide to write. Yellow paper would become later in my mind another colored distinct mark of New England. Wannabe women writers used yellow legal pads to scribble her stories or letters, as in Daddy Long Legs, by Jean Webster, a novel in which the potential of women was also exalted in the scenery of the typical up state New York college.

If red leaves and yellow paper were a luscious novelty and garrets the place where dreams were dreamt in houses with a nook for each need, Concord had more to offer. I was not the only one to have benefited of the experience of a Concord family in the immediate pre and post Civil War era. The Argentine President Sarmiento, elected in 1868 while he was the Argentine ambassador to the United States, had close ties to Concord. Horace Mann and later his widow, Mary Mann, introduced Sarmiento in the knowledge of the American educational system and helped him to adapt it to Argentina. Sarmiento hired a set of brave and free American women school teachers and started in Argentina a public education program which was a national pride for almost a century and a model for other Latin American countries. Sarmiento had also met Emerson in Concord, and if none of the meeting was recorded, at least one of Emerson’s reflections remained as a mysterious legacy: “There is a great education in the snow.” Often quoted, the famous sentence still distils the quaint image of New England winters.

There is snow in the first Christmas at the beginning of Little Women; snow while Laurie, the boy next door, plays with a sled; and more snow freezing romantic love as a pledge until the end of childhood. New England’s nature became part of my memories. I listed the snow as well as the woods and flowers, narrow rivers and ponds I would later find in Thoreau and Emerson, with the unmistakable feeling that I had been there before.

Little Women, as the top of the iceberg of the rich Concord based literature, introduced the past century Latin American children into a larger American project. Little Women as the other Alcott’s stories, An Old Fashioned Girl, Little Men, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Under the Lilacs, Jack and Jill, and Jo’s Boys represented not only a program on how to build strong family ties but on how to organize an equally strong community around common ideals of freedom. Alcott’s education was also on what I didn’t know at the time was a constitutional right, the pursuit of happiness. Women were also invited to the feast and that permission made all the difference for girls like me. My childhood days were also Evita’s days, and I can assure many of her dreams were also based in these embedded images of American happiness as seen in the movies and cartoons. The model of Californian chalets she picked up to build her neighborhoods and towns for the poor comes out straight from a later version of the American Dream started in Concord. Little Women grew up with the new generations of women and, the lesson on freedom being learnt, nobody reads Alcott any more.

Concord’s light seems to have dimmed while a heavy anti-American feeling spreads these days everywhere in the world, including my country. Below the world’s anger for a supposed American imperialism invading Iraq lies the powerful envy for a country which has succeed to be the richest in the world. The one which on top of that has not sacrificed happiness to wealth but, on the contrary, created wealth to allow that happiness. Hippies rediscovered Thoreau in the 60’s, when the goal was to be free from repression and to reach a fulfilled life according to nature. Isn’t it time for the skeptic world in search for a better life to revisit good old literary Concord? The body has been taken care. Does now humankind dream of spiritual happiness? Has the new hour of Emerson come yet?

Alcott, long before writing Little Women, in love with her master, played under his window, dreaming to be the Bettina of the new American Goethe. But that’s another story of the inexhaustible Concord’s treasure.

THE NAFTA ISSUE: WHY MC CAIN RINGS THE RIGHT AMERICAN BELL

2008-03-12T12:18:00.003-02:00

John Mc Cain asked his Democratic rivals to stop the “NAFTA-bashing,” and criticized them for their intentions to renegotiate a treaty they wrongly blame for the loss of jobs. Mc Cain has consistently remarked during his campaign that the trade treaty has been hugely beneficial for the three countries involved. He also explained the loss of jobs as the price to be paid for the transition from a manufacture society to one based on intellectual work. An enemy of protectionism and a critic of traditional American isolationism, Mc Cain is well placed to reshape the United States image in Latin America as well as in the rest of the world, creating a business atmosphere at a time of great worries about the global economy.

No matter how charming Senator Obama’s looks are for Latin Americans always ready to adore someone who defies the WASP standard or how attractive is the idea of a woman ruling the first country in the world, people beyond the border still care more about economy and how American elections will influence their lives. McCain’s news on free trade look good: United States’ protectionism is always feared by Latin America, which as a region still balances between the acceptance and the rejection of the FTAA (Free Trade Area for the Americas), that bigger NAFTA which will eventually involve all the countries in the Americas. McCain’s campaign hasn’t linked yet the Americas free trade to the immigration problem, but he might be thinking about it. The idea of bringing the United States to Latin Americans seems a better choice than hosting millions of illegal aspirants to the US citizenship. Free trade has been often rejected by some of the American unions and blue collar workers because it’s seen as an unfair export of manufactures, without considering that in the specific case of Latin America, business lie more in exporting services and know how than factories. The lack of appropriate infrastructure in public services, from water to government organization, opens a monumental chance for American investment and businesses. With a continental free trade agreement, American companies, while securing United States influence in the region, could make great profits there where European companies have advantaged them till now. It is not so much as in the past about helping Latin America, as Democrats propose, but about creating a frame that would tie countries in productivity and security issues.

During the past week, a border incident between Colombia and Ecuador triggered a threat of war, of which Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan president, took quickly advantage, leading one of his usual calls for a continental union against the United States. John Mc Cain’s response, while not addressing directly the war, called in the Congress to approve a pending free trade with Colombia. If security matters, it’s not all about Al Qaeda, Afghanistan or Iraq: Latin America, if abandoned, can represent a source of conflicts and a potential major trouble. Democratic candidates opposing trade agreements resign at the same time commerce as the best defense weapon of democracies in an unstable world. Mc Cain has pointed out this contradiction in candidates who are opposed ideologically to war but who refuse to create the conditions to prevent it.

To change NAFTA-bashing into NAFTA-pride will probably become, in the weeks to come, a main Republican campaign’s argument for economy growth and security. At the same time, the Republican candidate’s good relationship with Latin America, which gets him the favor of many Latino voters, could start now to represent also a great advantage to business makers. Reluctant and ironic Republicans could take then a second look on Juan McCain, who not only has Latino friends but is far ahead from trade blind Democrats in what concerns the greatness and security of America.

CONTINENTAL EYES

2008-02-15T12:25:00.000-02:00

We all see with the eyes of a nation: for most of us, the nation where we were born and which speaks the language we speak and that we learned from our parents. What happens if we are introduced into the challenge of a new multinational superstructure? Will our eyes change? How much are we expected to change? These questions, which have been often debated in the United States as a country with a large and diverse immigration, become again pertinent these days. The project of a continental union revivified by the attempts of the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, requires from the United States a strong political and cultural response. Chavez promotes a dangerous Latin American alliance against the United States and to successfully counteract this project of aggression with a project of union, the United States needs to see Latin America not only with its American eyes but with its continental eyes.

Both North Americans and South Americans are challenged to travel the space which goes from their nations, language, and culture to the common continental space with, at least, two main languages and cultures at stake. This political journey was not invented by Chavez. Three very different American presidents, George H. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, with different degrees of enthusiasm, stated in the recent past that Latin America and the United States were finally compatible and potential partners. They launched the ambitious Free Trade Area for the Americas, a program which has been quietly making its way defying the unfriendly environment of leftist Latin American governments and the US priorities after 9/11.

Beyond the traditional Latin American complaint about North American capitalism and its attributed imperialistic intentions, the lack of a clear program for economic growth appears to be the main problem which divides the United States from Latin America. What we, Americans and Latin Americans, face now is the challenge to finding a common ground that allows us to have hopes in the future and dream with what the Europeans already have: a continental union. Our American Union, which now would follow the model of the European Union, has been however the early dream of North American patriots as James Monroe and of South American patriots as the Argentine José de San Martín and the Venezuelan Simón Bolivar. Imagined during the days in which American countries were still reaching their independence and building their identities, the American union was never concreted. The fact that most of the colonies were gaining their independence from the losing and decadent Spanish Empire and that the United States was emerging as the brightest child of the dominant British Empire created a lasting cultural web of resentment and hatred. The common American-ness was crushed against the differences in language, culture and religion opposing Anglos and Hispanics. This opposition configures a category which continues to nurture speeches on both sides. Samuel Huntington is as scared of what Hispanics may do to the United States if let as Hugo Chavez and his followers from the supposed imperialistic United States threat.

American presidential candidates in their current campaign to reach the White House seldom talk about Latin America. When they do, it’s always about immigration issues: how to better protect the borders to prevent illegal Latin American immigration and how to deal with legal and illegal Latinos in the United States. They are not still thinking, and less talking, about what could actually stop immigration, which is bringing the U.S. organization and services to Latin America. The Free Trade Area has been widely resisted as the NAFTA was because it is wrongly depicted as an export of jobs, when it should be considered as an export of know how and services. A continental commercial union wouldn’t promote a loss of jobs in the United States because an ambitious and realistic American Union is not about exporting factories to Latin American countries but about to helping them in their development, selling knowledge. The United States can export and sell its know how, its engineers’ and technicians work and its financial and organizational services to communities which lack of everything, from water to highways, from credit banks to efficient federal organizations. Latin American countries in return can help to create a bigger common market for both United States and American products and thus enlarge commerce with the rest of the world. The Americas, duly organized, have the potential to become the biggest common market in the world.

This project of union can be seen as Chavez fears, as a form of imperialism, or as what it really is, the most progressive immediate idea to boost both the United States and Latin American economies. Those who already have in place their continental eyes can see in this possible union the continental essay of global rules for growth and wealth.

CONTINENTAL HUMOR: THE SIZE OF THE AMERICAN PENIS

2008-02-04T14:01:00.000-02:00

“Do you want enlarge your penis up to 4 inches?” No matter I am a woman who has longtime ago overcome that envy which made Freud rant about gender and accepted that I have no penis at all, small or long, but an equally serving vagina, I still receive dozens, if not hundreds of spam a week with the call of the mermaid. No, sir, I don’t want to enlarge a penis I don’t have and you would better trim your spam listings before sending them out. Such an amount of messages around the lines of “‎Imagine being able to put on inches permanently, safely, and quickly,” “Tired of a small cock?”, “It's normal to be ashamed if you have a small schlong, but change that around today” must have a better clientele than non envious women. The language is clearly and unmistakably American and whether I am still wondering if this type of spam is written by angry females or by rogues of any sex who know the nail they have to hit to sell pills, devices, or herbs or to get the click that will confirm a name in a spam list, I have no doubts they address American men.

The problem is that besides being a woman, I am a foreigner, and this spam is reaching not only Americans, who may laugh at it, but the whole world. In Beijing, Rome, El Cairo, Sidney or Buenos Aires, where I live, people envious of the American superpower also laugh. Thanks to spam, they are now into the long time kept secret of what is behind so much war. Freud helps them to deduct that a small penis calls for great empires. How come Homeland Security hasn’t noticed this leak in the American border? How come the Department of State didn’t detect the actual reason beneath the loss of American influence in the planet? How could ever America get her reputation back when spam addressed to American men yell in the world’s email boxes: “The problem is that you have a small one.”

America the beautiful, land of the free and home of the brave, confesses to the world her impotence to comply with the constitutional mandate of bed happiness. Is this true? Or is this spam written in anger by Arabs, by Chavez’ Venezuelan followers or by Castro’s Cubans, the usual suspects, all making a projection of their own lack? Will an atomic threat substitute later the spam in what is now only a more subtle dirty war? A spam which boasts “I carry a bazooka in my pants walking around” may be giving a clue that, after all, penis spam could really belong to some kind of unstated military problem.

But not all is about war in these uncertain times in which the economy takes the lead in presidential debates. The math and the grammar police combined could take a look at the funny “9 inches in your pennies will make you the world’s 8th wonder to women.” If 4 inches are usually promised and 9 inches is the final length, that means the average American penis is 5 inches long which doesn’t look that bad and wouldn't be a reason for so much war. On the other side, if the plural of penis is pennies, Freud might have something to add to the slip: power comes also from money and not just from building empires.

I can better understand the other series of penis spam, referred to Viagra and what spam calls the “Whopping Dick,” because it’s about age and decay. All males in the world will sooner or later have to deal with this, but the persistence in making of it a priority adds to the worries about size and, there we go again, the penis shines as an unavoidable American obsession. Written in American slang most of the times, this spam excels in distribution and seems to have no competitors: there is little or none spam in other languages concerning other foreign nationals. In the rest of the world, men have something else in mind but their penises.

Could it be that all this tragedy finally comes from the also often mentioned eternal dissatisfaction of American women? A careful reading of spam suggests that this uncomfortable revelation of too small American penises could have been triggered by the overwhelming demands of those bitches who always want more. To rescue male readers from despair and hopelessness, spam advices: “Do not worry! You have unique possibility to solve this problem. At present you can enlarge your male aggregate size.” In spam, promises soar, “You will be a king of bed sure enough,” while the actual problem is faced: “Don't let girls laugh at your small manhood, when you can add inches so easily.” But it's America and it all comes about reaching a Hollywood ending to this penis affair: “Bigger, better, mightier means getting laid more.” No matter what the world may think about the penis quandaries of American men or the fury of desperate wives, the problem can always be solved and men and women live happily ever after. Where there is a will, there is a way.

CONTINENTAL HUMOR: ONE TO TANGO

2008-01-31T13:51:00.001-02:00

Who says you need two to tango? Sometimes a solo tango can be the right solution for the senior dormant lover you are. You have been alone for a while; you don’t know where to start. Tango is your solution; you begin alone, you will end in a couple. All you need is a video or a book showing the steps and a good collection of CD. There where a partner should stand, you acknowledge the void, embracing the air. Dance! Tango will work its own magic. One step, one step, and one step, one step in a four beat, and you are done with rhythm. Walk behind, then again, walk behind, then again, walk behind, turn to the right, then to the left, and start all over again while Osvaldo Fresedo and his Orchestra play “Tinta Roja” that is to say, “red ink.” Tangoes are written with the color of passion and if you feel your body has been sleeping for too long, awake it! You are a song away of being reborn as a lover.

Who says age makes of us sleepy grand parents with no lust or interest in sex? We may feel discouraged, rather, as some teen agers do, because we don’t have a companion with whom to share the rest of our unlived passion. We are widows, widowers, or divorced and we doubt we will find at sixty, seventy, eighty or ninety, someone to share our dreams of naked togetherness. More on the tender side than on the aggressive approach, we shy at the time of confronting a possible partner. Tango eases everything and whether you practice it on your own before getting to the ball room or you are decided to engage in a tango lesson’s group, you will discover that the sensuous music and the calculated choreography have been created to allow a whole sensorial awakening. Emotional and sexual cobwebs are magically brushed away by the languishing though steep rhythm, and legs, hips and spine are sent into an unforgettable trip. Practicing tango on your own, surrendering to the music will get you there where you want: to the arms of who has been waiting you for a long time, dancing in the dark, as you do. Solo players are doomed to meet.

Tango is not an easy dance, but its difficulty is made out from the same walls people face at the time of being bodily connected. It’s true that in the classical tango the man leads and the woman is led, as in a macho sex game, where the woman is a chosen object to please and to get pleasure from. However, the primitive tango was a two men dance, and not at all a homosexual dance, but, once again, a macho dance where the body skills to interconnect were tried between men at a time women were not as easy available for such a trade. A solo tango is then the supreme nirvana of consciousness about how far our body may go if we let it follow the music. It goes as far as it can, because of the power of the music and the strict choreography where the torso remains quiet while the hips, the legs and the lower part of the spine do the job. Never mind if you have slow or clumsy feet, they will follow the pulse of your lower chakra. As always, sex commands.

Not only Osvaldo Fresedo climaxes to magic, also Anibal Troilo and his incredible “bandoneón” –that sort of small accordion which gives tango its unforgettable sound- or the bright Orchestra of Mariano Mores – tango’s Glen Miller’s equivalent- can make you peak to glory. There is a musical treasure to discover in the orchestras of the 40’s and 50’s and exploring it can give you an additional reward if you enjoy the refined quality of an achieved national rhythm. Dance! Dare! Tango is the only dance in which being one calls for two and succeeds in the appeal.

After your solo dance is over, not because your passion is exhausted but because you just want to get a rest, you can relay on Astor Piazzolla and his romantic tango with touches of classical Vivaldi. He has recorded the four seasons as lived in the most bewitched southern city. Try his “Verano Porteño,” the port of Buenos Aires' summer. You cannot dance under his spell, but your soul will. Then, you will reach perfection: a soul mate might be on his way.

THE ARGENTINE GOTHIC

2007-11-17T16:38:00.003-03:00

“I have not seen anything pulled down so quick since I was in the Pampas and had a mare that I was fond of go to grass all in a night. One of those big bats that they call vampires had got at her in the night, and, what with his gorge and the vein left open, there wasn’t enough blood in her to let her stand up, and I had to put a bullet through her as she lay” says Quincey Morris, the well traveled American character in Dracula. At the end of the 19th century, when American and British visitors were frequent in Argentina’s flat Pampas, Bram Stoker, the talented and intuitive author of Dracula, couldn’t have found a better reference to vampirism than to evoke a land where blood and horror were and remained a major cultural motif, with fellow countrymen killing each other in cruel and permanent civil wars based on the terror inspired by the different. The founding scene of Argentine culture revolves around blood shed, murder and horror, and the permanent opposition of the always conflicting terms of civilization and barbarity has created in its literature a variety of Gothic: the Argentine Gothic.

After the Independence from Spain in 1816, the Argentine thought started its long cultural journey towards its literary shape. During the 19th century, poems and essays first and novels and short stories later, slowly built the Argentine literary house bringing to the world a whole new set of images and feelings, perceptions and ideas. In the 20th century, Argentina’s literature would be recognized as one of the most relevant in Spanish language. The Gothic movement, in its 18th, 19th and 20th century different versions, had in Argentina its own original expression. The influence of the Enlightenment was present in the first writers post Independence, who were nurtured with its values; Romanticism’s wave took its own local color in the Río de la Plata; and Surrealism made later its own way in the minds of writers who were ready, because of their distance from the great capitals of the world, to recreate the universe according to new laws. Since the beginning, the tension between the local barbarity and the aspiration to civilization created the intense emotional basement for an Argentine Gothic, in which the ghosts always come from the repressed, in an eternally split culture. As María Negroni notes: “Between ideology and crime, the Gothic prefers an epic of the intense which tends to rehabilitate the madness as the negative path, while it claims the unlikely as an antidote against all transcendence.”(Negroni, 21. Tr. DF).

The founding book of Argentine literature, Facundo by Sarmiento, has as a subtitle which tells all: Civilization or Barbarity. This essay, published in 1845, can be also read as a romantic novel on the life of Facundo Quiroga, a popular caudillo or strongman from La Rioja, a province in the Andean region. Sarmiento’s portrays Facundo and the life in the country as the perfect example of barbarity, the contrary of the civilization he promoted first as a writer, and later as a president. The barbaric countryside as opposed to the civilized city crosses the text, and Sarmiento takes pleasure in the accumulation of horror scenes, in which the permanent slaughtering constitutes the ongoing motif, whether it is about the deeds of Facundo, of Rosas, the powerful ruler in Buenos Aires, of his faithful guards, the mazorqueros, or Santo Pérez, another gaucho malo, bad gaucho, according to Sarmiento’s definition, who finally murdered Facundo. In the void of the Pampas, the Gothic castle is, at that mid nineteen century, still absent, and what Sarmiento perceives as barbarians is nothing else than the uninstructed local people, blend of Indians and Spaniards while the ghosts represent the absent civilized Europeans, who have deserted the colonial scene to maybe never come back. Sarmiento, a fervent admirer of the United States, will be later one of the promoters of the European “white” immigration in an effort to mate the barbaric half caste breed. Facundo is the first text to describe the horror for that barbaric half caste which actually is Argentine reality and to express the madness behind that horror: the permanent and unfulfilled longing for an impossible white and “clean” civilization. His colorful romantic style and his passionate attitude make of Sarmiento the double of Facundo: as savage as his character, when Governor of San Juan he will not hesitate to have another caudillo, his enemy, the Chacho Peñaloza, murdered and to have his head stuck on a spear, exhibited in the main square as an example of what enemies had to expect from him. Real life doubled the Gothic narrative, creating one particular effect of the uncanny in Argentine literature and history: how the barbaric repressed returns acted by the representatives of civilization. Facundo starts a lineage in which this particular trait of the Argentine cultural character becomes a preferred object of reflection.

Available contrasts to explore in the Argentine Gothic narratives can be between Indians and the colonial Spaniards; between Indians and criollos (that mix of Indians and Spaniards which gave the gauchos but also the first local elites); between Catholicism and the Masonic or Atheist Enlightenment; between British diplomats and cattle barons; between gauchos and the first porteña (of the port of Buenos Aires) aristocracy; between the porteña oligarchy and the peronists; between the military and the guerrilla. The list of opponents creating mutual fear could be continued till the present. Horror can alternate from the horror for the barbarians -Indians, gauchos, even Catholic Spaniards when seen from an enlightened point of view, peronists or military- to the reverse horror for a civilization perceived as strange, British and not Hispanic or Atheist and not Catholic, Communist or Liberal.

The particular brand of Argentine Gothic has changing ghosts depending on which is the ideology and the social belonging of the writer. Argentine history is a Gothic novel on its own right because of the degree of violent horror, from the massacres of the rebellious gauchos in the 19th century to the political massacres of the 70’s, just thirty years ago, and this horror is present in one way or another in its literature. If Facundo is the Rosetta stone which explains the basic and delivers the clues to understand the local Gothic, there are some outstanding texts which illustrate the horror, referring to different episodes of terror, evoking different ghosts, marking levels of transgression generally related to legitimating murder, and creating that particular passionate excess which characterizes Argentine history, always swinging from one extreme to the other.

Before Facundo, Esteban Echeverría delivered in 1838 his story The Slaughter House where the killing of cattle serves as a metaphor for the killing of opponents to the regime of Rosas. The detailed killing and splicing of a bull is followed by the equally detailed torture and murder of an unitario, the political opponent to the federales, or partisans of Rosas, who nevertheless called the unitarios “savages,” in one of those ironies present since the Argentine beginnings, when the definition of what was right depended on who held the weapon. The populace is represented as a grotesque group of meat addicts and fans of the murderers, while the red of the blood matches the red of Rosas’ federales ’ clothes, in a first image which, as a classic, will nurture the Argentine Gothic till the present. As Katy Wagner says:

What the image of blood loses in unlikelihood, it regains in 'significance of context'. The image of blood appears strikingly at critical points in the story, such as the dramatic death of the Unitarian, dying for his beliefs and instead of submission. Echeverria writes that 'a torrent of blood spurted, bubbling from the young man's mouth and nose, and flowed freely down the table' (Echeverria, 75-6). The development of the Unitarian's anger and spontaneous death marks itself in blood as well, as the 'veins on his neck and forehead jutted out black from his pale skin as if congested with blood' (Echeverria, 75). Here again, the image of blood strengthens the literary motif of the slaughter as it influences most visually many of the critical moments of the text.(Wagner)

One of the great novels of Rosas times, Amalia, by José Marmol, has for the first time an urban aristocratic setting and recreates the oppressive atmosphere in which the opponents to Rosas lived and the dangers and sufferings of their struggle to overthrow him. But Marmol’s affiliation as a Unitarian blinds him to see that Rosas was still a loved and popular dictator, and the Romantic story unfolds once again the tragedy of those who didn’t belong to the vast “barbaric” community. A house with secret rooms, shadows, political persecutions and double faced spies sets the original model for infinite Argentine novels dealing with the same problem of internal exile and alienation in a hostile, frankly aggressive, or directly criminal environment.

After the battle of Caseros in 1852, the reign of Rosas is over. A different breed of estancieros, ranchers, who like to call themselves civilized, is ready to make good businesses with Great Britain and to govern the country under the new laws of progress. It’s the time when estancias, ranchs, are converted in French palaces and Tudor castles which will be the new setting where the old ghosts, now under the form of the losing gauchos and the Indians massacred during the long military march to civilize the Patagonia, will provide new Gothic stories with the same actors changed. Martin Fierro by José Hernandez is the emblematic long poem quoted as the Argentine masterpiece, which relates the gaucho decline’s in what was the wild pampa in the beginnings of Argentine history. The pampa is now converted in the territory of the cattle barons suppliers of meat for the British Empire and in the realm of the military who draft the gauchos against their will to serve in the battle against Indians. Blood has in Martin Fierro the tint of a melancholy loss since all the barbaric seems doomed to be repressed, taking away at the same time genuine parts of Argentine culture. Freedom as it was known by the gaucho and before him, by the Indian, is lost and the horror lies now in the civilization to come. The powerful British Empire and its culture, so different from the Spanish, in the language and religion, become the new threat. From the point of view of the gaucho, the horror speaks English and is not a true Christian. Martin Fierro expresses the supreme transgression: the barbaric speaks by itself, in his own Argentine folk language, and explains its fear, not of a barbaric tyranny as in Echeverría’s Slaughter House, but of civilized tyranny.

These two opposite points of view, one with the urban civilized as a hero, representative of the “true” Argentine culture, and the other one with the barbaric gaucho as the admired paradigm of the Argentine character, will remain active during all the 20th century and can still be seen in the first years of the 21st century. They both describe different fears which will however develop in the same violent direction. The terror one will feel for the other, the need of suppressing who is seen as the enemy and the unwanted part of the nation, and the horror for a bloody past which will inevitably come back to both of them (because the Argentine history is one in which both Cain and Abel are murderers), appear once and again in the texts of the most famous Argentine writers.

At the end of the 19th century and during the 20th century a powerful elite will set the basis of modern Argentina. Well read and fond of good literature, Argentine authors, more oriented to the short story than to the novel, will be very sensitive to the influence of Edgar Allan Poe. There is more in that attraction than the admiration for a good writer: certainly the Gothic traits of their American colleague matched some of the Argentine. The European nostalgia as well as the American barbarism and grotesque, even if giving birth to different images and stories, belonged to both countries. The British influence in the Argentine elites opened them also to that new American Gothic in search of its own roots.

Among the great authors from that period, like Manuel Mujica Lainez, and Jorge Luis Borges who left masterpieces of Gothic literature, we have a myriad of secondary authors, some of them very famous, as Ernesto Sábato, who returned in their novels and short stories to the obsessive theme of the split Argentine personality, half barbaric, half civilized, and with the permanent tension of a repressed violence. From the literary excellence of the charming collection of short stories, Misteriosa Buenos Aires, mysterious Buenos Aires, by Mujica Láinez, with stories like El Hambre, the hunger, in which the Gothic is set in the 16th century at the time of Buenos Aires’ foundation and the barbaric, in the anthropophagic behavior of the Conquistadores, to the monumental work of Jorge Luis Borges, examples abound. In the well known story by Borges The Gospel According to Mark, we have all the elements of the Argentine Gothic in place: the estancia, or ranch, as the local setting; an urban pro British free thinker father who instructs his son with lessons of Spencer; an urban son, Baltasar Espinosa, a medical student, who visits his cousin in his estancia and who will finally become the victim of the Gutres, the local half caste foreman, his son and his daughter. Espinosa will end crucified by the Gutres, in a Gothic renewed symbol of the civilized insulted, tortured and executed by the barbarians, comparing Espinosa to Jesus and the Gutres to Romans, in an audacious twist linking the civilized to Jesus. This type of point of view, where the barbarians are not considered children of God but evil will be repeated in many works, and echoed in as many other works, where the Christ changes sides and becomes the protector of barbarians and the accuser of the civilized. In On Heroes and Tombs, Ernesto Sábato will address this opposition in the mid 20th century, with the ascension of Peronism to power, seen by half the Argentines as the return of the barbarians and by the other half, as the occasion for a more democratic civilization including everyone. As Paul Gray remarks in Sábato’s novel:

Argentine life provides surface chaos. An attempt to overthrow Perón brings bombs raining down on a city plaza; Peronists retaliate by sacking and burning Roman Catholic churches. Beneath all this noise, the novel circles slowly around an internal mystery, announced at the outset: a woman named Alejandra murders a man named Fernando and then sets the scene of the crime on fire, immolating herself. The event draws attention because it involves members of a prominent, though sadly faded, old family. Particularly horrified is a dreamy, morose young man named Martín, who has had a tortured affair with Alejandra. Roughly the first half of the novel tells their story…..With its hints of incest and its portrait of a doomed family hagridden by history, Alejandra's tale is South American gothic at its most feverish. (Gray).

Peronism redefines Argentine life and the urban gothic recreates the old dilemmas: the barbarians are now part of the urban landscape, invading the literary scene. Julio Cortázar, the author of many collections of short stories, among them Bestiario, bestiary, is without any doubt the master of the urban Gothic in stories like Casa Tomada or Las Puertas del Cielo in which the peronist threat creates the new horror, undefined and unexpressed. The new barbarians are the dark workmen, those cabecitas negras, little black heads, who will be the support of Perón and Evita. Horror will have a new twist after Perón is overthrown in 1955, and the corpse of Evita, hidden, mutilated, and traveling later to be hidden again in Italy, will create a new literary motif to express the savage side of the supposedly civilized military. A great Argentine writer, Rodolfo Walsh, will write about the tragic hatred concentrated on Evita in his story, Esa Mujer, that woman, part of the collection Los Oficios Terrestres. Walsh was murdered later by the military, in his condition of a guerilla militant, during what was called the dirty war of the 70’s but which was only a chapter of a history made out of horror and blood, and of ritual sacrifice of despised parts of the nation.

During the 60’s, the films of Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, based on his wife Beatriz Guido’s novels, explored the decadence of the old aristocratic families after the Peronist government opposed them. Films like La Caída, the fall, account for sexual dilemmas in old and quaint urban houses, with innocent heroines and sophisticated pervert stories of a pure Gothic breed. In those same years, a television actor and director, Narciso Ibañez Menta, made a great success on T.V. with his adaptations of stories like The Phantom of the Opera and many Poe’s stories, from The Tell-Tale Heart to The Cask of Amontillado. The city of Buenos Aires would stop and stay quiet as a small provincial town during the emission, showing to which extent the Gothic taste was embedded at that time in the Argentine psyche.

The Gothic trend is well and alive. While older authors like Cristina Bajo explore the more classical shapes of Gothic novels with great success, young authors like Pablo de Santis with his El Calígrafo de Voltaire, in which he returns to the 18th century to explore uncanny questions about writers “switching the Gothic from the Argentine space to the Enlightenment time”(Borrás), have made best sellers and earned important literary awards. Some other new writers join efforts to create horror and fantasy stories, like the authors in the group La Abadía de Carfax, the Carfax Abbey, lead by Marcelo Di Marco, a writer and teacher of writers, who is not scared of returning to Dracula as an inspiration for a new Argentine literature.(Sacerdote).

The Argentine Gothic has a literary story of its own, which joins other American Gothic literatures; the United States American, of course, with Master Poe at the top, and the less known Brazilian, Cuban and Caribbean Gothic, just to mention a few of them. The Argentine Gothic is not a favorite discussion theme among the critics maybe because, as Cristina Bajo says in that typical ingeniousness before a collective reflexion: “We, Argentines, have a Gothic but we cannot see it because we are criollos and not Europeans.”(Zeiger). As long as the old opposition of civilization of barbarity remains in place, the Gothic will be the genre and, above all, the style.

Works Cited
Borges, Jorge Luis. The Gospel According To Mark. The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales pp.478-
482. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Borrás, Jordi. "Entrevista a Pablo de Santis." El Broli Argentino. 30 Oct 2007
Cortázar, Julio. Bestiario. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1965.
Echeverría, Esteban. El Matadero. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopena Argentina, 1962
Gray, Paul. "South American Gothic." Time 17 Aug 1984 .
Hernández, José. Martín Fierro. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Alemar, 1974.
Mármol, José. Amalia. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1966.
Mujica Láinez, Manuel. Obras Completas. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1980.
Negroni, María. Museo Negro. Buenos Aires: Grupo Editorial Norma, 1999.
Sabato, Ernesto. Sobre Heroes y Tumbas. 4th. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1965.
Sacerdote, Karina. "La Abadía de Carfax: un nuevo movimiento literario." Revista Axolotl
Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino. Facundo. Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1967.
Wagner, Katy. “The image of slaughter: a literary motif in Echeverria's The Slaughter House”
http//www.haverford.edu/span/spanish/Docs/
wagner240.html
Walsh, Rodolfo. Los Oficios Terrestres. Buenos Aires: Jorge Alvarez Editor, 1965.
Zeiger, Claudio. "El Gótico Escondido." Página 12. 16 May 2004. 30 Oct 2007

THE AMERICAN ODYSSEY

2007-06-30T13:49:00.000-03:00

At the beginning was the sea. Later, ships would come; three, if we count the caravels of the first American wanderer, Christopher Columbus, “High Admiral of the Sea, and perpetual Viceroy and Governor in all the islands and continents which I might discover and acquire.”(Columbus, Journal) or just one, that ship dreamt to carry a myth “That sail which leans on light,/ tired of islands,/ a shooner beating up the Caribbean/for home, could be Odysseus,/ home –bound on the Aegean” (Walcott, Sea Grapes,1-5). From the red-wine Mediterranean sea to the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, the Ancient World literary legacy would take a new shape in the New World. The Americas rewrote its own Odyssey, and the myth of Ulysses as told by Homer, would be relived by historical, literary and every day heroes. All these new American characters seek for their way back home, even if the identity of that home is nothing else but the travel and the quest. America is both Ithaca and the journey, and we can consider this the first original trait of the reinterpretation of the Greek myth.

The Americas excel in colleges based in Athens’ ideals which came directly from Great Britain and the European university tradition, but Americans do not only relate to “The Odyssey” inspired by the reading of classics. From Columbus on, they grew as children of ships, of the sea wandering, and the astonished discovery of unknown territories. “In the meantime I strayed about among the groves, which present the most enchanting sight ever witnessed, a degree of verdure prevailing like that of May in Andalusia, the trees as different from those of our country as day is from night, and the same may be said of the fruit, the weeds, the stones and everything else” says Columbus who could see from day one the new land differences with Europe, both in its nature and its native people. Even if he thought he had reached Asia and ignored that he had in fact discovered a new continent, he was fascinated by the place: “I assure your Highnesses that these lands are the most fertile, temperate, level and beautiful countries in the world.”(Columbus) First Ulysses in what would become the matrix of the new world, Columbus wandered, confused and marveled, through the Caribbean and its islands: “Afterwards I shall set sail for another very large island which I believe to be Cipango, according to the indications I receive from the Indians on board.”(Columbus). The first chapter of the American Odyssey is the quid pro quo comedy, where Cipango-Japan will end as Cuba, and the first land to be trodden by an European foot, the Ysabela, named after the Queen of Spain, will become Quisqueya or, simply, America, as the rest of islands and the continent. The first four travels of Columbus will inaugurate an era of discoveries and, as the beginning of colonial times, the first psychological island of the American Ulysses.

“Ulysses is the man with thirst for eternity, always threatened by the two risks of the sea travel: destruction and backward movement. Beyond this, heaven or the land of the dead, Ithaca awaits and enlightenment, and the image of an universe not determined by the karma laws. The main mast in the ship expresses the cosmic axis planted in the center of the funeral vessel or transcendental vehicle” observes the Spanish writer Sánchez Dragó ( I, 88, Tr. DF). The American Ulysses is an European reborn in a new land, starting a new history of its own, and even as a colonial subject, in search of its own transcendence and its own place in the universal plan. The conquest began as a search for gold and spices, but the real American treasures would be of a different kind. “In fact, of the so many people who look for treasures, only children usually find them, and also some exceptional beings, doubled as men and gods, such as Parsifal, Ulysses, the Argonauts, and all those who know that each one’s truth lies in each other’s truth as long as we don’t ask them for it. An intuition all the poets had: not to find Rome in Rome but on the road, and understand what the Ithacas mean”(Sánchez Dragó, I, 190.Tr.DF): America was not meant to be the provider of wealth but wealth itself, as the founding stone of a new type of human society. Ithaca could certainly be seen as the cultural memory of Europe, the lost home, a place where every American would unconsciously long to return, but more than that, Ithaca would represent, in the American founding myth, the future home of the perfect society.

“Why did the Spaniards, the English, the French, the Germans, and the Russian come to the New World? To create a new society, when they could not tolerate the injustices and failures of Europe. The history of America is original and distinct; America is something different, and I want to live to one hundred to see how America is doing and where it is going” says the Colombian writer Germán Arciniegas, reminding the originality of America and the need of “the fulfillment of the American being, free from all inferiority complexes, free from the need to imitate European models, conscious of the complexity of his heritage.”(Ambrus). From the first settlers in America to the European colonies, part of the journey was accomplished, but the travel would still last for a while. As Sanchez Dragó points out: “To overcome difficulties, to get rid of karma, to resign to own personality (Ulysses chooses to be ‘Nobody’), to silence passion, to wander through a labyrinth till reaching its center, to die and to resurrect: all the parts of an initiation puzzle are there.”(I, 55-56. Tr.DF). To resign to the familiar European identity and find out what was to be an American came next. The wars for Independence may be seen as the war of Troy or as Calypso-Europe releasing the sailor, finally allowed to return home.

The American journey to its own identity is also a poetical search and as Harold Bloom points out: “There are no poems, only relations between poems.”(Farquhar). The American odyssey cannot then but mirror the Western literary pattern for all foundational travels. Bloom, as one of the most outstanding American critics perceived well the character of this literary identity search, never too far from all the Freudian battles between powerful fathers and sons struggling for being themselves. As Farquhar notes:
From Freud he (Bloom) borrowed the notion that the human quest for imaginative autonomy takes the form of struggling against his poetic influences: struggling, that is, to appropriate and warp, or ‘misread,’ his precursor’s work in such a way that, to a later reader, it would appear that the precursor had failed. It would seem that his poem was in some way asking to be corrected by the poem of the later poet, or as the though the precursor were the weak successor to the later poet and not the other way around.(Farquhar).
America would invest its own identity at some point of the voyage and surpass the given European culture. Literary independence is conquered in one of the stops of the trip, with Emerson as a version of a daring and smart Ulysses. “The strength of the strong poet, as Geoffrey Hartman said in an essay about Bloom, is chiefly cunning: more Jacob’s strength than Esau’s, more Odyssean than Achillean.”(Farquhar).

“The American writer has an exhilarating role” say Arciniegas, “He has to create a New World, a world that departs from the European one, and understand it is something different” (Ambrus) Borges would be inspired by the labyrinth, that older pattern lying below “The Odyssey”, and Pablo Neruda would live and write his best poems in an island, Isla Negra; Leopoldo Marechal would create his own Ulysses in “Adán BuenosAyres,” another novel where the journey happens inside the mythical city and Derek Walcott would recreate in his poem “Omeros” and in his stage version of “The Odyssey,” the Caribbean travel to the American self. However, the opposition between America and Europe still represents a relevant and unfinished discussion about cultural colonialism.
Walcott implies that colonialism and imperialism, as monsters, are present in every person’s house, because such monsters are created by those in the house. They do not invade a community; they are the product of a community. The postcolonial writer cannot simply ignore his past, including an education in British and European literature. He must confront his “monsters” –both native and foreign- and learn to live with them in harmony, not fight against them in anger. When the postcolonial can accept his own monsters, including the dark memories of a colonial past, he can accept his present hybridity. There is no perfect past to return to, no place without Walcottt’s metaphorical monsters. (Martyniuk)
As Martyniuk remarks, Walcott provides a way for postcolonial authors “to write as heroes and not victims.” (Martyniuk). Writers become not only the tellers of chapters of a common American odyssey, but Ulysses themselves, and their characters can even be domestic and modest Ulysses of a new democratic breed. As Walcott says: “The hero in my poem (Omeros) is a simple fisherman who doesn’t conquer anything and who works with his element the sea.”(Cabrera).American literature can be also read as a journey in discovery of a new style and if Hemingway will resort to the eternal sea to give another novel of the American trip in “The Old Man and the Sea” --maybe the story of a Ulysses grown old and facing his last battle against a monster-fish--, De Lillo, in our 21st Century will set the wanderings of a financial Ulysses across Manhattan neighborhoods. Margaret Atwood would join them and publish “The Penelopiad”, “a brilliantly funny and sardonic version of the Odysseus stories seen from Penelope’s angle and told through the incorporeal mouth of her shade in Hades with the benefit of 3,000 years of hindsight.”(Taplin)

The American journey is not yet finished. Americans reached the Moon and some will soon travel to Mars. For them, Ithaca is not just America but Earth, that big island in the sea of space. The Ulysses and Penelopes of the Americas, travelers of water and air, weavers of stories not yet lived, know that “First, there was the heaving oil,/ heavy as chaos;/ then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,/ the lantern of a caravel,/ and that was Genesis.” (Walcott, The Sea is History). The rest, is the eternal odyssey; again, and again.

Works Cited

Ambrus, Steven. "Germán Arciniegas: Guardian of Our Distinct History" Americas (English Edition) 49(May/Jun 1997):41.
Cabreras, Elena. "Derek Walcott: The Voice of the Caribbean." Americas (English edition) 59(May/Jun 2007): 38-46.
Columbus, Christopher. "Extracts from Journal." Medieval Sourcebook. 8 Jun 2007 .
Fajardo-Acosta, Fidel. "Omeros." World Literature. 8 Jun 2007 .
Homer, The Odyssey, The Norton Anthology of World Literature. 2nd Edition by Sarah Lawall. New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 2002.
Mac Farquhar, Larissa. "The Prophet of Decline." The New Yorker Sep30, 2002: 86.
Martyniuk, Irene. "Playing With Europe." Callaloo 28(Winter 2005): 188-200.
Sánchez Dragó, Fernando. Gárgoris y Habidis. Una Historia Mágica de España. I & II. Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1985.
Taplin, Oliver. "Homer's Wave Machine: It's Fast, furious ans fun. But it isn't really ‘The Odyssey’as Oliver Taplin Knows it.." The Guardian London.U.K.(May 20, 2006): 18.
Walcott,Derek."SeaGrapes".8Jun2007. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/

literature/laureates/1992/walcott-poetry-seagrapes.html.

Walcott,Derek."The Sea Is History" 8 Jun 2007.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-sea-is-history/

GROTESQUE COUPLES: LOVE AND GRACE IN FLANNERY O'CONNOR

2007-05-07T12:32:00.000-03:00

“I have found, in short, from reading my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil” says Flannery O’Connor in “Mystery and Manners” (Galloway). Her grotesque couples, whether composed of possible lovers, mother and son, or mother and daughter, in “Good Country People,” “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” “Everything that Rises must Converge,” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” represent the account of the battle in that territory and the tale of how grace finally opened a gate there where love was the great absent.

O’Connor’s characters seem to follow a pattern of grotesque exaggeration in women and a suspicious elusiveness in men which in their interaction give that unique literary quality in her stories: unstable comedy doomed to develop in tragedy. In “Good Country People” we can find many couples: Mrs. Hopewell, the ridiculous mother who manipulates to prevail and Mrs. Freeman, the nosey maid; Mrs. Hopewell and her daughter Joy/Hulga, the arrogant Ph.D. in Philosophy; Mrs. Freeman and Joy as well as Mrs. Freeman and her own two daughters; Mrs. Hopewell and Manley Pointer, the fake Christian selling Bibles; and, finally, the central couple to them all, around which revolves the story, Joy/Hulga and Manley Porter. In “A Good Man is Hard to Find” we assist to the same ballet of odd couples: the grandmother, another narcissistic and manipulative woman, and her silent and apparently submissive son Bailey; Bailey and his mute and indifferent wife who has a face ”as broad and innocent as a cabbage”; the two grand children, John Wesley and June Star, in charge to speak out all the truths the adults prefer to ignore, and opposing their grandmother; Pitty Sing, the cat, and The Misfit, as the two agents of fate; the two Misfit’s partners, Hiram and Bobby Lee; and the starring couple, the grandmother obliged to face The Misfit and her son Bailey through the shirt The Misfit is wearing after killing him, and ultimately, facing herself and what she has provoked. In “Everything That Rises Must Converge” a shameful Julian is confronted by his mother, a fat woman with high blood pressure, and they both couple in the bus with other passengers, the mother with her seat neighbor and Julian with a black passenger, while feelings of shame and racism intertwine in all these relationships until the again tragic end, with the death of the mother. In “The Life You Save May Be your Own” we have a couple composed by another powerful, dominant, proud and finally blind mother taking care of her deaf mute daughter, both living in a farm in the woods; another mysterious man, Mr. Shiftlet, arrives as an apparent savior, as in “Good Country People,” builds a relationship with the old mother till he gains her complete trust, marries the daughter, then leaves her and runs away with the family car, forming a last devilish couple with his desired object, the reason of all his manipulation on mother and daughter. These grotesque couples mean to convey a moral: the grotesque is nothing but an exaggeration of sinful traits; where sin reigns there is a need to identify it and to repent; repentance will come only with the help of grace. As Galloway notes: “Flannery O’Connor remained a devout Catholic throughout, and this fact, coupled with the constant awareness of her own impending death, both filtered through an acute literary sensibility, gives us valuable insight into just what went into those thirty –two stories and the two novels: cathartic bitterness, a belief in grace as something devastating to the recipient, a gelid concept of salvation, and violence as a force for good.”(Galloway)

It is very interesting to compare all the feminine characters in these stories. As many in other stories, they are dominant, maybe as Flannery O’Connor’s mother was dominant in her life. These usually extroverted and histrionic women express, if not exactly sin, at least a territory apt to attract actions from wicked men. We see then these women who seem very sure of themselves, mistresses in their own world, becoming the victims of con men or of a murderer, like the grandmother in the most terrible and achieved of O’Connor’s stories. In spite of these extremes or precisely because of them, “O’Connor is compassionate to her characters in that she gives them the opportunity of receiving grace, however devastating that might be to their fragile self-images, as well as their fragile mortal frames, for in O’Connor, grace often comes at the moment of grisly death.”(Galloway). Men are those who provide violence or the lies which allow them to have things their way. In this sense, violence is the gate by which grace can enter in the sinful lives of the victims: “I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace,” says O’ Connor (Galloway). At the end of “Good Country People,” The Misfit makes a memorable comment about the grandmother: “She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”(O’Connor) As Galloway has remarked, the grandmother has her last minute chance to understand what her life had been about: “O’Connor provides her with an epiphany, one which she probably would not have been able to deal with, had she lived. Self-knowledge can be a curse, and, indeed, it is the characters that are allowed to live that there are the more to be pitied, for they are confronted with the unbearable truth of their own folly, their own pathetic, wasted lives, which they can no longer deny.”(Galloway). As a writer, O’Connor has the strength to become a puppeteer God. She holds firmly her characters by their threads while providing them with an extreme circumstance in which they can find the occasion to step on the side of love instead of remaining on the side of sin. In this sense, Flannery O’Connor demonstrates clearly that sin lives and grows in the absence of love, and that grace doesn’t mean anything else but a surrendering to love. The end of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” leaves an unexpected lesson: “Indeed, the grandmother’s epiphany may be that goodness has been in her midst, within her reach. The good man was one of her babies, one of her children. The good man was Bailey.”(Nester).

In a letter written to Winifred McCarthy, Flannery O’Connor writes: ”There is a moment in every story in which the presence of grace can be felt as it waits to be accepted or rejected, even though the reader may not recognize this moment.” (Galloway). Galloway points out that most of Flannery’s short stories are constructed in such a way as to dramatize the sinfulness and the need for grace and that “As the idea of grace figures prominently in Catholicism, so it does in O’Connor.” Always sinners in need of grace, women and men are represented in very distinct ways: men can look like saviors but be in fact swindlers or con men; women, like Joy/Hulga, can look powerful and even smarter than the rest and become later crucified for what they couldn’t see or prevent. That South “hardly Christ-centered” but “most certain Christ- haunted” (O’Connor) is always present, forcing us to look for Christ in every character, man or woman, and if Lucynell also ends in her cross, The Misfit is seen by the grandmother as a son of God after he has killed the whole family. Like any outstanding writer, Flannery O’Connor engaged her own feelings in her work. Because of the insistence in showing men as deceitful and because O’Connor was a woman, we wonder as readers how her own love life was, as she was never married, and how she might have perceived and felt this theme of sin, love and grace in her personal life, which in many aspects seems to have been a source of inspiration for many of her stories.

That grace, which for O’ Connor always comes under a certain form of violence, may have been provided in her own life by lupus, the disease which finally killed her. “Lupus was in control of her fate. What kind of strange disease attacks itself, its own living cells? As an artist, she must have thought about this disease differently than her doctors. Violence on its own life giving system is not only frightening but it does not make sense”(McGovern) If lupus was for her the violence and the door to grace, the consequence was a life devoted to art. Mc Govern quotes a book from Josephine Hendin, “The World of Flannery O’Connor,” where she makes this comment on her visit to O’Connor’s last home, the farm Andalusia:
“Sitting on this porch, I felt for the first time that O’Connor’s disease did not radically change her life. Its horror was that it prevented her life from changing at all. The loneliness it dictated for her was too familiar to the ‘shy, glum girl’ whose feelings had been under control, who seemed so alone everywhere. Her illness seems only to have reinforced and cemented an isolation that always existed, a feeling of being ‘other’ that she could sometimes accept with wry good humor.” (McGovern).

Her disease never became part of her stories but frustrated love as in Joy/Hulga deceived by Manley Pointer or Lucynell abandoned by Mr. Shiftlet looks instead related to her personal life. Mark Bosco has closely studied Flannery O’Connor’s letters collected in “The Habit of Being” and he remarks that they offer “a sense of O’Connor’s personal development as an artist and offer insight into her personality. What they do not provide, however, is an account of romantic interest in her life. Many critics have assumed that her physical condition, compromised after the onset of lupus in her twenties, precluded her forming ---even hoping to form—deep attachments with men.” Some other critics, like Julie Buckner Armstrong, considered a possible repressed lesbianism but report also “the work of Sally Fitzgerald, who believed that the author was a lifelong victim of unrequited [heterosexual] love and provided as evidence a list of men she fell for who did not fall for her.”(Buckner Armstrong). The truth seems more on the side of unrequited love, as the one reported by Bosco, that Flannery had for Erik Langkjaer, a young Dane studying in Georgia, who slightly flirted with her while she had hopes that he would become a great love and a possible husband. Langkaer left America because he was homesick but also after “he realized that O’Connor had fallen mildly in love with him and that, although he liked and admired her, he was not simply in love with her.” (Bosco) Unrequited love offers always a grotesque side to exploit, made out of the blindness and arrogance of those who expect a love which will not be fulfilled. “Good Country People” could be Flannery’s sublimation of this frustrated love story and Bosco reports that in a later interview Langkjaer recognized the kiss scene in the story and Joy’s reaction, as the reaction Flannery had when he kissed her.

In January 9, 1955, in one of the letters she sent to an indifferent Langkjaer soon to be married to another woman, and in the hope of keeping the relationship alive, Flannery begs: “Write me an unintelligible post card please so I will have an excuse to write you a letter. My mother doesn’t think it is proper for me to send mail when I don’t receive it.” (Bosco). Her mother appears in this letter as one of her own powerful censoring grotesque characters and herself as a yet innocent maid who doesn’t want to know her lover doesn’t love her, another pattern for a future grotesque character at the time of realizing she was denying reality and lying to herself. Bosco points out that “At thirty she was still a young woman but chronically ill. Though she was not yet on crutches when she met Langkjaer, they became part of her life by the time she wrote her first letter to him.” Love failed, and lupus became grace. She had nine more full years to write, before dying.

Flannery O’Connor’s publisher, Robert Giroux, remembers what Thomas Merton, another great Catholic writer and philosopher, said after she died: “I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man’s fall and his dishonor.” (Giroux, xv) A truth extracted from her own fall and dishonor, a craft profound enough to dig in her own experience of grotesque and humble to feed her characters. In her own words: “The main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life” (O’Connor), that is to say, where sin meets grace.

Works Cited
Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 6th. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003.
Bosco, Mark. "Consenting to Love: Autobiographical Roots of 'Good Country People'." The Southern Review Spring 2005: 283-297.
Buckner Armstrong, Julie. "Flannery O'Connor: A Life." Southern Quarterly Winter 2003: 156-159.
Folks, Jeffrey J. "Flannery O'Connor in Her Letters: 'A Refugee from Deep Thought'." Modern Age Spring 2005: 176-181.
Galloway, Patrick. "The Dark Side of the Cross: Flannery O'Connor's Short Fiction." 19 Apr 2007 .
Giroux, Robert. Introduction to Flannery O'Connor The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1971.
McGovern, Linda. "A Good Writer is Hard to Find: The Search for Flannery O'Connor."19Apr2007 .
Nester, Nancy L. "O'Connor's 'A good Man is Hard to Find'." The Explicator Winter 2006: 115-119.
O'Connor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace , 1976.
O'Connor, Flannery. The Complete Stories. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1971.
O'Connor, Flannery. "The Columbia World of Quotations." 19 Apr 2007 .

EMERSON, MY NEIGHBOR

2006-12-04T19:32:00.000-03:00

“Our best & greatest American gone. The nearest & dearest friend father ever had, & the man who has helped me most by his life, his books, his society. I can never tell all he has been to me from the time I sang Mignon’s song under his window, a little girl and I wrote letters à la Bettine to him, my Goethe, at 15, up through my hard years when his essays on Self Reliance, Character, Compensation, Love & Friendship helped me to understand myself & life & God & Nature. Illustrious & beloved friend, good bye!” (Myerson, 234).

With these words in her journal entry of Thursday April 27th 1882, Louisa May Alcott bid farewell to Ralph Waldo Emerson, her neighbor and mentor, who had died at 9 p.m. The author of “Little Women” and the philosopher lived in Concord, Massachusetts, an extraordinary place in an extraordinary American time:

“ A century and a half ago, bucolic little Concord was a hub of the American literary and cultural universe, home to a small group of talented intellectuals, major figures in their own day who would go on to exert an incalculable influence on all subsequent American thought and culture. One could hardly think of a more illustrious circle of American writers than Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller. All of them knew one another, lived in or near Concord at roughly the same time, and wrote many of their most important works there. Indeed, all of them (with the exception of Fuller, who died in a shipwreck) are also buried there today. There is perhaps no single location in all of American literary history more weighty in literary lore and more alive with the sense of possibility- precisely the sense of possibility that has always been one of the chief glories in American life. “(Mc Clay).

Concord and the colored tissue woven by Emerson and his friends would be an invisible part of all the novels Alcott wrote, which were privileged for more than a century as one of the best children and young people literature, not only in the United States but in the rest of the Americas, where people on quest of their own American identity were avid for new local models. Alcott’s novels, with their moral example and their description of the spiritually rich New England life, are one of the best examples on how Emerson’s philosophy expanded beyond Concord to the rest of the country and of the continent. They stand as a beacon which signals by which roads Emerson’s words and teachings contributed to mold the Americas ‘soul. Emerson solved the American original identity before any other intellectual in the region. Because of this, Emerson represents a consistent original model of American intellectual, valid not only in the United States of America but in the Americas, and his influence can be measured on a continental scale.

Emerson, as a man from New England, inaugurated a new intellectual era. To trace his life as a man, his works, his message and his historic making of a role model, equals to define the qualities, history and destiny of America, understood not only as a country but as the first independent nation of a continent who would imitate its steps, in every progress toward freedom and self assertion. Henry Adams, a prominent Bostonian, recognized that there was a third force in America, besides politics and money, which “he called Concord, it was the influence upon the nation of Emerson’s example that man need not be the creature of his circumstances but could rise above his fate and work his way upon the world” (Ziff, 15). Emerson, who quit his Unitarian ministry to become a philosopher, a poet and a civilian preacher, invented a new category in history: the American intellectual. From Concord, his living example on what an American character was made of, would stand as that third force mentioned by Adams, and his literary work would reveal to the last minus details the pattern of an original American culture. Emerson was the hinge between a culture recreated from the leftovers of Europe and a brand new American philosophy, literature and national character.

Before him, an attempt of national literature was tried by Washington Irving in “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20)” which made him famous in Europe and America for his effort to create an image of a possible literary America:
“The rude American republic of unfinished manners, commercial instincts and awful art was not, after all, the hopelessly permanent home of aggressively practical mediocrity. Cultivation, Irving demonstrated, was possible. Its previous invisibility had been a matter only of immaturity, not as English critics would have had it, of the intrinsic nature of American society. Given time for further cultivation, America could be expected to produce more Geoffrey Crayons.”(Ziff, 8).

But Irving was still depending on the European heritage and “Just as Europeans naturalist had hunted down and captured American flora…Washington Irving conducted a relentless search for those items of the European scene that spoke of the power of the past to dominate the present” (Ziff, 9). As Ziff also notes, the popularity of Irving’s books showed that Americans “were anxious to feel themselves a folk” (10). Irving opens the way to Emerson’s thinking who no longer would believe that “The superficiality of the American past meant that it must be assisted by the artist’s visiting legends upon the scene until the passage of time provided a memorable body of events” (Ziff, 11) but rather invent its own legend : “The needy European, emerging from tradition with an empty stomach, regarded America as the land of promise, but the native son, his stomach full and his imagination starved, reversed the application of the biblical phrase.” (Ziff, 9). The Americas, after their own wars of independence were immersed in their own similar identity quest and at different levels, faced the same creative struggle than Emerson with the same lack of civilization dilemma, the same questions face to nature and the same need of cutting the umbilical chord with Europe, even if every country had different European roots. If European Romantics praised a return to Nature and to the wild, seen as a return to a probable lost paradise, Emerson would retake this theme and rework it according to the American needs. Nature would be the main basis of American identity.

His first essay “Nature” still owes to the 18th Century French philosophers like Rousseau and the first Romantic writers, as Chateaubriand, Coleridge and Wordsworth, but introduces a new phenomenological approach to nature, seen more than a national geography as a territory of new dreams. “Why should not we enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of theirs?” (Emerson, Selected Essays, 35) “Nature” was the first brick on the Transcendentalist philosophy building and it explored also the tension between solitude and society, individualism and freedom, which would make later famous a disciple of Emerson, Henry David Thoreau.
“Nature” constitutes the first step toward an American philosophical thought and as Ziff
remarks:

“The much lamented shallow past of America was, in fact, a strong enabler, and that nature could teach the American lessons of power unavailable to Europeans. In 1776, Americans had declared their political independence from Great Britain, but it was not until 1837 that they received from Emerson what Oliver Wendell Holmes called their ‘intellectual declaration of independence” (15-16)

It was “The American Scholar,” a lecture given in Harvard which “would in due course become the most celebrated academic lecture in American history” (McClay) and would frame Emerson as the leading mind in America. If “Nature” discovered where an American philosophy could find its own roots, “The American Scholar” enlightened Americans about the new era, in which the thought would be local and no longer a rumination of the European thought.

“Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close”(Emerson, Selected Essays, 83) stated Emerson, proposing also a destiny for America: “A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men” (Emerson, Selected Essays, 105). Emerson realized that such a destiny required high souls to be met, and the core of his lecture was based on a thorough definition of what an American intellectual should be. He lectured about the do and don’ts of that new class from which he was the founding father. “Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst,” (Emerson, Selected Essays, 88) he said, reminding us of Cervantes and his Don Quixote, in an early intuition of the modern and renewed culture of the Americas, which would remain, mainly due to his own directions, pragmatic and full of good common sense acquired through the direct observation of nature: “Books are for the scholar’s idle time. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other’s men transcripts of their readings.” (Emerson, Selected Essays, 89). He would also point out to the need of joining action to thought: “Only so much do I know, as I have lived” (92) and then he would remark: “I do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies and rubies to his discourse.”(92), also insist: “Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.” (91), underline: “Character is higher than intellect.” (94) and conclude: “The great man makes the great thing.” (98). He would finally set the supreme rule of the American scholar: “Free should the scholar be, -free and brave.” (Emerson, Selected Essays, 97).

Emerson was fully aware of the social importance of scholars as models and intellectual leaders in the America-on-the making. “The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances.”(Emerson, Selected Essays, 95). This idea of the intellectual as a civilian leader is impregnated of the Masonic tradition, which rejects churches of different origins and favors free thinking and independence. Almost all the American nations had these seeds of free thinking embedded in their conception, and Emerson expresses, at the time of defining an American scholar, a wider concept at a historical stage in which American nations were independent but had not reached yet their fullest national identity. Emerson reminded us: “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” (Emerson, Selected Essays, 101) and, showing his esoteric penchant, he quoted Swedenborg: “The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be an university of knowledge.”….”The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of reason; it is for you to know all; it is for you to dare all.” And to then add: “This confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe.” (Emerson, Selected Essays, 35). Emerson had not only met America’s destiny but his own. The man who concluded his brilliant lecture with what would become one of the most famous quotes in America: “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.” (Emerson, Selected Essays, 104) had set for him a working agenda as a lecturer. After “Nature” and “The American Scholar” he would continue with his essay production. The market of lectures increased and replaced the pulpit he had resigned. After him, and in front of diverse audiences, cultured and uncultured, in Lyceums and associations, in the North East and the Middle West, he would name the American character, inspiring people and molding them at the same time. His ideas were engrained in the emerging community and he was the one who revealed them, in what wanted to be a poetical intuition. As Cayton notes: “He adapted his philosophy to the needs of popular audience” and his fame grew every day: “A passion for teaching self-trust drove Emerson through an astonishing public career, in which he became a kind of northern institution of one, rather than the icon of Transcendentalism. Though his books sold well, Emerson's fame and influence came as a popular lecturer, a kind of displacement of his earlier role as an exemplary Unitarian minister.” (Bloom) Emerson second travel to Europe in 1848 in a ship called, by those ironic turns of destiny, the “Washington Irving,” closed an era of self discovery, which would institute Emerson as “perhaps the single most influential member of the American literary community.” (Ziff, 26).

Away from pre made European theories on life, Emerson trusted himself to discover the American reality as seen in its nature. Goethe, to whom he initiated Alcott, becomes a guide to creation. “The near explains the far. The drop is a small ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients,” shared Emerson in “The American Scholar” (Selected Essays, 103) and his words still reach us with the power of a secret, for Goethe as Emerson were initiates in the knowledge of ancient sciences, something which can be also deducted by the lectures Emerson gave in the Masonic societies and from the essence of his most powerful creation, Transcendentalism, as a theory of man in the universe. “In ‘Nature,’ Emerson explains how every idea has its source in natural phenomena, and that the attentive person can ‘see’ those ideas in nature. Intuition allowed the transcendentalist to disregard external authority and to rely, instead on direct experience.” ( Brulatour).
In “The Transcendentalist,” a lecture read at the Masonic Temple in Boston, in January 1842, Emerson declared:
“What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us, is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842….As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealist; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say The senses give us representations of things, but what are things themselves, they cannot tell. The materialist insist on facts, on history, on the force of circumstances and the animal wants of man; the idealist on the power of Thought and Will, on inspiration, on miracle, on individual culture. These two modes of thinking are both natural, but the idealist contends that his way of thinking is in higher nature. He concedes all that the other affirms, admits the impressions of sense, admits the impression of sense, admits their coherency, their use and beauty, and then asks the materialist for his grounds of assurance that things are as senses represent them….Every materialist will be an idealist; but an idealist can never go backward to be a materialist.”(Emerson, Selected Essays, 239-240).

Independent from organized religion, Emerson and the Transcendentalists conveyed nonetheless an optimistic message on mankind and human destiny. “Transcendentalism declared meaning in everything, and in all meanings was good, part and connected by divine plan. Emerson refuted evil, insisting it was not an entity in itself, but simply the absence of good. If good introduces, evil dissipates.” (Brulatour).

This message of optimism was an echo of the 18th century Enlightenment as adapted to the novelty of America which, as a blank national slate, was seen by Emerson as a territory of hope, where all the ancient utopias of freedom could revive and prosper. Emerson found adherents and followers, sometimes people who couldn’t understand or explain Emerson’s deep thought but who felt an automatic empathy with his optimism, for it was also theirs. However, this thrust toward future had also its enemies. “Anti-transcendentalists rejected such an outlook on humanity. They declared such optimism naïve and unrealistic. The anti-transcendentalist reflected a more pessimistic attitude, focusing on man’s uncertainty and limited potential in the universe: Nature is vast and incomprehensible, a reflection of the struggle between good and evil.” (Brulatour). Incredibly, Poe, the only other equivalent writer of his time, the only one who had Emerson’s height and gave his measure, opposed him. He was fought back. As the writer John Updike pointed out:

“To someone of Emerson’s generation, European thought and writing was almost all there was; Puritan sermons, Benjamin Franklin’s blithe compositions, the Founding Fathers’ chiseled eloquence, Washington Irving’s sketches, and James Fennimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales—all were easily overlookable by a serious American aspirant to high thought and poetry in the early nineteenth century. To Emerson, Poe, his only peer as a homegrown critical and creative mind, was ‘the jingle man.’” (Updike).

If Emerson belittled Poe because of his predictable rhymes in his poem “The Bells,” Poe –who was the first to pick a quarrel with Emerson- laughed at the Transcendentalist for something that went beyond the literary style : “Poe attacked stylistic excesses, but his irreverence extended to the social philosophy of the Transcendentalists. Fashioning himself a member of the Virginia gentry, a social class to which he could only aspire, he objected to Transcendentalist views on abolition and reform. Adopting a hostile stance once again because of regional bias, he hardly discriminated among individual literary figures and social thinkers. He referred to Boston as Frogpond or as headquarters of ‘the humanity clique,’ and lumped together writers from this city with Transcendentalists and Socialists.” (Hayes, 15) Posing as the aristocrat he wanted to be and was not, Poe couldn’t but reject the democratic philosophy of Emerson, which went even beyond the Constitution to enhance the Supreme Freedom of man. Poe’s idea of the world had still some nostalgia of Europe, as he showed in his gothic stories set in Great Britain or in a Virginia still modeled after the British culture – something still perceptible in Richmond, for instance. Poe certainly couldn’t perceive the New World as a promise and less, enjoy in it. Poe’s own character signed by the death of his mother and other closer relatives would align him rather on the side of melancholy and, by his own nature, he would become a pessimist, skeptic on man’s power to overcome his destiny and succeed.

“During his lifetime, he [Poe] achieved only a modicum of the literary fame he so resented in writers such as Longfellow and the Concord transcendentalist whom Poe derisively referred to as “Frogpondians.” Writing in an age where America’s literary and national voices were shaped by Emersonian transcendentalism and its faith in nature, self-reliance and an expansionist philosophy, Poe offered a constant rebuttal by asserting that we inhabit a universe unfavorably disposed toward humankind, that human nature itself was simply untrustworthy. As the America of the 1840 looked brightly into a future of limitless possibilities, Poe’s work counterpointed the general spirit of American optimism by revealing the human propensity to seek pain rather than tranquility.” (Magistrale).

If Emerson can be seen today as the paradigm of a progressive mind, Poe remains as the perfect example of a “wannabe” conservatist, betrayed by his own chaotic exploration of life as an artist. His pessimism contrasts Emerson optimism and both stand as the two great literary models of the mid 19th century, who would inspire writers and artists across the Americas, in two different lineages: the optimists, always confident in the original destiny of America and relying in their own creativity to reach an every day better future; and the pessimists, attracted by the decadent Europe, always falling into the chasm of an unforgettable past, always bent to the unhappy facts of life, disease, decay, death.
“Poe and Emerson were both great poets of their time, contemplating the element of beauty, where it stems from, and how to relay that image through their poetry. Their ideals, however, were from different parts of the spectrum. Poe fixated himself on the beauty of melancholy and the mystery of the afterlife to the point of extreme emotion, while Emerson relayed beauty through the Oversoul.” (Ebeling).

If Emerson looked high, knowing man would reach the stars, Poe, in his story “The Balloon Hoax ,” a mystification about the first transatlantic crossing of a flying machine, describes “the rapturous delight of the crew annihilates the threat of the waters below, especially when elemental forces are subdued by human inventiveness. As far as the exhilarating adventure smacks of the Emersonian spiritual ambition to reach for a star, at least metaphorically, the ‘double entendre’ slyly associates the overstated enunciation with implicit ironic inflation.” (Hayes, 62). Poe believed in art and despised “the power of rhetoric among the Frogpondians and their total reliance on words and signs at the expense of shrewd thinking” (Hayes, 66) whereas Emerson relied on the power of his own speech which, he could see it, was molding America and Americans as a new cultural species with a new mission on earth.

The two lineages can be tracked at present times, for instance in the cultural roots of blue and red states, but no one would resign the property of any of the two authors. More than Poe, Emerson seems to be everywhere and to belong to the national heritage independently of intellectual affinities:
“In America, we continue to have Emersonians of the left (the post-pragmatist Richard Rorty) and of the right (a swarm of libertarian Republicans, who exalt President Bush the second). The Emersonian vision of self-reliance inspired both the humane philosopher, John Dewey, and the first Henry Ford (circulator of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion ). Emerson remains the central figure in American culture and informs our politics, as well as our unofficial religion, which I regard as more Emersonian than Christian, despite nearly all received opinion on this matter.”(Bloom).

This opinion has more than one follower: “Bloom finds Emerson popping up in so many places…that his vast claims begin to sound meaningless. Where isn’t Emerson? Yet one sympathizes with Bloom. There is something undeniably large and at the same time ineffable about Emerson’s status in our culture, a quality of both being everywhere and nowhere that is somehow reinforced by his way of doing things: his defiance of conventional categories, and the flowing amorphousness of his highly quotable but rambling and unsystematic style.” (McClay). Not everybody agrees on what Emerson’s word stands for: “It is not easy to know whether Emerson is best understood as the inspirational poet and prophet of a robustly independent American intellectual life, or as the spiritual father of contemporary narcissism, the uber-Protestant who greased the skids from ‘Here I Stand’(Martin Luther, 1521) to ‘I’ve Gotta Be Me”(Sammy Davis Jr.,1969)” (Mc Clay). The only sure thing about Emerson seems to be that he was the first American intellectual worth this name and that, as such, he is still a inspiring model for intellectuals in the United States and the rest of America, where despair has always found comfort and a powerful example in what the United States had experimented and learned before.

When Emerson’s first son, Waldo, died at age five, he showed through his own life example what it meant to be an optimist. Margaret Fuller, editor of ‘The Dial’ and close Emerson’s friend, was visiting him and his wife Lidian, who were mourning their child in a very different way; she was destroyed, he wouldn’t lose his faith in life, working and writing. “She [Margaret Fuller] was especially struck by one of the couplets in the “Saadi” poem: ‘An yet it doth not seem to me/ That the high gods love tragedy.’ This meant to her that, unlike Lidian, he had ‘entirely dismissed’ the idea of personal tragedy.” (Baker,197). Emerson had a clear idea about how to deal with tragedy: “Tragedy is in the eye of the observer, and not in the heart of the sufferer.” (Emerson, The Tragic) and also knew of to organize his life independently of fate: “The bitterest tragic element in life to be derived from an intellectual source is the belief in a brute Fate or Destiny; the belief that the order of nature and events is controlled by a law not adapted to man, nor man to that, but which holds on its way to the end, serving him if his wishes chance to lie in the same course, -crushing him if his wishes lie contrary to it,- and heedless whether it serves or crushes him.” (Emerson, The Tragic).These ideas, borne through his own experience of life, dyed his philosophy and his optimism, was not as Poe believed, a product of rhetoric, but a deduction from his own nature and feelings. He had learned that “the spirit is true to itself and finds its own support in any condition, learns to live in what is called calamity, as easily as in what is called felicity, as the frailest glass-bell will support a weight of a thousand pounds at the bottom of a river or sea, if filled with the same” (Emerson, The Tragic) and that, whatever happened in one man’s life, the power of hope and life would take the lead: “How fast we forget the blow that threatened to cripple us. Nature will not sit still; the faculties will do somewhat; new hopes spring, new affections twine, and the broken is whole again.” (Emerson, The Tragic) In Emerson, grief and sorrow transmuted into optimism, and that’s how the model was cast in iron for the generations to follow, leaving an unforgettable motto: “Fight best in the shade of the cloud of arrows.” (Richardson, 390).

Emerson walked for the first time the creative road every intellectual would later, both in the United States and the Americas. The young man who at 18 wrote in his journal: ‘I dedicate my book to the Spirit of America’ (Perry, The Heart of Emerson’s Journals, 11) had soon heard the call of his homeland and had a glimpse on how his own life had a meaning in the building of America as a nation. From the very beginning he understood that his authenticity and intellectual honesty should be at the basis of his work and he would write later in his essay “Self- Reliance”: “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”(Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series, 29). His intelligence and his intuition, oriented to the creation of an original thought, didn’t follow the pattern of the traditional European philosopher. “When he began to write to explain himself to Lydia Jackson, when they were courting, he made a point of telling her: ‘I am born a poet, of a low class without doubt yet a poet. That is my nature and vocation.’” (Richardson, 177). The romantic model of the thinker as a poet, represented by Emerson for the first time in America, would also expand, as a continental particularity, to the rest of the Americas: Emerson is the first intellectual-thinker-poet of a long lineage which goes from him to the Comandante Marcos, from Alberdi to Chico Buarque, from Sarmiento to Robert Frost. Involved in politics as well as in poetry, in philosophy as in art and religion, the American and Latin American intellectuals owe to Emerson that first unconventional model. Present Latin American intellectuals, who face in their nations uncertain institutional conditions very much alike those in the 19th century United States and who are still in the need of leading unorganized masses to a better knowledge of themselves, follow in an unconscious way Emerson’s pattern for a free creativity. Referring to the highest minds of the world, Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg and the masters of sculpture, picture and poetry, Emerson said: “For we are not pans and barrows, not even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, an at two or three removes, when we know least about it.” (Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series, 217). Seen as “children of the fire,” intellectuals have no other choice than becoming poets: “He [the Poet] stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth.” (Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series, 218). Emerson understood as anybody else how those who embraced this path, as Transcendentalists in his time, were singled out from the rest of society: “They are lonely; the spirit of their writing and conversation is lonely; they repel influences; they shun general society; they incline to shut themselves in their chamber in the house, to live in the country rather than in the town, and to find their tasks and amusements in solitude. Society, to be sure, does not like this very well.” (Emerson, Selected Essays, 247). With a great sense of humor about the intimate fabric of intellectuals, artists and poets he would add: “For these persons are not by nature melancholy, sour, and unsocial, -they are not stockfish or brute- but joyous, susceptible, affectionate; they have even more than others a great wish to be loved. Like the young Mozart, they are ready to cry ten times a day, ‘But are you sure you love me?’” (Emerson, Selected Essays, 248).

Since the independence in almost every country in the Americas was shaped by the Masonic societies which saw in America as a continent, the Promised Land for freedom and progress, Emerson’s message of optimism and his own model of intellectual would make a long way, not always through the conventional means. In the United States, his idea of America permeated into the public not only through his books but through his lectures. He influenced directly major writers who had their ideas shaped by what they learned from him, like Thoreau and Whitman, but also indirectly in that “he stands as the representation of thought of American identity and so provides the cornerstone for the words and deeds of many who may not know his work but who when they believe themselves to be influenced by America are actually responding to what Emerson said America meant.”(Ziff, Emerson, Selected Essays, 26). Bloom pointed out: “Emerson's mind has become the mind of America.” America, as the master experience of freedom in the world, was meant to be shown as a model and Emerson would reach the Americas through his own work but, in a more permanent way, through the Americans molded by his thought. Some characteristics of his progressive mind have gained steady followers in the Americas, such as his defense of freedom, democracy, and commerce, “The historian of the world will see that trade was the principle of liberty, that trade planted America and destroyed feudalism, that it makes peace and keeps peace, and it will abolish slavery,” an Emerson sentence quoted by Richardson who also observes that “Emerson is virtually alone among American writers in his endorsement of the principle of commerce.”(Richardson, 394). Emerson’s position against war: “A peaceful nation is protected by its spiritual power because everyone is its friend”(Beck) reminds us of the most progressive tendencies crossing the whole continent from the USA to Argentina during the 60’s and as Beck says: “For Emerson the soul transcends all conflicts and has no enemies; soldiers he considered to be ridiculous. War is ‘abhorrent to all right reason’ and against human progress. Form the perspective of spiritual oneness he spoke of ‘the blazing truth that he who kills his brother commits suicide’” (Beck). Emerson position against war would be consistent with his position on slavery: “In an address in Concord on August 1, 1844, the tenth anniversary of the slaves’ emancipation in the British West Indies, he [Emerson] suggested that the United States could follow the British example by buying the freedom of their slaves from their plantation owners.”(Beck).

In every nation in the Americas, the reflection about each own identity was, as we have seen for Emerson and Poe, around the acceptance of the new reality in the continent, the untamed nature and the somewhat barbaric people, and the nostalgia of the European civilization. Sarmiento, the great Argentine writer, author of “Facundo, Civilization and Barbarism,“ and a great admirer of the United States, visited Emerson in Concord around Thanksgiving, in 1865, and had the occasion to discuss with him his book (Vellerman, 5), very much praised by the widow of the educator Horace Mann, Mary Mann, who would eventually translate the book and help Sarmiento to bring American teachers to Argentina to improve education. They had to speak in French and Emerson complained, as Mary Mann reports: “I do not think we shall allow you to speak French when you visit Concord again- you just talk American, as Mr. Emerson said, no matter how many blunders you make.” (Vellerman, 61). Sarmiento wanted cities there where Argentina only had wild pampas, and he wanted educated Europeans as citizens there where he only had half savage gauchos. We have no record of what Emerson told Sarmiento, besides his wise request of leaving France behind, but he probably advised him in the sense of accepting what the Americas reality yielded and to transform it from there, what Sarmiento did as a President a couple of years later, creating the first public school system. We can have an idea of Emerson’s thought regarding “barbarians,” through a couple of passages quoted by Bloom: “In his essay Power, Emerson says “Power educates the potentate. As long as our people quote English standards they dwarf their own proportions,” and also: "In history, the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelagic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty - and you have Pericles and Phidias - not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astringency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity." Emerson’s direct influence in Sarmiento can also be measured by the value Sarmiento gave to the single Emerson’s sentence from that meeting he used to quote. Emerson stated that the snow was a great teacher (García Hamilton, 277) and this made Sarmiento daydream about how he could reproduce in the wild Argentina, the life as lived in New England, where people stayed home during the terrible winters, reading and deepening their education. Besides Sarmiento, other patriots, intellectuals, and writers in the 19th century Americas were inspired by Emerson, as the Cuban José Martí. Even in the 20th century Borges would recognize a direct influence in his work, notably through the greatest Emerson American follower, Walt Whitman who would give birth to the first continental poetry, defined by –what could be more American and Emersonian?- its free verse. Whitman embraced the whole world, pampas included, in his poem “Salut au monde” (Whitman, 118) but, as Borges pointed out, Whitman was aware that “America represents a new event which has to be celebrated by poets, whereas Poe and poets of his kind saw America as a mere continuity of Europe.”(Borges, 51). This opposition explains the problem Emerson solved for all the American intellectuals to come and who would find in Emerson’s thought an answer to their solitude in the emptiness of a void territory, with no tradition of its own, with no “civilization” as the one so missed by Sarmiento. Emerson enabled for them the possibility of creating, in that void, a new philosophy of nature as well as, later, like in Borges, a fictional world always metaphysical, which is the main characteristic of Latin American literature and which had in Emerson its hidden promoter. All the American countries had the same dilemma, of having to give a name to everything in the new culture, as Whitman observed :“The act of poetry was the act of naming the parts of his unrealized America.” (Ziff, 23). No matter if roots were British, French or Spanish, the Americas were all on the same quest of cultural identity and faced the same challenge “We yet have had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer…Yet America is a poem in our eyes.” (Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series, 235). The most important gift Emerson gave to his peers in the Americas was a sense of trust and self-reliance. He had done his work; others could do so: “Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, ‘It is in me, and shall out.”(Emerson, Essays: First and Second Series, 236).

Not only Sarmiento was fascinated by New England life, generations of female readers who would avidly scan Alcott’s novels for a new model of woman would meet without knowing Emerson lesson on self reliance as adapted to working and struggling women, who could be nurses, teachers, and, yes, writers, as Jo in “Little Women,” allowing any and all women readers in the Continent to become in an indirect way his neighbor and receive a lesson on how life was meant to be lived, as Louisa May did.
Emerson poured his ideas and feelings about life into the minds of Americans through his books and lectures and his influence progressed exponentially and with those Americans shaped by him, and their new works and enterprises, he crossed the border toward the rest of American nations. Through other writers and artists, his message of optimism and self reliance, his confidence that America and the Americas expressed the new and that the new could only be better than the past, attained multitudes. Books, cartoons –the American Dream as expressed by Walt Disney is as Emersonian as the Hollywood happy endings- and films would transfer Emerson’s optimism into the souls of people who have never heard his name. His idea of America became America, even if some don’t totally agree with this reduction, as Mc Clay says:

“For many Americans, educated an uneducated alike, something like the Transcendentalist vision of reality forms the core of what America is all about as a nation. That doesn’t mean they are right, however, And that’s precisely the nub of the problem with Emerson, It is one thing to acknowledge his influence. It is quite another to propose that, in some sense, he is America, a proposition that is not only demonstrably false, but one that should arouse our suspicions, since it is an effort not only to define Emerson, but to define America, Anyone who proposes it needs to be reminded of the commanding presence in American life of a set of very different, and more sober, assumptions about liberty, moral authority, sin, human nature, and national identity. Assumptions contained, among other places, in the theory and structure of the Constitution, and woven into the nation’s Christian, republican and liberal traditions.”

If it is true that the idea of America has more than one father, it is no less true that Emerson, as a thinker poet, seized and defined America in its most important meaning for the rest of the American nations, always a step behind in their own progress, coming as they were from the losing Spanish Empire and not from the victorious British Lion which gave Emerson, as his heir, a sharp lance and an efficient shield.

The bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s birth on May 25, 1803 was celebrated with a “flurry of local celebrations…But this admiring sentiment does not seem to have spread much beyond the region or stimulated a more sustained national reflection on his larger legacy. Americans know they are expected to revere Emerson. But they are not sure quite why. Some are not even sure if they should. The eminent literary scholar Harold Bloom has few doubts on that score. He did his bit for the bicentennial by proclaiming Emerson to be ‘the dominant sage of the American imagination,’ ‘the central figure in American culture,’ a thinker who, far from being a faded tintyped stowed away in the national attic, is ‘closer to us than ever on his two-hundredth birthday.” (McClay). The “us” includes Americans from the whole continent who can agree with Harold Bloom in that “No one, after Emerson, has taken up the burden of the literary representation of Americanness or Americans without returning to Emerson, frequently without knowing it.” Emerson’s legacy includes the trust in the perpetual renewal of the American culture, which in the 21st century embraces the whole continent, at least two main languages and an evolving interchange and mutual influence.

Robert Frost, the 20th century direct heir of Emerson as a poet observed that: “Emerson supplies the emancipating formula for giving an attachment up for an attraction, one nationality for another nationality, one love for another love. If you must break free, ‘Heartily know/ When half-gods go/ The gods arrive.’” (Frost) The old worn out goddess Europe was replaced, in the hearts of the born free Americans of the whole continent, by goddess America. Emerson may be soon forgotten again, or not duly measured in what he accomplished in the history of America as a whole continental nation. But, as Americans of the Americas, we can always look inside ourselves and see where Emerson left his imprint. With Frost, I say: “Emerson’s name has gone as a poetic philosopher or as a philosophical poet, my favorite kind of both.” I remember also that Louisa May Alcott and her Jo represented the powerful model of woman writer I received as a child and I could make my own her words when herself a child she wrote: “I have been reading today Bettine’s correspondence with Goethe. She calls herself a child, and writes about the lovely things she saw and heard, and felt and did. I liked it much. “(Sunday, Oct.9, 1847) (Myerson, 60). Behind Bettine and Goethe stands Emerson, her mentor, and mine, behind Alcott, my mentor. He still is in the Americas a Halloween friendly ghost who, unlike the raven, keeps saying “always” instead of “nevermore;” an eternal host in a Thanksgiving dinner where Sarmiento listens and plans how to change my life according to the idea of snow; Alcott’s neighbor in Concord; Emerson, anywhere in the Americas, my neighbor.

Works Cited

Baker, Carlos. Emerson Among the Eccentrics. New York: Viking Penguin, 1996.
Beck, Sanderson. "Emerson's Trascendentalism." Abolitionists, Emerson and Thoreau.
31 Oct 2006 .
Bloom, Harold. “The Sage of Concord.” Guardian [United Kingdom] 24 May 2003:
Borges, Jorge Luis. Introducción a la literatura norteamericana. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1997.
Brulatour, Meg. Heaven on Earth: The Legacy of 19th Century Trascendentalism as an Ecumenical Philosophy of Nature. Virginia Commonwealth University. 31 Oct 2006 .
Cayton, Mary Kupiec. "The making of an American Prophet: Emerson, His Audiences, and the Rise of the Culture Industry in Nineteenth-Century America." Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays Prentice Hall, 19931987 31 October 2006 http://galenet.galegroup.comarktos.nyit.edu>.
Ebeling, Rebecca. "The American Poetry Web." Poe and Emerson on Beauty. 29 Oct 2006 .
Emerson, Edward Waldo. Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1864-1876. 1st..
Bridgewater, NJ: Replica Books, 1999.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays: First and Second Series. New York: Vintage
Books/The Library of America ed., 1990.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Essays. New York: Penguin Books, 1984.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Uncollected Prose, Dial Essays 1844." The Tragic. 23 Oct 2006 .
Frost, Robert. "On Emerson." Daedalus Vol.134, Iss.4Fall 2005
García Hamilton, José Ignacio. Cuyano Alborotador. Buenos Aires: Editorial
Sudamericana, 1999.
Hayes, Kevin J.. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Magistrale, Tony. One of Our Own- The Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe. October 1998. Gadfly. 29 Oct 2006 http://www.gadflyonline.com/archive/October98/archive- poe.html>.
McClay, Wilfred M. "Emerson and Us." The Weekly Standard Vol.8, Iss.48 (2003)
Myerson, Joel, and Daniel Shealy. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1997.
Perry, Bliss. The Heart of Emerson's Journals. 1st. New York: Dover, 1995.
Richardson Jr., Robert D.. Emerson, The Mind on Fire. 1st. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1995.
Updike, John. "Big Dead White Male." The New Yorker 4 August 2003:
Velleman, Barry. "My Dear Sir" Mary Mann's Letters to Sarmiento (1865-1881). Buenos Aires: ICANA, 2001.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: Bantam Dell, 2004.
Ziff, Larzer. Introduction. Ralph Waldo Emerson Selected Essays. New York: Penguin Books, 1984

JANE EYRE, THE WRITER

2006-09-26T14:24:00.000-03:00

“Let the reader add,” “True, reader,” “In those days, reader,” Reader, you must fancy you see a room,” “I will tell you, reader, what they are,” “No, reader,”” You are not to suppose, reader,”” I have told you, reader, that I had learnt to love Mr. Rochester,” ”I had green eyes, reader; but you must excuse the mistake,” “ Stay till he comes, reader; and, when I disclose my secret to him, you shall share the confidence,” (Brontë,1-433) writes Jane Eyre, and by the reiterated use of the word reader, she becomes in our reading a writer on her own right and displaces Charlotte Brontë, her author, from the center of the novel scene. In a Brontë unconscious concession of her role as an author, Jane Eyre assumes herself the writer identity of her literary creator, and allows us to read her biography also as the making of a writer.

Jane Eyre has been mostly read as a story of the coming of age of a young struggling orphan. All of her controversial sexual and gender aspects, as a revolutionary feminist or as a conservative Victorian woman, have also been widely discussed. “The labor component of Jane Eyre stands central to the text’s manipulation of sexual identities. Gendered performances become acts that are increasingly tied to material wealth, and the text suggests that only the middle and upper classes can afford the costly performance of gender,” observes Godfrey. If it’s true that Jane Eyre will be crossed by a number of gender and class issues, from being raised in the middle class home of the Reeds to achieve her woman and class career as the girl bride of Edward Rochester, it is no less true that her work as a governess at Thornfield and as a teacher later, will find an intellectual continuity in her writing. She writes and writes with art and knowledge and it is amazing that Jane Eyre as a character has not been yet analyzed in her first and most obvious trait: author of an autobiography.

Charlotte Brontë created her character Jane Eyre and chose to tell her story in the genre of a literary autobiography. “There was no possibility of taking a walking that day,” (Bronte 1) utters Jane as the first sentence of her confidence. It is only by the end that we will learn that Jane Eyre, as a character, decides, after being married ten years to Edward Rochester and after having given birth to a child, to write her autobiography. She doesn’t explain in the text the reasons or the purpose for this decision. We can only infer that she was aware she had an accomplished life to share. Maybe she also felt that she could become an inspiration to other women orphans, as her love and protection for Adèle suggest. What we don’t know only enhances what we know, that by writing her autobiography, Jane Eyre becomes a writer, and mirrors as a double Charlotte Brontë, who is writing her. All the experience Brontë had as a writer, transfers without a filter to Eyre, who not only writes as well as her author, but shows in her story of what stuff writers are made. What molded Brontë, moulds also Jane.

The making of a writer and how a writer’s mind is shaped, can be observed along the text. Books are important in this story, as well as the solitude that usually pushes young people to become readers, and often, later, writers. Jane tells us about her readings at her Aunt Reed’s house “Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word book acted as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch “Gulliver’s Travels” from the library.”(Brontë14) and also she becomes Helen’s friend because she is also a reader. Helen reads “Rasselas” and its story conveys a meaning regarding their imprisonment at the orphanage: “Few critics of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre have made much of the book that Helen Burns is reading when Jane first meets her at Lowood.”(Richard). Jane will later read to Adele, and will also avidly read books like “Marmion.” at St.John’s house.

Jane reflects on her contributing place in the world, when she considers, after St.John’s proposal, to follow him as a wife and a missionary to India. St.John’s is an inspired man, also an intellectual, and if Jane says “My heart is mute.- my heart is mute”(Brontë 384) regarding a vocation, she understands that she cannot spend the rest of her life mourning for the lost love of Rochester and accepts that: “Of course (as St.John once said) I must seek another interest in life to replace the one lost.” (Bronte 386) This is probably an echo of a choice Brontë herself had to make at some moment of her life and Jane, after marrying and becoming a mother, will still find that she owes something to society - as she did when she seriously considered to be a missionary if not a wife- and decides to write as a personal gift to others. The marked path of the writer is also knowledgeable in the fact that Jane is also aware of what the publishing industry is and makes smart comments as both a reader and a writer, borrowing once again, from Brontë’s experience:

“ I have brought you a book for evening solace," and he laid on the table a new publication--a poem: one of those genuine productions so often vouchsafed to the fortunate public of those days--the golden age of modern literature. Alas! the readers of our era are less favored. But courage! I will not pause either to accuse or repine. I know poetry is not
dead, nor genius lost; nor has Mammon gained power over either, to
bind or slay: they will both assert their existence, their presence, their liberty and strength again one day. Powerful angels, safe in heaven! they smile when sordid souls triumph, and feeble ones weep over their destruction. Poetry destroyed? Genius banished? No! Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought. No; they not only live, but reign and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell—the hell of your own meanness.” (Bronte 354).

Not only Jane thinks as reader who enjoys quality reading but as a literary writer who will need, at one time or the other, to be published. She acknowledges, as Brontë herself, that the market may gain power over poetry and genius, but trusts that the best will still happen and that readers will be able to access more than mediocre books.

A writer like Charlotte Brontë endeavored to tell the story of Jane Eyre, a woman who will also end writing. Even if Brontë doesn’t allude to stories Jane might write other than her autobiography, we can imagine she will, because she writes with the same talent Brontë would exert if she was writing her own autobiography. “When you read, who is speaking to you? A novel or a poem is always told by a specific voice- the voice of the narrator: that narrator is a fictional character, whether they reveal themselves or not. Whose is the narrator’s voice in any particular text?” ( Bolton). These questions help to understand better the writer process, from Brontë to Eyre and eventually from Eyre to another fictional character, which could even be a certain Charlotte Brontë, a writer: “Authors want their readers to develop and maintain a relationship with the text –intellectual, enotional, physical and spiritual. They remove from the page their own bleeding heart, their own anguished mind or their personal knotty tussle…..It is not so much the death of the author, as suicide.” (Bolton). Dispossessed of Brontë’s real life and owning only an imaginary existence, Jane Eyre turns in an unreliable narrator, when it comes to analyze or describe facts of her own life. However, she is reliable as a writer, for what she tells, true or not, real or not, is still moving, credible and always interesting.

Behind Jane, Brontë hides her own unspeakable biography, not as a writer but as a woman. To which extent Jane’s feelings are her own, and which metaphor is hidden, for instance, in the romantic love Jane succeeded to live and Brontë possibly didn’t, is something that will remain for ever matter of discussion. But we can judge, with no risk of mistake, Brontë as a writer in the abyss image of Eyre as such. Who is speaking becomes then a highly interesting literary issue, in this fake autobiography if we speak about the real world, in the admirable novel written by a great writer as Brontë or in this moving testimony if we accept Jane Eyre as a writer who has somehow mastered her literary skills to give us an honest, truthful and useful portrait of her life. The reading of Jane Eyre’s life written by herself, becomes essentially “a revisiting of the way in which Brontë combines the domestic and the spiritual to contribute towards a new tradition of autobiography, in which religious concerns are refocused and to some degree tamed by being directed towards localized and specific moral projects.”(Flint)

Many followers of Brontë will later unconsciously borrow or simply plagiarize this pattern by which a woman writer tells the story of another woman doomed to be a writer: the most famous example is Louisa May Alcott and Jo, the writer on the making in “Little Women”. “Seelye (University of Florida) makes a strong case for examining the influence of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre on a host of US women writers….The domestic novels likely spawned by Jane Eyre reveal some surprising and often dark connection to their English predecessor. The novelists Seelye examines range from the well known (e.g.Louisa May Alcott, Susan Warner, Frances Hodgson Burnett) to the less known or now forgotten (Eleanor Porter, Jean Webster).” (Knight) Most of them would examine “the struggles of independent young women who attempted to combine love and work despite the presence of overbearing men and societal prejudice.” (Fahy) Women in America, and later in Latin America and the world, would be influenced by the model of independence represented by women writers and women writers as main characters in novels. Jane Eyre expresses the first link of this long chain still continued by contemporary women writers.

Hidden in the structure and text of Brontë’s novel, the character Jane Eyre as a writer emerges as part of the 19th century women’s intimate landscape. Jane Eyre allows us to reflect on autobiography as the only possible way in which a Victorian woman could express herself, an issue Brontë didn’t bring up to be openly discussed but which she artistically disguised in the accurate choice of a genre. Jane Eyre overpowers her author, becoming an author herself and going beyond the boundaries of her era. As Hawthorne says, referring to autobiography as a literary genre:
“Some authors, indeed, …indulge themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed, only and exclusively, to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer’s own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally.” (Hawthorne, 15)
Victorian women couldn’t speak all and it’s Jane Eyre, the writer, who writes for us what Brontë couldn’t write: the autobiography of a woman who becomes a writer.

Works Cited
Bolton, Gilles. "Who's speaking?." Journal of Medical Ethics
29(2003): 97.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Bantam Books, 1987.
Fahy, Christopher A.. "Alcott reading: An American response to
the writings of Charlotte Brontë." Children's Literature
30(2002): 187.
Flint, Kate. "Tradition's of Victorian Women's Autobiography:
The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing." Biography
25(2002): 505.
Godfrey, Esther. "Jane Eyre, from Governess to Girl Bride." Studies
in English Literature 45(2005): 853.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. Cambridge University
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Knight, DD. "Jane Eyre's American daughters." Choice 43, Iss 5
(2006): 856.
Richard, Jessica. ""I am equally weary of confinement": Women
writers and Rasselas from Dinarbas to Jane Eyre." Tulsa's
Studies in Women's Literature 22(2003): 335.

EDGAR ALLAN POE: AN AMERICAN ENTERTAINER

2006-07-29T17:06:00.000-03:00

“The great problem is accomplished. We have crossed the Atlantic- fairly and easily crossed it in a balloon! God be praised! Who shall say that anything is impossible here after?” wrote Poe by the end of The Balloon-Hoax (Complete Tales and Poems, 80), a story which can also be seen as the metaphor of the new American times, which required an equivalent inaugural cultural journey.
By birth and education, Edgar Allan Poe was half British, half American and living in the first decades of America as an independent country, he faced the double challenge of creating a new American literature worth its name and of redefining the role of writer in the new democratic society. In 1833, his foster father, John Allan, wrote this comment about him on the back of a letter Poe had sent him: “His talents are of an order that can never prove a comfort to their possessor,” summarizing thus the opinion of a society not yet in tune with artists as professionals. If Poe tried first to get adapted to his foster family of rich tobacco merchants and the aristocratic Virginia society, being a soldier or a lawyer, after failing in both careers he finally found the true place which was his, by right of birth.
As the son of two actors and through his articles, stories and poems, he addressed the public as an entertainer, founding a new aesthetic and proposing to his contemporaries a new American vision of the world. As an American entertainer, Poe redefined good and evil for the new masses, no longer European, not yet fully American, in quest of truth, which had to be painted with the colors of an artistic continent yet to be discovered.

By fate, Poe was in a privileged position to compare Europe and America. Born in Boston, raised both in Virginia and London, he soon realized that “We have no aristocracy of blood, and having therefore as a natural, and indeed as an inevitable thing, fashioned for ourselves an aristocracy of dollars, the display of wealth has here to take the place and perform the office of the heraldic display in monarchical countries. By a transition readily understood, and which might have been as readily foreseen, we have been brought to merge in simple show our notions of taste itself.” (Complete Tales and Poems, Philosophy of Furniture, 462). In that wealthy rather than aristocratic society, which was also becoming little by little a democratic society of masses, Poe had many problems to solve. Not only to find his own place in society as the disowned son of a rich tobacco merchant, but, once decided to make his living as a writer, he had also to evolve from the literary European tradition to the new American literature, which had its center in Boston and where the European trends were imitated or recreated.
Heirs of the Enlightenment philosophers or followers of the Romantic movement, his Bostonian peers irritated Poe, who was from start a rebel to any aesthetic authority, claiming in his very American way, freedom to create. Little by little, Poe became the author of an original literary philosophical system expressed in his stories, poems and critic essays. He criticized both the Enlightenment and Romantic sequels in America because he didn’t believe neither in the absolute power of reason or the sole command of emotions. He promoted a method of art where intuition would be served by a rigorous artistic construction, paraphrasing his most deep spiritual beliefs, where God and Truth couldn’t be but an intuition, and a certainty only through the Beauty and perfection of the Universe, which the artist had to imitate. Poe made a whole American blend of metaphysic intuition and scientific knowledge, including the mechanics of writing, to build a literary universe, mirroring as a double the Universe, where reason exists only to serve the Truth through the scientific demonstration of the invisible phenomena. As Hoffman observes, “Poe takes certain aspects of the Romantic Movement to their limits –his tales of terror and poems of being haunted by lost loves probe and dramatize these states of feeling….At the same time, Poe inherits the Enlightenment rage for order, for systematization.” The mix of elements of the Romantic Movement with elements of the XVIIIth century philosophers turned into an original American style. Poe’s Gothic is no more a British Gothic and if in some of his stories, like “William Wilson”, “The Masque of the Read Death” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”, we still see the need of the civilized and refined European settings, themes and characters, in “The Fall of the House of Usher”, for instance, we perceive the new American setting and the wondrous blend of the British nostalgia and the decaying colonial society, where the theme of incest, endogamy and the salvation of a family from sin and decay only by exogamy, evokes the independence and the partition of the European homeland.
Poe also sees that in America, some of the ancient European codes pre-French Revolution can be preserved: ” “With our modern and altogether rational ideas of the absurdity and impiety of warfare, we are not precisely in that frame of mind best adapted to sympathize with the sentiments, and thus to appreciate the real excellence of the poem. To do this fully we must identify ourselves in fancy with the soul of the old cavalier….Our business is like men to fight/ And hero-like to die!”(Complete Tales and Poems, The Poetic Principle, 906-907). As a new born American, he rejects with strength a society where individualism would be of no worth and one of his characters ironically states: “I rejoice, my dear friend, that we live in an age so enlightened that no such a thing as an individual is supposed to exist. It is the mass for which the true Humanity cares.” (Complete Tales and Poems, Mellonta Tauta, 387). Poe’s ideal social system was hierarchical and he was convinced that if the old days of European aristocratic society were gone, it was not an unformed society of masses which would substitute it: “ It is related, however, that the first circumstance which disturbed, very particularly, the self-complacency of the philosophers who constructed this "Republic," was the startling discovery that universal suffrage gave opportunity for fraudulent schemes A little reflection upon this discovery sufficed to render evident the consequences, which were that rascality must predominate–in a word, that a republican government could never be any thing but a rascally one.” (Complete Tales and Poems, Mellonta Tauta, 390).
Something new had to come, and Poe proposed to his contemporaries an alternative thought to the current trends, which, even local, as the Trascendentalist movement, didn’t seem deep enough to apprehend the nature of the changing society. Poe, as a writer on the stage of newspapers and magazines, was a mirror of these changes, not always perceived by an audience which took a long time to understand what Poe’s performance was about. Wooing the public with a perfect craft, to convey his vision Poe trusted his art more than any philosophical tirade: “By undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought.” (Complete Tales and Poems, The Murders of the Rue Morgue, 153)

If the cultural shift from Europe to America worried Poe as an artist, the more permanent theme of the battle Good and Evil, also understood as the opposition of Life and Death, captured his soul, and in most of his writings we can see the traces of this concern. As a very sensitive and accurate instrument, he echoed the religious fears and beliefs of the new Americans, who were creating not only a new culture but also a new Christian religion, with its own character. Poe had a rich personal life, made out of a deep contrast between education and misery, richness and disease, public position and lack of recognition. His spiritual quest comes from the experience of his difficult life, always with his keen eye looking within himself, in the search of the source of Evil as well as the source of Beauty and Good.
As Peter Thoms points, Poe relied on “The potential comforts of narrative: the apparent provision of order, of meaning, of a metaphoric map in time (with beginning, middle and end) that seems to tell us where we are.”(The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, 133) to convey his vision of the world. Stories like “The Imp of the Perverse”, “The Tell Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”, among many others, propose a reflection on mankind and evil in the frame of an entertaining mystery story.
Poe found his own redemption as a man through his art and he shared with the public the metaphorized chapters of his inner struggle, so that the public could also reflect on these themes. He felt like one of them, as new as them, as innocent and as guilty, as responsible in the need of finding new images and new meanings to old themes in a brand new society. As the intuitive artist he was, Poe discovered soon that literature could be a great teacher for the new masses, not in the didactic way other writers like Hawthorne understood it, by rational allegories, but through the sudden epiphany of art: “All true knowledge …makes its advances by intuitive bonds” (Complete Tales and Poems, Mellonta Tauta, 387).
Poe the actor had his own technique to understand his fellow contemporaries: “When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression”(Complete Tales and Poems, The Purloined Letter, 216). His deep knowledge of humanity was in service of what was his main task as a writer: to create a truthful world where his creatures would inspire a reflection on the Universe and his creator: “The Universe as a plot of God” (Poe, Eureka) Initiated in the ancient mysteries of knowledge, the former soldier, the failed law student, Poe the writer performed his metaphysical play in front of Virginian bourgeois, a not too spiritual audiences, with one basic certainty, inherited of the most purest pioneer religious American spirit: “Does it not seem singular how they should have failed to deduce from the works of God the vital fact that a perfect consistency must be an absolute truth!” (Complete Tales and Poems, Mellonta Tauta, 389) Poe’s originality would take some time to be fully apprehended. In 1848, he was still misunderstood by his fellow Americans, not fully grown yet to their potential and unable to see Poe as their true double: “There comes Poe…Who has written some things quite the best of their kind/ But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind” (James Russell Lowell).

Poe began his career as a writer when the print as an industry started to grow in America, creating new legions of readers. Not yet the mass media society, but the beginning of it, Poe was aware of the new market rules. He knew he was part of a chain in need of writers to fill pages with an attractive content for readers who would pay for it –whether in the form of newspapers, magazines or books- and, therefore, for his own writer’s wages. Poe knew also that he needed readers to make a living and that his first professional duty was to attract them. He was not always lucky in this success: his best seller and the only book which was reprinted in the time of his life was “The Conchologist’s First Book” (Gould), a coauthored manual on shellfish. Richards mentions that “Whalen [in his book Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses] identifies Poe’s central challenge as addressing an audience newly divided among an elite group of readers interested in ‘true literary merit’, a mass of readers who seek to be entertained and the ‘Capital reader’ who assesses the marketability of a text. Poe confronted this challenge not by writing different kinds of works for different audiences, but by creating a theory and practice of the ‘divided text’ that addresses simultaneously readers with different evaluative criteria.” Poe’s literary efforts brought to the American public craving always for new things, combative articles destroying well established literary reputations, like Longfellow’s, sensationalist pieces like “The Balloon-Hoax”, tales that inaugurated an American taste for horror like “The Cask of Amontillado” and new genres like the mystery stories of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget” or like the science fiction stories “Mesmeric Revelation” or “Maelzel’s Chess- Player.” Poe’s body of work, including his most famous poems like “The Raven”, stands as the first Southern literary wall opposed to the Northern, by its connection to the muddy nature of man, far away from the cleanness of Bostonian reason, far away from the pale blue cold colors and anchored in the pure red of blood, from lust, murder or the plain spit of consumption.
Many of Poe characters write or are directly writers proposing to the public an amusing reflection on the writer’s role in the new game of American entertainment. He satirized aspiring writers in some of his humorous stories as “The Literary Life of Thingum Bo, Esq.” and “How to Write a Blackwood Article.” ”Castigat ridendo mores”, the maxim of Jean de Santeuil applies to these stories where writers also need to receive a lesson on what are the ethical rules in a profession still to be defined. He described also the role of writers as newspapermen in the new market society, being the mirror of daily events, with even a cynic quota of sensationalism required to sell more than competitors, in a market where printed magazines and papers were soaring. As Richards observes: “Poe’s work is fundamentally shaped by “the political economy of literature,” followed by Grammer interesting reflection on the same issue: “Poe, like us, lived during an information revolution, one in which the speed and cheapness of printing, and resulting literary overproduction, threatened to render any individual work of literature nearly valueless. He was not the only writer to lament these conditions, but few others understood so profoundly their full implication. Strongly influenced, in this one respect, by his despised foster-father, the merchant John Allan, Poe habitually viewed literature through the lens of commerce. For him, publishing was always a product, either useful (like the financial news on which Allan depended) or merely beautiful (like poems and stories).”
Sometimes an actor, sometimes also a Southern charlatan, Poe played his solo, his one act play, stand up comedian on the paper stage, creating what Baudelaire defined as an “objet de luxe” to be consumed by the new bourgeosie in ascension, what would become later the massive American middle class, earlier fond of moral entertainment. Poe hated the moral preaching of the Trascendentalist writers, but he believed in art as the supreme conveyor of truth: “Convinced myself, I seek not to convince” (Complete Tales and Poems, Berenice).
As a classical artist, Poe undertook the task of showing the world as it was with a subtle hint about the world as it should be. He portrayed horror and evil, but in total Beauty, witnessing in his art what he perceived as the infinite power and mercy of God. An entertainer because he needed to make a living, and an artist because that was what he was meant to be, Poe explains with his own words how the stage kitchen works: “Most writers-- poets in especial--prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic intuition--and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought--at the true purposes seized only at the last moment--at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view--at the fully-matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable--at the cautious selections and rejections--at the painful erasures and interpolations--in a word, at the wheels and pinions- the tackle for scene-shifting- the step-ladders, and demon-traps- the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, constitute the properties of the literary histrio.” (Poe, Philosophy of Composition)

“It’s because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films”, said Alfred Hitchcock, in an interview published in 1960, recognizing Poe as the basement of all contemporary suspense fiction in literature and films. Other writers, film makers and artists would also claim Poe as predecessor in the art of entertaining the American public. Two of Poe’s more important characteristics: his full American-ness made of a wise and inspired recreation of old British and European cultures and his spiritual quest where religion and esoteric traditions blended in a unique combination, created a whole aesthetic American brand that can be perceived from Welles to George Lucas and from Bradbury to Stephen King. The great entertainer clearly foresaw the new chances Americans had, as part of a new society, to go a step further in the quest of human perfection and thus also, a step further in Art: “It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic.”(Complete Tales and Poems, The Murders of the Rue Morgue, 143).
Poe’s work inaugurated a tradition, a pure American artistic pattern made of lively intuition and spiritual reasoning embedded in always powerful human characters taken to their extreme. As part of a long lineage of writers and poets who followed his path, William Carlos William paid his homage to Poe: “In him American literature is anchored, in him alone, on solid ground” (“Edgar Allan Poe”, In the American Grain, 1925)

Works Cited
Dameron, J.Lasley. "Poe, "Simplicity" and Blackwood's Magazine." The Mississipi Quarterly
Spring 1998.
Gould, Stephen Jay. "Poe's greatest Hits." Natural History July 1993.
Grammer, John. "Poe, literature and the marketplace." Southern Literary Journal Fall 2002.
Hayes, Kevin J.. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Hoffman, Daniel. "Edgar Allan Poe: the Artist of the Beautiful." The American Poetry
Review November 1995.
Poe, Edgar Allan. "Bits and Pieces." 15 Jul 2006 .
Poe, Edgar Allan. Complete Tales and Poems. New York: Vintage Books, 1975
Poe, Edgar Allan. Eureka. 16 Jul 2006 .
Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Quotations Page." 15 Jul 2006 .
Richards, Eliza. "Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in
Antebellum America." Studies in Romanticism Spring 2002.

THE FATHER TONGUE (2006)

2006-07-01T16:42:00.000-03:00

Bearing it? Holding out? Enduring? Junot Díaz could have used any of these expressions instead of the Spanish word “Aguantando”, as the title of his short story included in his book “Drown”, written in one of the most creative and astounding English tones since Carver. But Junot Díaz, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic to the United States as a child, still perceives himself as an immigrant to the English language. Even if Díaz has been “hyped as the next young gun of American fiction”(Spillman), his Spanish words, tossed here and there in the text in a very controlled way , act as a reminder that he is writing from his cultural background as a Dominican and that he has a mother tongue, the Spanish language. This kind of bicultural text has created what it is more a market label than an accurate literary category: the Latino literature. Written by immigrants, and more often than not, reporting the immigration experience, it is a literature written in English and firmly embedded in the American culture. As the Cuban-American writer Gustavo Pérez Firmat states: “Born in Cuba but made in the U.S.A., I can no longer imagine living outside American culture and the English language” (Next Year in Cuba, 1). The Latino label usually doesn’t apply to the immigrants who decided to be faithful to their Spanish and are considered as writers belonging to their national origin –the most famous of them, Isabel Allende, a San Francisco resident, is a Chilean writer- mainly because, like the Cuban poet José Kozer, they have manifested their “will to live in Spanish” (Pérez Firmat, Life on the Hyphen, 161). Those who, inside the United States, play the experimental game of belonging to a sort of nation –the Hispanic community- inside another nation- the United States- write in Spanglish, which is a Spanish infiltrated and modified by the English and, according to Ilan Stavans , “a new American language in the making.”(Marx and Escobar Ulloa). These experimental writers seem to represent the only true literary novelty: living in an imaginary Latinoland inside the United States, they relate to the Spanish language and tradition. Junot Díaz, as Oscar Hijuelos, Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez and many others, represent the Latino writers but their writings, as the exemplary “Aguantando”, show that they might be Latino writers, but there is no such a thing as Latino literature written in English. Once the Latino writer chooses the English, the English also chooses him, and the Latino story, the Latino character and the Latino experience become part of the English language heritage while being, at the same time, ruled by it. What is called Latino literature is nothing else but pure American literature: language rules.

Junot Díaz comes from the Island, that Hispaniola where Columbus landed and started the invention of America. Because America was first a continent, and a promise of paradise for Europeans, no matter if from Great Britain, Spain, France or other countries, all the countries of the Americas share this solid ground of a shared birth. Independence wars brought a new common sign of identity to all the American countries and the leader of them all, the first to cut the umbilical cord with Europe, took the name of the continent: America. That America grew from the independence of the British Empire, which would rule the world still for more than a century, and, as an absolute master of the world, gave good lessons to its breed. The other America, the Latin America, won instead its independence from the falling and destroyed Spanish Empire, only to get the melancholy lesson of the looser. The tension between the Anglo-Saxon culture and the Hispanic culture, between the English and the Spanish, and between the Latin Americans –immigrants or not- and the US Americans, is dyed by this historical background with deep psychological resonances. Junot Díaz literature is inscribed in this confrontational pattern of two cultures and his statement of using Spanish words is also an unconscious rebellion to his choice of English. A rebellion which is also well paid back by Kirzner and Mandell, the authors of “Literature” , the book where “Aguantando “ can be read by English students, but only as “Aguantado” (448) , a disrespectful misspelling, which converts the present participle in a past one and shows how the Anglo-Spanish war is still active, not only in the immigrants minds but in the country hosts.

Between being fully American and rebelling against it, the Latino immigrant dwells under a powerful shadow: the mother land, the mother tongue and probably the actual mother. Junot Díaz ‘s “Aguantando” tells the story of a boy living with his mother, brother and grandfather in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic capital and the oldest city in the Americas, while he dreams of the return of his absent father, gone to the United States. From the first sentence: “I lived without a father for the first nine years of my life” (Kirzner and Mandell, 448) to the last one “What’s the worry with that one?, he’d ask and Mami would say, he doesn’t know you. Squatting down so that his pale yellow dress socks , he’d trace the scars on my arms and on my head. Yunior, he would finally say, his stubbled face in front of mine, his thumb tracing a circle on my cheek” (457) Díaz introduces the relationship with the US as a relationship with an absent father. “He had left for NuevaYork when I was four but since I couldn’t remember a single moment with him I excused him from all nine years of my life”(448) says the protagonist of the story about his father, adding that “the only way I knew him was through the photographs my mom kept in a plastic sandwich bag under her bed” (448) while giving to the paragraph a political spin, since the shot was taken in the same year the US invaded the Dominican Republic, 1965, to prevent a feared new communist revolution in the Caribbean.

“Aguantando” can be seen also as an autobiographical story that reflects the perception of Junot Díaz as an immigrant himself, torn between the need of faithfulness to the mother tongue and the need to betray her to survive in the new American environment, adopting what in the story can be seen as the symbolic father’s tongue. The protagonist relates his miserable life in a poor neighborhood of Santo Domingo, where, like in most of the Latin American countries, there is no law and no justice, with the necessary consequences of lack of education and poverty. The Latin American society is described by Díaz as a feminine dominant society without a rule. For the protagonist, the US appears not only as the place where the father is, but where the jobs are; where men go and where men rule. Junot Díaz ’ s choice of the English language could be based on the deep need Latin Americans have of a father who properly rules the family life in a way its members are kept together and able to prosper. To resign to the mother tongue signifies in Díaz world, to enter in what is perceived as the father tongue: a language that rules the previously unruled. The English language and its tradition are fully embraced by Díaz, as the scholar Rob Jacklosky notes: “In a twist that no marketing strategist could have foreseen, in most bookstores, Diaz shares shelf space with Dickens, often sitting cover-to- cover ... so rather than a ‘front-line report’ as one critique suggests, what we have is a missive from the literary past: Diaz is working in a classic, not a street mode.” In Díaz language, the said and the not-said create a more powerful link to the English speaking reader’s emotions than the hidden meaning of some Spanish words. It is not then the association with Dickens but with Raymond Carver that prevails, in the delicate assessment of the family ghosts. As the critic Eli Gotlieb points out “The family portrayed in many of Diaz’s stories is fatherless, and the father’s ghost presence is the core of the book, a kind of ground tone or ambient noise which shades the narrator’s whole childhood.” In Díaz prose we are far away from any Spanish literary tradition. The sharp language and the sober construction of the scenes remind us more of Hemingway than any of the contemporary Spanish authors, except those who made the point of abandoning the Spanish flourishing wordiness and its tendency to the baroque, and mimicked the precision and brevity of the English, imitating also American authors in the structure of fiction. The reading of “Aguantando” in Spanish, in the translation of the book “Drown” (which, continuing the bicultural battle, became in Spanish “Los Boys”) represents a thrilling experience. The memoir of a Spanish speaking Dominican kid has the pace, the rhythm and the tone of what a Spanish reader recognizes immediately as a translation from the English of the United States, with its hammering sentences, made of mere action, with precise verbs which in Spanish would require infinite adjectives to come to the point, and a whole flair of American-ness in the way of talking about the most intimate feelings, which in its lack of self pity is not Hispanic at all. What happened to Díaz, a Hispanic after all, and how come that even translated to Spanish, he writes like an American? Writing about his absent father, he abandoned his mother and recovered his father in the language of the country that fostered first the father and later the son. By doing so, he became an American writer and completed the full circle of immigration. His cultural background will remain for ever as Latin American, Hispanic, and Dominican but his literature is now nothing but pure American production. The absent father is finally present: English rules.

Talking about his first trip back to Dominican Republic, “home”, after twenty years, Junot Díaz writes: “The trip was to accomplish many things. It would end my exile –what Salman Rushdie has famously called one’s dream of glorious return,” to only find that “Nobody believed that I was a Dominican! You, one cabdriver said incredulously and then turned and laughed.” (Díaz, Homecoming, with Turtle) and we cannot but remember the scene in “Aguantando” where the protagonist plays with his friend Wilfredo, “We shook hands elaborately. I called him Muhammad Ali and he called me Sinbad; these were our Northamerican names. We were both in shorts; a disintegrating pair of sandals clung to his toes” (453), and realize how America as a model has always worked inside the Latin American souls, provoking mixed feelings of genuine desire of betterment and an uncomfortable envy which always seems to point out the inferiority feeling where it comes from. In this sense, some could be drawn to think that “Díaz has provided us with an exemplary chapter in the novel of American Empire, showing us both the literal impoverishments produced by colonialism, and –perhaps more difficult to accomplish- the excruciatingly subtle ways in which colonialism can be internalized and allowed a second life” (Gottlieb), forgetting that the cause of poverty in the society where Díaz and the rest of Latin Americans come from , lies not in the so called imperial expansion of the United States but rather in the lack of proper rules or even of a rule. If Díaz, in the rest of the stories of “Drown”, presents also the life of his protagonist Yunior with “his struggles with alienation and dislocation as an immigrant in New Jersey” (Chen), and as a “ghetto writer … he shocks the reader into the experience of rough life in the ghetto. As a result it reiterates Díaz political causes and exposes the delusion of the American Dream.” (Chen) , we might be tempted to shelve him again in the Latino section, forgetting that his chronicles of poverty and his artistically controlled “disregard for English grammar” (Chen) and “His use of blatant curses, Spanish interjections, lack of quotation marks and failure to start new paragraphs” are not far from the Afro-American literature, which has never been doubted of being other than American literature, with the African languages also lost in the far away past, and reflecting accurately in the style of dialogues, the uneducated and particular way of speaking of the working class. As Díaz himself says in an interview by Marina Lewis: “It’s fun to blow things out of proportion to make a point” (Lewis).

In that same interview, Díaz had previously confessed: “Because community work is so important to me, I find myself almost utterly alienated from other writers. Because that’s a central part of who I am. For most other writers that’s not a real concern. Few are the writers I can share both my art and my community work with” (Lewis) “Aguantando” can be read then also as the testimony of a political fighter, in the crossroads not only of the wealthy White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant population and the Dark, Dominican, Catholic immigrant community, but in the wider continental crossroads of the wealthy English speaking America and the poor Spanish speaking America. Two Americas which are doomed to be one, as in the beginning, with the languages reconciled in the richness of the common history and each respectful of its own tradition. In the meantime, Díaz says: “I might grow up feeling truly American, but I won’t. I am an immigrant and I will stay an immigrant” (Guthmann). However, when the drama of poverty and the tragedy of immigration become part of the past and not a poignant daily reminder of injustice, nobody will deny to bilinguals or trilinguals in the continent, the pleasure of expressing themselves in more than one language, a privilege of educated people that only becomes a theme of an essay when writing in the language of the rich is understood as betraying the language of the poor.

In “Aguantando”, there is also a Spanish speaking father who chose to stay in the Dominican Republic, the young protagonist’s grandfather, the father of her mother, who spends his time setting rat traps and remembering “the good old days, when a man could still make a living from his finca, when the United States wasn’t something folks planned on.”(450) As long as the local fathers will fail, orphans will not always have the choice of loyalty to their mother land and mother tongue. They will continue to emigrate and the American literature will benefit from them, even if they persist, as Julia Alvarez in believing and telling us they are something else: “No, I am not a Dominican writer or really a Dominican in the traditional sense….I’ m also not ‘una norteamericana’. I am not a mainstream American writer with my roots in a small town in Illinois or Kentucky or even New México, I don’t hear the same rhythms in English as a native speaker of English. Sometimes I hear Spanish in English (and of course, viceversa). That’s why I describe myself as a Dominican American writer. That’s not just a term. I am mapping a country that’s not on the map, and that’s why I am trying to put it down to paper”(172-173) But she writes it in English. In a perfect, round and polished English because as Junot Díaz concludes: “No one internalizes social norms in society as do minorities in that society. Or, in other words, whatever criteria there is for literature, nobody follows that more to the letter, I think, than people who are literary minorities. There is this kind of colonial baggage…that idea that the Indian becomes more Indian than the Englishman” (Lewis). Or the child, a man, like his father.

Works Cited
Alvarez, Julia. Something to Declare. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
Chen, Yvonne. "Junot Díaz: Writer, Activist, Teacher."
The Middlebury Campus 23/04/2006
http://www.middleburycampus.com>.
Díaz, Junot. "Homecoming, with Turtle."
The New Yorker 14 June 2004 23/04/2006
.
Díaz, Junot. Los Boys. 1st ed. Barcelona: Mondadori, 1996.
Gottlieb, Ely. "Prose Reviews Drown Junot Díaz." Boston Review. 28/04/06
.
Guthmann, Edward. "It's a scary time for Latin American immigrants and Junot
Díaz feels the pressure to help."
San Francisco Chronicle 22 April 2006 28/04/2006 .
Jacklosky, Rob. "Drown- Book Review."
Studies in Short Fiction.
Winter 1998. 28/04/2006 .
(Jacklosky)
Kirszner, Laurie G., Stephen R.Mandell. Literature.5th ed.
Boston, Ma. Thomson, 2004.

Lewis, Marina. "Interview with Junot Díaz."
Other Voices 3623/04/2006
http://www.webdelsol.com/Other_Voices/DíazInt.htm>.
Marx, Agnes and Escobar Ulloa, Ernesto. "Entrevista: Ilans Stavans."
Barcelona Review 28/04/2006 .
Pérez Firmat, Gustavo . Life on the Hyphen. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press,
1994.
Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. Next Year in Cuba. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
Spillman, Robert. "Salon Daily Clicks: Sneack Peeks." Salon 23/04/2006
.

THE FENCE, THE WALL (2006)

2006-07-01T16:41:00.000-03:00

“Tear down this wall!” ordered President Reagan to the Soviet leader Gorbachev in Berlin on June 12th 1987, without suspecting that a couple of decades later, some of his fellows Republicans would pass a bill to build a fence across the American border to stop illegal immigration. As the one who said” “Freedom leads to prosperity” and “The wall cannot withstand freedom”, Reagan would have been more pleased with those, both Republicans and Democrats, who in the House of Representatives, opposed the fence initiative comparing it to the Berlin Wall. As the great politician he was, he would have figured out a better way to dissuade Latin Americans from entering illegally into the United States than building a fence that only would remind Latin American and the world how totalitarian regimes protect themselves. The fence is not just a border patrol instrument but a symbol: a wall between the rich America and the poor America. A wall of fear which will part the American continent in two, as the Berlin Wall parted Europe. A wall of despise which will alienate even more the Latin American countries against the United States, at a war time where friends are more needed than enemies.

The United States has an illegal population of about 11,000,000 people. Half a million more illegal immigrants enter each year. The terrorist attacks of September 2001 left no doubts about the need to know who is who in the country, illegal or not, and to have a complete control on those who visit the country. So, something has to be done. James Sensebrenner (R-Wisconsin) authored a bill known as the Border Protection, Antiterrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005 and President Bush has spoken in favor of this bill, fence included, even if at the same time he sponsors a more sensible guest-worker visa program compatible with his all time friendship with the Hispanic American community. The fence, a rather sterile and expensive device when most of the illegal immigrants enter legally the country and then overstay, has create a heated debate in the Congress. Many Republicans and a majority of Democrats opposed the bill and the five initial fences of 698 miles out of the 2000 miles border between Mexico and the US and look for more efficient alternatives to the immigration issue. This represents also a big concern for the legal population of Hispanic Americans, who fears a big anti-Hispanic wave coming along with extreme immigration policies. We are in a pre-electoral year and not only the Hispanic vote is at stake. Which world policy the United States will adopt and which place Latin America will have within that policy is also a matter of serious debate in the frame of the war against terrorism and rogue states. The Latin American countries can join the rebels or become closer allies with the United States and, in regard to the immigration issue, they have noticed that there are no fences planned across the Canadian border nor any particular fishnet projected in the Pacific to prevent Asian immigration. The fence is a continental issue.

President Bush took office in January 2001 with a promise: that the Free Trade Area of the Americas (which would unite all the American countries in a common market bigger than the European Community), would be accomplished by 2005. That project, which was the priority for a President who understood at that time that the American power needed stronger continental roots to properly compete with the European Community, ended tragically – as a priority- on September 11th 2001. The US forgot its continental mission and went to Asia to secure the European gates. Since then, the image and power of the United States in Latin America has dramatically decreased and, while speeches talk in favor of the FTAA, other measures, like the projected 2000-mile fence, talk of another symbolical fence: the one that divides Americans from the US, from Americans of the rest of the American continent. Once again, it is necessary to remember that if Americans call themselves Americans because they were born in America, the country who took the name of the continent, Latin Americans also call themselves Americans, Americanos, because they were born in the same continent. The shared condition of Americans and the common property of the American continent pose the same type of questions Europeans raised at the time of their union. How to deal with boundaries, border, and common cultural assets is not easy, and that is exactly the problem the United States and the Latin American countries have to explore if they want to build a common market and a political unity. The FTAA –Free Trade Area for the Americas- was proposed as the beginning of the solution but resisted by the traditional enemies of the US. When people like Fidel Castro from Cuba and Hugo Chavez from Venezuela, organize big demonstrations against the United States all over the continent, including the riots in Argentina by the Summit of the Americas in November 2005 when President Bush was visiting, one wonders who the fence will serve, if the United States –who battles to spread freedom in the world- or its enemies –giving them the perfect pretense to regroup behind a fence that shouts the free world is not for them.

Why do Latin Americans want to work and live in the US? I am a Latin American and I can tell why. The differences between Latin America and the United States are not all related to wealth, but rather to the conditions that promote wealth: a strong democracy; solid and respected institutions; justice; respect for the law and the right of property; all conditions which precisely attract investment, which in turn creates jobs and better living conditions, like water supply, power, roads. Latin American countries lack of most of those things. That’s why Mexicans die crossing illegally the border, that’s why poor Colombians swallow packs of cocaine and illegally bring drugs to the US, that’s why drug lords dig tunnels across the border and that’s also why Americans get an illegal crowd that waits their tables, build their houses, take care of their children and mow the grass in their gardens, paying less than they would pay an US worker.

The problem of illegal immigration will only be solved by fair measures that recognize the US need of immigrants to sustain its economy. To legalize workers would create even wages for everybody and the jobs market would be completely clear, with no unfair treatment either for the immigrants or for the US American workers who suffer today a disloyal competition. If those who hire illegal workers were duly penalized, ending the hypocrisy of complaining about illegal immigration but at the same time encouraging the illegal hire, the immigration would be ruled by the natural laws of supply and demand. Justice could be the best fence because nobody would cross a border behind which there is no work.

The problem of illegal immigration goes beyond the Mexican border –with a fence or not. Most of the immigrants arrive with a tourist visa and then stay. They come not only from Mexico but from all the Latin American countries, more and more disorganized every day and with less and less hope. Thirty and more Cubas are on the horizon if things don’t change. Does the United States need that? Will a fence across the Mexican border stop the crowds of impoverished people living in terror of even more totalitarian regimes like the one growing right now in Venezuela? Is the fence the best defense a free country can build against those who don’t threaten its freedom but rather aspire to the same? Instead of the fence, a double answer is needed. First, to rule properly on the illegal hire so that illegal immigrants are not encouraged to an unfair competition with the US legal workforce, and second, and most important, the US should focus –through a political extension of the FTAA- in exporting to the Latin American countries, democracy techniques, institutional know-how and business organization wisdom. These countries which are feared by US workers and businessmen as competitors because of their lower prices, are in fact potential buyers –not only of sophisticated products- but of US services.

The infrared technology, cameras, drones, all the technology, the people to enforce the border, all the fence paraphernalia will cost anywhere from the $70 million already signed by President Bush to an estimate over $45,2 billion when the fence is completed. Wiser laws on work and wiser investment to spread freedom in Latin American countries would bring to the US not only more international friends and military allies but a lot of money, because America –not as a country but as a whole continent- has the potential to become the greatest common market in the world. Greater than Europe, of course, and even greater than China, and this is what will count in the second part of the 21st century. The Free Trade Area of the Americas is not only a commercial project; it’s the most important project the US has for its survival as the leader of the world. That’s why so many enemies of the US leadership are interested in poisoning its relationship with Latin America: nothing better for them than cutting the roots the US could grow below the border.

Reagan remembered, in that same wall speech at Berlin, the words of Secretary of State George Marshall in 1947 -“Our policy is not directed against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos” – and also the signs Berliners could see posted at that time - “The Marshall Plan is helping here to strengthen the free world.” In our days, Samuel Huntington is less generous: “There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican-Americans will share in that dream and in that society only if they dream in English.” If it’s true that immigrants accepted in the United States should respect the language and values of those who welcome them, it’s wrong to imagine that the Americano dream will stop. How to dissuade new immigrants from crowding at the border? Those who still remain in their countries might continue to dream in Spanish, but only as long as they have the freedom to dream. Since freedom has been a common cause for Americans and Americanos since the Independence, maybe the time has come to reverse the immigration. Pressure for pressure, Americans could now be those who cross the border bringing their knowledge and businesses to the Americano countries which desperately need it. A fence would only bother their friendly and joyful march south.

MY AMERICA, SU AMERICA (2001)

2006-07-01T16:13:00.000-03:00

A few days ago, during the Hispanic Heritage celebration, President Bush, with a funny smile and a wink to the Spanish-speaking audience, converted the well-known Mexican saying Mi casa, su casa, into Mi Casa Blanca, su Casa Blanca. The Latinos living in the United States maybe didn’t need this assessment, since they perceive themselves as Americans in their own right in spite of their Hispanic heritage. But maybe in the times of the Free Trade Area for the Americas, probably the most important international issue for the United States after the war against terrorism, the large continental majority could be a better audience for the kind and generous invitation of the President of the United States.

Latin Americans beyond Mexico, successful partner in the NAFTA, wonder if the coming free trade area will make of them welcome guests of the economy of the most powerful country in the Continent and on the planet. At the same time, President Bush and the present administration haven’t yet made a clear assessment on the levels of protection the US will eliminate in order to allow a real free trade with the less favored countries, which – like the USA itself—desperately need new markets.

Fidel Castro, who has very clear thinking about what a real friendly association with the United States would mean for the Latin American countries -- no longer doubting about the benefits of capitalism — has recently expressed that the Free Trade Area means nothing but a disguised annexation. For Castro, Latin America has no other choice since the external debt of almost every country is impossible to be paid. No longer an exporter of socialism, angry with his exclusion from the project, the Cuban leader spreads the negative idea that there are only two possible options --- annexation or bankruptcy ---, an idea that will make its way into the Latin American public consciousness unless discussed.

The binary thought that opposes imperialism against socialism is an easy path for skeptical Latin American minds, by whom the Free Trade Area is quickly explained as a threat of annexation by the United States of all the countries below the Rio Grande. The idea that a fair capitalism can spread in the same countries where all the economic theories seem to always have failed to eradicate poverty still needs powerful thinkers and speakers. In the United States, worker unions believe that any agreement with poorer countries will encourage American companies to produce in those countries with lower wages. At the same time, the poorer countries worry that their production will not be accepted in the United States.

Both parties seem to need to be addressed with a project that encourages both the United States export of infrastructure services – such as roads, water supply, communications, building, railways — as well as the export of Latin American industry. Both parties should be encouraged to merge companies from one side and the other, ,making of continental capitalism a new flag. It wouldn’t harm if the United States would be the first to resign the old thinking, inviting Cuba to join the project, maybe trading the blockade for the start of free elections. Exports to Asia, Africa and Europe under the Continental brand – a large and all-inclusive American brand—would exponentially increase the wealth of the USA as well as the rest of the countries.

The experience of NAFTA is the perfect example of what happens when trust and a common commercial purpose lead the association between a rich economy and a less developed one. Cultural and military associations will follow in the steps of the trade agreements and finally a political association –not too different from the European Union — will give a convenient frame to a union among equals. A continental federal system will be understood as the opposite of imperialistic expansion, and a union in freedom will be the ultimate response to those who could still blindly talk of annexation.
Defying those who don’t believe in the good will of the United States, and making of the Free Trade Area of the Americas the most generous project of capitalism for the creation of wealth and well-being, President Bush could soon say: My America, su América. He would make clear, once and for all, that America is the common continent, a unity from the start, and that intelligent people should not make a confusion between leadership and imperialism.

THE WAR AND THE FREE TRADE AREA FOR THE AMERICAS (2001)

2006-07-01T16:10:00.000-03:00

From Monroe to San Martín, from Bolívar to Martí, from Kennedy to Perón, the union of the Americas in a one and only American nation has been the most cherished dream for American patriots. No matter which country they've stood for, the idea of a great America, where they all could found a new civilization, has led the most audacious continental projects since the days of Independence.

George Bush revitalized the dream in 1994, with the project of the Free Trade Area for the Americas (FTAA), but the Clinton administration, more inclined to other international issues, tabled the idea. Present President George W. Bush, during the Summit of the Americas in Quebec last April 2001, reaffirmed that the Free Trade Area would be completed by 2005. A few months later, the attack of September 11th on the USA drew the attention of both the government and the people to the new issue of terrorism and the war both in Afghanistan and on the home front. Shared by Americans from everywhere, but seen as a threat by the rest of the world because of the incredible amount of power that it would give to the United States and the associated American countries, the dream of the FTAA was again postponed.

While the United States keeps busy in its war for self defense, the rest of the world sees with certain unhidden relief that the Free Trade Area for the Americas, with its market of eight hundred million people and incredible military potential, is not for tomorrow. The complicated relationship between the USA and the rest of the American countries, where love and hate as well as envy and cooperation are tangled in unresolved feelings, also shows some cracks after September 11th. Last week President Fernando Enrique Cardoso, from Brazil, said that the United States was no longer reliable to rule the world, and that the countries from the Mercosur would do better to seek partnership with the European Union rather than look to the USA project for the FTAA. The Dominican Republic, which has suffered a substantial reduction of the traditional flow of United States tourists, has also turned its eyes towards Europe. Argentina, the most supportive continental partner in the project of the FTAA, sinks into an economic and political despair where the temptation to strengthen its traditional links with Europe is seen as a possible salvation. The war has obviously attacked the United States economy as well as its commerce with the rest of the American countries. Since the attacks, the message of expansion that the FTAA promoted has been suddenly reversed , and the dream of a common area of commerce could seem again a dream left to patriotic utopists, if the multiple commissions of the FTAA were not working on in silence, ahead of all public knowledge about the final triumph of the Americas cause.

We have heard enough about the Chinese character and how a crisis can be taken as an opportunity; maybe now it is time to think about how opportunities are lost because of unexpected crises. This November 13th, in Washington, DC, there will be held a FTAA meeting of the Special Committee on Inter-American Summits Management. Maybe there the extraordinary opportunity of the Free Trade Area, in opposition to a terrorism jealous of the unstoppable power of a Greater America, will recover its character of hope in a better life for all Americans.

THE US LEADERSHIP: GOOD AND EVIL IN THE BATTLE FOR THE WORLD’S SOUL (2001)

2006-07-01T15:45:00.000-03:00

Right at the time when talks on a variation of the Free Trade Agreement for the Americas started, the attack on the World Trade Center put a question mark on this issue --- the four plus one, linking the four countries from the Mercosur to the United States of America. The United States, by an act of war, was distracted from its continental purpose and sent again to the battlefields of Asia.

If the FTAA project was the reassessment of a constructive leadership, trying to build an American continent with equal opportunities for every country in an incredible and generous spread of US knowledge and resources, the war against terrorism seems to appeal more to the destructive military power of the United States to guarantee a global modernity. Confusion about the means might nevertheless ruin the end.

Formerly the shining example of the growth that is possible for countries in Latin America, Argentina’s now sinking economy gives part of the clue to the dilemma the US leadership has to face and which certainly goes far beyond terrorism. Widely promoted by the media, a rise in anti-capitalist thinking in Argentina is demonstrated by acts of urban subversion and by the recent electoral campaign, where most of the candidates pointed to the failed destiny in the friendly USA-Argentine relationship. Traditionally linked to European social-democratic and liberal thought, many of the Argentine media persist in showing how weakened the US position can be in this part of the world. The Argentine leaders who support a strong and close friendly link with the USA as well as a determined resolution to progress into modernity, whatever it costs the country, are not believed by the people since the United States doesn’t seem to be an enthusiastic supporter of the same idea. The United States' slight distraction from hemispheric issues has developed into a strong indifference since the terrorist attacks. This would be irrelevant to United States destiny if not for the fact that the terror it is having to endure now grew out of those very same sources of indifference, distraction and lack of planning.

Decades of terrorism all over the world, based on a theory by which the rich have to be destroyed in the name of poverty, a theory vastly spread and still alive and well in countries once upon a time known as the Third World, like Argentina, show political planners and military strategists that the best way to avoid destruction is to make plans for a common construction. In other words, it is up to the rich countries with the know-how to do it, to build with the poorer countries a strategy for a better and safer world, where everybody’s needs are taken care of. The Free Trade Area for the Americas has this profound meaning, based in a continental brotherhood, and represents also the beginning of a military commitment, since the terrorist threat is believed to come also from the neighboring continental countries.

A military alliance extra-NATO between Argentina and the United States started in the nineties an example of cooperation; but without a strong United States interest in the common continental destiny, this alliance wouldn’t be enough to prevent Argentines and other continental populations from becoming resentful crowds more affiliated with violence than with justice.
If Latin American countries have been considered as the US’ backyard, it is no less true that the US is Latin America’s backyard. The attack on the city of New York and on the Pentagon means that the vulnerable and weak backyard might not be any longer the Garden of Eden for Latin Americans in quest of leadership and a model. The effect could be that they turn their minds and economies to Europe again, like in the years before World War II. Then the effect of the terrorist attack could only be seen, like in the old times of the Three Worlds, not as a Third World envious revenge but as a carom, the billiards master coup of a declining Second World on a rising and powerful First.

Maybe while pursuing and punishing the terrorists, the United States should invest intelligence in the reconstruction of the idea of paradise as well as in the strategies for sharing it with the whole planet, starting with their own continental region and ending, why not, in Afghanistan, where the local millionaires like Osama Bin Laden continue to play the same role that regressive oligarchies all over the world have played: destroy and divide in order to reign. The role that US Americans have in this unexpected and maybe really holy as well as wholly new war is no more, but no less, than to be the crusaders of common wealth and prosperity.

Part of the idea of paradise is bounty. Nothing better than the promise of this bounty to the hungry people of the world, to make understandable the real difference between good, which builds, and evil, which destroys.

WORD SMUGGLERS: A BEAUTIFULISSIMUS EFFECT OF CONTINENTALISM (2001)

2006-07-01T15:43:00.000-03:00

We can make a speech with gusto, or, as we would say in Spanish, con brío, or we can welcome a friend with a cheerful mi casa, su casa. We can learn that in Spanish, the very, the superlative, the “a lot”, can be just an ending to an adjective, and that things can become extraordinary also in English, by a Latin pass of magic: greatissimus, beautifulissimus and wonderfulissimus.

An erotic feeling happens when we transgress the borders of the language, smuggling at the same time words and a new vision of the world. We already know about the fascination of the inhabitants of the Hispanic America for the English American words and their automatic association with a wealthy and prosperous society. To these other Americans, living beyond the United States borders, some English words are the mantra they need as aspiring winners: ok, sorry, I love you, sale, top, full, fashion, cool. They get from the language the reward of power. On the other side, US Americans, including the most visible of them, President George W. Bush, seem to be equally pleased when trading English words for Spanish ones, and smuggling, in the heart of Yankee land, the mysterious delight of being another, a Hispanic. The primary Latin that sounds underneath the Saxon brings to their consciousness a feeling of ancient belonging. Rome and Greece claim their children drowned and revived in the barbarian Northern wave-- and propose an everlasting brotherhood with the faithful Latinos beyond the ocean.

The languages, in the frame of the Great America, that America that engulfs the United States, are making an intimate wedding in the hearts. Citizens of a brand new project for the Americas, the Free Trade Area, the Americanos from everywhere realize that they are part of a new cultural reality that will lead to a new political agreement. Americans or Americanos, brothers, pals or hermanos, from Native, or European -- British and Spanish, and from all the other European countries—or African descent, are engaged in a new collective creation: the whole American cultural identity. The common fact of belonging to the same Continent, and together being mostly cultural heirs to Europe, no longer Europeans but Americans, is the main stone on which the new American, the whole American culture will be built. The policy that defends this culture, in commercial and military issues, is called Continentalism. And to this point, an update of the word Continent is required. "The Continent" is no longer the European Continent but the American Continent—and yes, that includes both the North and the South parts of it. Continental trade involves the USA with NAFTA as well as NAFTA with the rest of the Continent, within the new FTAA. Preceded now by an unavoidable cultural and language merge, the future trade merge is the nightmare of the European Community.

Europeans see in this American market of eight hundred million the definitive sign of their decadency and their withdrawal to an honorable second role in the world. This omen is at the origin of many criticisms to the cultural marriage between English and Spanish speaking communities of the American Continent. When two giants marry, chances are that the baby will be enormous, and what Europe fears the most is the Great America that the FTAA is giving birth to.

The Latino writers have assessed in many novels and short stories the oral experience of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Cubans and Dominicans in the USA, where both languages were melted into a new one, the Spanglish. A more subtle way of dealing with a bicultural life is the one adopted by well-educated people, who tend to use just some words or grammatical constructions to add a different point of view to a well-preserved language. English or Spanish speaking, they trade values without too much reflection and with the spontaneity of a Continentally shared life. While the Spanish speaking try to grab the key to commercial and financial success, the English speaking crave for a better quality of life, made of passion, love, friendship, good food and the laziness necessary to enjoy all this.

At the same time, some kind of distrust nests in some American minds. They think that maybe all this melting and marriage and illegal word smuggling will lead to a bad place, the hell of patriots, where the nations loose their identity and are destroyed forever. Crusades for just English in California, or for an exclusive use of Spanish in the media language in Argentina, witness the fear of the blend, rather than the richness of an enlarged language and a wider identity. Both definitions, “el inglés es nuestro” and “Spanish is ours”, represent a valid statement. They could also be the cry of war of the lusty language smugglers who have probably understood before anyone, that they share not only languages but also the ownership of the Continent.

The beauty of English and the beauty of Spanish compete, as well as the immanent beauty of the two world visions, and no one could say that this competition will lead to a victory and a defeat. Rather, as the increasing mischievous word smugglers seem to show, the illegal creativity will come to an end. Too many smugglers, we know, finally allows for free trade.

AMERICANS SAY I, AMERICANOS SAY YO (2001)

2006-07-01T15:42:00.000-03:00

And Americanos from Brazil Eu, and the Américains, Je. And more Americans from everywhere, speaking Native American, European or even Asian languages, use a different word when they have to say, for instance, that they are the citizens of some country on the American Continent: I am Canadian; or, yo soy cubano. Also when they simply realize a new cultural fact, that they are Americans, though the word Americans can lead to another confusion. I am an American and yo soy americano, could mean a different thing in the times before the Free Trade Area for the Americas, but will necessarily mean the same thing in the near future, when the Continental union flows from the commercial treaty. Americans are Americanos, and Americanos are Americans; and both are one and the same with the holy American spirit --- though the multitude of American languages constitutes something larger than a trinity.

After such a statement, cries against Yankee Imperialism can be expected, claiming that, after all, this is what the Free Trade Area for the Americas was invented for, to make of all the inhabitants of the American Continent the subjects of the United States Empire. We have heard that song often, sung by a yo as well as by an I. But, since the Americanos existed before the Americans –the Spaniards came first-- what yo say is that I am as American as US Americans. And yo being me-- an Argentine from the American Continent writing in English-- at the same time yo and I, I agrego or yo add, that US Americans are not my subjects as well as I am not theirs, and that a new thing is happening while yo write and an I read. I and yo share an identity: I and yo are Americans.

We can say I, yo, eu or je, but in any language we will only assess one fact, that we are Americans, and that this Americanity is --through the tiny pretense of Free Trade-- the excuse to get finally together in a political, cultural and military association. As Europe did, America will. Behind the I or the yo, to mention only the two most widely spoken languages, what is hidden is not an imperialistic threat, but a common destiny.

How can individuals with different heritages build a common culture? The experience of Latinos in the United States and that particular new language—the Spanglish—as well as their mongrel new culture –half Yankee half Hispanic— shows that unexpected things can happen when the geopolitical border becomes only a thin line in the soul of real persons living in a real dual culture.

Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Cubans came across the border into the U.S. carrying within them the invisible contraband of the old Spanish American Empire. Language, habits, history and religion, all packed into mind and emotions. The memoir of old mother Spain brought into the kingdom of old mother Britannia and mingling amidst inequalities and sorrows. The marriage of the people sharing a border will be followed in the present decade by a larger, continental marriage, that will include a vast majority of the Hispanic countries. The last word about the history of the people on the American Continent has not been said, and a new common cultural adventure seems to be starting.

If the United States was the heir of the victorious Empire, the Hispanic countries were the heirs of the defeated one, dragging with it into the present the karma of failure, with the weight of one of the most remarkable and original cultures on the planet. When somebody says I, the I carries a history of success. When somebody says yo, the yo hurts and has to work hard to remember that Spain was an Empire long before the British, and to open in the mind a way to possible success. At the same time, the I has the obscure feeling that a long time ago the Spaniards were greater than the British, and the intimate fear that in every Spaniard breeds the germ of an enemy.

When I and yo quarrel, both imperialistic minds can tangle and get a general sense that between I and yo, there can possibly only be a battle, a winner and a loser. It doesn’t take long for them to assume that if the Latinos are allowed to speak Spanish in the United States, English will be condemned, or that if the children in Hispanic countries speak English, they will lose their national independence.

But when I and yo live in the same person, a doubled imperialism rises, with two descents, two heritages, two languages and two religions. Since the idea of being two in one, and precisely not a two made out of a giant and a dwarf, but a two made out of two giants, the I and the yo go mad and have hard time reacting, either as an I or as a yo. And when I and yo get together on the point of faith, even if I enjoys being a Buddhist and yo an Atheist, an emotional earthquake dissolves both the I and the yo, and memories go back --- in language to Latin, in history to the same European kings, and in religion, back to the old times of Christianity, before any partition. The I and the yo disappear, the person remaining just says “sum” and realizes that this is all what any American life is about. Sum here, in America. Sum sums, and adds, and many sum sums more people and a bigger American crowd, and any wedding between giants is allowed to be consummated and it is also admitted than a giant baby can be born, and cry the first primary cry, sum.

No I, no yo, just sum American, sum americano, sum from a Continent mirror of another Continent, sum from America as young mirror of Europe. To be an American means then to those from different European ancestors, to be the cultural sons and daughters from Europe --a mother older than Spain, France or Great Britain. To be named Americans refers to a common new motherland, where the Natives Americans and the Americans of any European, African or Asian descent close their past and open the future. A future in which America will be composed of thirty-five countries and will own a multilingual American culture, different from European, and also from African and Asian cultures, though including bits of them all, in an authentic seed of universality.

Americans say I, Americanos say yo, but not for long. We will hear us and nosotros more than often, and nos and nous, and many other things we don’t dare to dream, in the new American times to come.

THE CONGA LINE OR HOW TO BUILD A CONTINENTAL POLICY (2001)

2006-07-01T15:40:00.000-03:00

While alerting drums beat from valley to valley, Americans from everywhere go to battle: the coming Free Trade Area for the Americas is seen as an unfriendly ghost who will take jobs and money away from where they are already not abundant. From California to Patagonia, as the song says, a crowd of eight hundred million people are tapping their shoes, more ready to march savagely to a demonstration than to go to a ballroom.

The war against a feared and increasing poverty as well as against a flight of capital and manufacturers has started. The protesters against globalization and against its youngest breed, Continentalism, attract the attention of doubtful people all over the Continent, who wonder if this new free trade agreement can be of any benefit for them or will represent, again, a shortcut to misery. As long as it is not understood that a free trade area is not only a commercial area but also a political and cultural agreement, the drums will not play a cheerful music that gathers continental populations in a happy dance of love, joy and growth.

The Free Trade Area for the Americas is not a free trade among equals. Though the previous NAFTA has given many examples of success, the fact that this time the partners are thirty-four and with completely different political and economic situations gives little hope for an easy path. Since the leadership of this project is undeniably US American, the main question of success or failure is about how the USA qualifies for this leadership. Besides, the USA has to play the drums as well as dance dance, with the help of Argentina which has, through General Perón's continental doctrine, a solid theoretical foundation for this political construction.

Of course, Perón thought in the 50s that Argentina could be the natural leader of such an association and that that association would include the United States only in the last period. All the Ibero-American (of Spanish and Portuguese descent) countries would gather first in a still politically difficult but culturally easy association, inviting the United States to join them when their power would be the USA equal. In spite of] their abundant natural resources and their talented people, the Ibero-American countries have made in half a century a poor performance, and the United States has become the first country in the world, as well as the economic, financial and military leader of the planet. The Perón plan has had to face a change: Argentina and the rest of the Ibero-American partners, in order to constitute a continental association, have had to accept the USA's leading role.

How is it that a project, which was mainly an Hispanic project, not even Ibero-American because Brazil always rejected the idea of a continent going beyond the limits of South America, came to be a high priority US project? Disfavored by its condition of being a continental minority in a large majority of Ibero-American countries, the USA has always more willingly played a role in the whole planet than in what was its so-called backyard --- a bunch of poor unknown Latino countries only able to buy US industrial goods and to get bank loans at high rates. The achievement of the first common market in the world, followed by a political and cultural union, set the example: the European Union was to be naturally followed by an American Union.

The eventual construction of a whole planet free market with the same political rules begins with that first continental brick. The necessity of a safer planet, with countries linked by open markets and financial interdependence, builds the rest. Continentalism is understood also as a convenient path to a military cooperative association for safety and peace. By proposing the Free Trade Area of the Americas to the countries of the Continent, the United States enlarges the Free Trade Area of the world, obtaining at the same time a market big enough for fair commercial competition with the European Union.
Where the factories will relocate themselves for the best competitive product prices, and who will be the owner of jobs and profits, are questions raised by the old pre-continental thinking, particularly by union leaders who are not adapted to the conditions of a new economy. These issues, even if they are the ones that get the headlines, are not the most relevant in a future Continental economy. Since the problem remains on the political construction, the economy will be affected more by how the United States as a political leader organizes the continent, and how --as the richest country in the world-- it manages to raise the rest of the countries of the Continent to its level.

With the help of emerging secondary leaders who cannot be ignored because of their size and the influence they exert in their region, such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, the United States can avoid the cultural trap of misunderstanding by accepting that they live on an --at least-- bicultural and bilingual continent; as well as the political trap of imperialism, by organizing countries under a federal system. The way to get countries into a cooperative association seems to be based on a recognition of the equality of both dominant cultures --- the Anglo-American and the Ibero-American --- as well as on the imitation of US administrative systems to provide equal rights and justice to the rest of the countries on the Continent.

The idea of an enlarged Federalism, where all the countries would join together on equal conditions in an American Union, points only to a richer continent with multiple owners and beneficiaries, instead of to an Empire with a ruler and its vassals. This continental Federalism needs the active participation of countries that will fear less the mighty power of the USA if allowed to install in their territories the same laws and regulations as exist in the USA. Only this would gain the immediate support of traditionally disorganized societies who would then feel ready for fair Federal competition for investments and production.

The main business of the United States will not be --as the US American workers fear --- in moving factories to countries with low salaries, but in exporting services. From the reorganization of state administration to the updating of infrastructure like highways, water supply, electrical power and communications, the upgrading of services in developing countries to the level of --at least --- the poorest state in the United States will prevail as the most rewarding investment.

At the same time, the local production in every country –contradicting their local union leaders who fear US export of goods -- will jump to an international level and besides selling to the rest of countries on the Continent, will export to the rest of the planet under the new Continental flag.

A new vision, considering Federalism as the political tool of Continentalism, and services instead of products as the main US export to its neighbors, improving dramatically both Ibero-Americans' conditions of life and US business earnings, can change the sound of the drums and go from a military march to a mambo. Reluctant countries can then forget old ideas about Imperialism, accept the Continent as the common motherland and join, one by one, the fair and joyful conga line.

FREE TRADE AREA OF THE AMERICAS: THE EAGLE AND THE CONDOR (2001)

2006-07-01T15:37:00.000-03:00

During the Quebec Summit in April 2001, thirty-four countries of the American Continent ---all of them, with the only exception of the uninvited Cuba --- agreed to continue the conversations that would stretch a free trade area from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Here and there, bilateral or multilateral meetings spring up and many leaders, in the USA and in the rest of the countries, are starting to realize that the agreement known as the FTAA is not only about commercial issues.

The effect of a collision of the two predominant cultures– the English speaking culture with the Spanish speaking one --- as well as the new political meaning of a market with eight hundred million consumers, goes far beyond the scope of the usual worries about unequal commercial merges. While the labor unions in the USA and Canada on one side, and in the Hispanic countries on the other, may claim that they have everything to lose, and paranoically believe that their neighbor-- whoever it is-- will get all the profit, the political leaders, at least, have grasped that the serious matter will be the cultural, military and political effect of such a union. In addition, the September 11th attack on the USA made the war against terrorism a continental issue and common defense has become a priority, regardless of the old antagonism.

Is there an eagle flying over the Continent? Is there a condor getting ready to fly as high and as fast? In fact, both things seem to be happening on a Continent, whose casual mention will mean, --- even for the English speaking Americans --- the entire American Continent, in a necessary update and a cut of the umbilical cord to the old meaning of that word.

The first commercial issues that have been addressed concern the actual level of protection, and free markets. The main political objections of the countries who would enlarge the existing NAFTA till it embraces the whole Continent come from their perception of the FTAA as an imperialistic USA threat that could also change cultural and military conditions. From Brazil to Guatemala, the image people have is that of an eagle grasping the local markets and destroying the chances of any local production. In the USA and Canada, the primary reaction is about the same: North American workers are afraid of a condor breaking into their jobs, with lesser salaries and lower production cost, and they imagine factories and capitals migrating South.

But in reality what is to be built is a brand new political structure, a Continental community, where partners will be equal in their rights and subject to a common commercial organization. In this sense, a departure from the traditionally inefficient economies will certainly generate a drastic change, but a change for the best, engendering more productivity and competition. A complete understanding of the project is necessary in the minds of all eight hundred million American inhabitants of the American Continent. The desired equality in the rights of member countries is meant to include the treatment of cultures and languages, a common military commitment to the defense of the common Continent and the war against terrorism ---the last addressed issue and probably the most important in the months to come--- as well as a new reading of the word American, which will mean not just US American, but any kind of American.

As in the song, the condor flies, and so does the eagle, and a marriage of both is in the air more than a fight between them. And if we see some signs of a battle, let's not panic. It might only be one of those petty prenuptial quarrels that are quickly dissolved by the passions of fierce love.

CONTINENTALISM: A NEW POLICY FOR THE GREAT AMERICA (2001)

2006-07-01T15:34:00.000-03:00

The Continent is now for Americans a different thing than it used to be. For the heirs of the British islanders’ language, the Continent continues -- more often than not-- to be the land across the channel, the firm territory beyond the islands, the European Continent. Now, with the prospect of the Free Trade Area for the Americas, an increasing feeling of a common land blossoms in all the countries of the area. A new idea about the old fact of living on another continent, the American Continent, has emerged both in spirit and language, and in this century Continent and Continental describe a belonging and a new policy.

The Spanish-speaking people, maybe because of their condition of discoverers and conquerors of the new territory, have always been clear about the continental quality of America, about the spatial, cultural and political separation from Europe, and above all, about the unity of the Continent seen as a single geographical entity, subject to a possible geopolitical union. Instead, the English-speaking Americans kept the name of America for only the United States of America and referred to the continental territory as the Americas, in a term that separates more than unifies. The Spanish-speaking people talked confidently about America, with the spontaneity of those who knew that there were two continents in question, Europe and America. Overseas became quickly for them a reversible expression: overseas could be America or Europe, according to where the person was actually speaking. The Canadians, half Europeans through the Commonwealth and half Americans, had a new perception about the Continent, and for them Continentalism, an expression probably inaugurated by Harold Innes, meant, early in the 20th century, every geopolitical movement linking Canada to the United States, movements perceived always as subtle or not so subtle ways to tear Canadians apart from Europe.

Affections, ideas about the national self, and political and cultural wars have surrounded the words America, Continent, and Continentalism --- a word that is not even recognized by the spell-check of computers. All this emotional turmoil breaks out again in the middle of the commercial battle for the Free Trade Area. Like with the North-American Free Trade Area, the Caricom, or the Mercosur, traditional quarrels and friendships between American countries emerge, but this time, since the discussion is about the whole continental area (including the Caribbean Islands-- as American as the rest), the concept of Continentalism raises arguments which certainly involve much more than commercial agreements.

Bolívar and San Martín in South-America had the dream of what they called the Great America. Heroes of the Independence wars, they advocated for an American union. President Monroe in the United States had, with the same independent spirit, the idea of an America just for the Americans, and he meant with this statement to be far more inclusive than what the enemies of the United States want to believe. General Perón, in Argentina, was the first to start a continental association: in 1949 he promoted the ABC, the Argentina, Brazil, Chile agreement, which was intended to start exactly what the NAFTA started in the mid-90s and what the FTAA is supposed to start now.

General Perón, contemporary to the Foundation of the European Community by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, and enlightened witness of the whole process, was probably the first American leader to speak about Continentalism, understood as a special policy dedicated to the union of America not only in a common market but also in a common political, cultural and military association. In the earliest 70s and before dying in 1974, he warned the revolutionary youth about the political sequence for years to come: that nationalism would be followed by continentalism to finally end in a necessary and unavoidable universalism. The foresight proved to be true and in the times of globalization, Continentalism is merely completing its also unavoidable historical routine.

Europe has already completed a political union --- we talk now about the European Union --- and America, as a Continent, is on its way to achieve in years to come its own political unity. The idea of a continental union, which will in the first place install on the planet a market of eight hundred million consumers --the biggest market in the world-- scares Europe, and we can perceive the influence of the frightened European perception on the Americans everywhere. Here and there, projects to split “the Americas” into at least three separate markets, surge in the speech of local American leaders, both in North, Central and South America. The unity is resisted by many other American countries, which fear the omnipresent ghost of Yankee imperialism. The resistance to an American Union is promoted in various ways by European political or economic interests, in a secret war impossible to understand without the concept of Continentalism. For a certain period of time, the two Continents will commercially compete for the markets of the rest of the world and for political supremacy. Though all this will end, as General Peron warned, in a universal market and a universal political union, the continental step will make fall many countries, long before that.

From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego -- to say it with the already famous inclusive formula-- a new patriotism is the challenge for the Americans from here to there. The idea that the Continent is the new motherland --representing a more superior interest than the country land-- and that Americans from everywhere –including the powerful and feared Yankees-- share a dazzling brotherhood, has started to put hearts on fire, minds in thought and hands in action.

Continentalism seems to be the new word for hope to the poor in the Great America, and probably the new word for victory to the United States, as the richest country in the world. Of course, and until the time of the fair Universalism comes, with its promise of final peace on Earth, American Continentalism has become a nightmare to Europe; and as a political idea, an unanswered question to Asia; maybe a clue to the wounded Africa; and an unexpected opportunity for the long denied cultural Americanity of Oceania.

ABOUT WRITING IN THE TIMES OF THE FREE TRADE AREA OF THE AMERICAS (2001)

2006-07-01T15:31:00.001-03:00

There have been times when I´ve had trouble with a computer because it was set only for the English language and it didn´t allow me to write in Spanish properly. A letter was missing, the ñ, as was the umlaut and the accent mark and both the upside down question mark and exclamation point needed in front of questions and exclamations in Spanish. But now, on my Spanish language computer, I have another problem, which is the lack of English Spell -Check . Living in a two-language world is complicated, but even worse is to live in a four-language world: I write sometimes in French and in Portuguese and there again, on both English language and Spanish language computers, letters and accents and particular signs such as the cedilla are missing. The integration of the Americas is a technological problem from the start, but even more urgently a cultural one: do all the languages have the same status? Which is the same as to ask: Do all the cultures have the same value?

When we think that next April thirty four countries will sign the agreement to integrate a free trade zone before 2005, we wonder first about the usual commerce laws and the equality they are supposed to bring to the parties of the agreement. Only in the second place do we realize that something deeper is going on among the signers of the treaty.

Being different and at the same time being a part of the same thing, raises questions in every single language of the Americas, and for every national thinker the question is more and more about how we will deal with each culture.We wonder if there is going to be a fight, and who will win in the end, and the nightmare of an uneven imperialism haunts us. Being a Bolivian is not the same as being a Yankee, though a primary question jumps out: what will the Americans from the US be called? "US Americans", maybe, since they will finally have to share the name of America, which is one and only also as a continent, with all the rest of the thirty five remaining American countries, which have been more modest and adopted a second name, leaving the word American to the common property rather than to Yankee greed.

And how will the giant deal with the smaller countries, or even with the big sized ones like Brazil or Argentina? Will every "American" country get the same status that Canada and Mexico have in the present NAFTA? Is it the pure Yankee imperialism that will prevail, as the leftists from the whole Continent claim, influenced by the perpetual divide and conquer European thought? Or, on the contrary, are we at the dawn of a free political, cultural and military association based on the common character of Americans (whole Americans, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego) with a new identity to explore? Signs of a merging new American culture can be seen here and there: a Hispanic minority increasing in the United States, now surpassing the African-Americans, and a military and economical Argentine drive towards an American common market (extra NATO ally military status, and dollarization) show that people are acting toward merging even before the computer manufacturers have reacted.

There is more communication between Americans of all origins than anyone thinks: US American citizens buying big farms in Patagonia; Argentine citizens teaching Spanish in the US; Brazilians dealing with Mexicans; Chileans with Venezuelians; and Rockefeller visiting Cuba and reminding us that Cuba belongs to America, no matter what the former USSR might have thought. It is a strange melting pot indeed, of Americans mingling with Americans in a broth of the four main European languages , mixed in with more than thirty five cultures, each having even more languages, such as the always forgotten American Native ones and all the rest of the European languages that migrated to the American Continent and the Caribbean Islands.

I am writing in Buenos Aires for the English-speaking reader, I still don´t have a Spanish-English dictionary in my computer, and, of course, I know I will solve part of the problem – with a click on the multilanguage button, by trying to memorize every foreign keyboard, or by simply surrendering to an uncomfortable plastic keyboard cover that includes the missing characters. But, am I ready to merge into the pot and trust that all will be for the best? That is to say, is there an English speaking American writing specifically on this issue for an Argentine or Peruvian reader? I wouldn´t be afraid of merging if somebody up there in the North of the Continent is also scared about what will come out of this mainly cultural marriage and wants to communicate with the rest of their Americans pals and share. We are all Americans – not USA subjects– but members of a great, multilingual and fantastic new thing. Hello, is anybody out there awake in this dream? The Great America is waiting.

AMERICAN GIRL (2001)

2006-07-01T15:31:00.000-03:00

The Argentine writer Manuel Puig was the first to discover the effect of the Hollywood silver screen on the hearts and minds of Argentine women living during the 40s and 50s in big houses in small towns or in small houses in big towns. In those times when Evita and the always neglected criollo workers were the absolute stars in a too Peronist Argentine public life, provincial and porteñas –from the capital port of Buenos Aires— middle class women couldn’t dream but of a better place to live. A place with blond people with blue eyes that would restore them as the worthy people they had –as European immigrant daughters-- struggled to be. A place where they would be recognized as different from the crowd of half Indian dark workers that invaded those days the national scene, and where they would be loved by loving men –who always seemed to be far away from that country where men had more important things to do than to love. These women thought they had no room for any further class ascension if those little dark heads, the cabecitas negras, were in the heights before them, though later as a middle class they would replace the old upper aristocratic class. Also repressed as women --even if the hated-by- them- and loved- by- Perón Evita gained for them the right to vote—middle class women began to live an imaginary movie life. This life happened to be, without these women being too conscious of that fact, a Yankee life. In love with Tyrone Power, Clark Gable or William Holden, they helped the writer of great talent and intuition that Puig was, to build a series of extraordinary feminine characters, where the hidden lust for sexy men was as meaningful as the distance from where the Argentine middle class women lived, to paradise.

When Perón was thrown out of government by middle class military men –the husbands of the dreaming women— a new golden age of the forbidden fruits of the always distant United States started. I was eleven years old then and at the same time I went with my mother to see Eva Perón’s rich clothes and hundreds of shoes –what my mother blamed and what I saw as the necessary outfit of the popular queen she was-- I got my first Parker pen. My mother could buy her first pair of nylon stockings while a new present arrived into my hands: a bunch of small violet envelopes with bubble-gum that tasted like root-beer and came with colored pictures of Hollywood actors to whom you could write to get their autographed artistic pictures, which I did. Before and after obtaining those fragments of American real life, I sat close to my mother every Saturday in front of the literally pearled screen of the neighborhood movie theaters and fell in love with Anthony Perkins. I was obviously another generation who didn’t enjoy too much the macho type, too close to the military with big moustaches and their scornful look towards the always-inferior women.

With the new open market following ten years of protected Peronist customs, a new kind of goods came in to keep the dream alive: the glossies. My father got himself a subscription to Popular Mechanics and to the Readers Digest. My mother got House and Gardens, and I was included in the package with a subscription to American Girl. My youngest brother didn’t get any and that may be why he was the only one to desire to actually live in the United States, which he succeeded in doing through endless summers competing on waterskiing teams.

I was an avid reader, besides being an eager movie spectator, and the Popular Mechanics soon provided me the plans for a home where I should live when I would meet Bob or John and have with him four kids with English names. Meanwhile the Readers Digest gave me the directions on how to think, though with little success, because the more refined Frenchmen in the private school I was sent to during Perón’s government to avoid the obligatory Peronist doctrine in public schools, got my soul first. The silver bullet of the commercial empire did reach me, though, by way of American Girl in a section called Pen Pals.

My letter must be still there; it was the second time I was published, the first one was in La Semaine de Suzette, the French magazine for nice girls. I was looking for friends abroad, maybe real people beyond the screen. While I got some answers from the clients of the remains of the cultural French empire, and wrote for years to people in North Africa and in borderland French provinces like Alsace and Provence, I was inundated with letters of young American girls and boys. I couldn’t feel more happy and loved, getting attention from strangers like Blanche DuBois, and being finally a star just because of a tiny bit of paper, a letter written in English, an envelope and a stamp. I selected of course the boys, as Mae West would have done, and I remember having corresponded lastly with a young charming boy, Danny T. McCarthy, from Springfield, Illinois and, because of his friendship and sympathy, I began to love forever and beyond any silver screen, those United States impersonated by these real people who addressed to me tender and kind letters. With the first teen rebellions and the bloody Argentine history that followed, that love would be buried, though, in the deepest bottom of my heart and forgotten till more favorable times.

I was fifteen and a little more advanced in the study of the English language at the French school than when I wrote letters to my American new pals. I was then summoned by my English teacher to make a speech in front of the class and this is how my first political speech in any language was “The growing importance of Communist China”. It was the year of the Cuban revolution, which was probably the start of the last battle between the United States and the Latin American countries. Che Guevara was an Argentine and was pictured with Fidel Castro on Life magazine’s cover, as admired young rebels, when it was still a thorough continental truth that they had to replace the dictator Batista. Following the new trend, I was becoming a revolutionary Latino American, a Communist because my father was rich and I was not and that seemed unfair to me. And also a Peronist because my mother didn’t like Evita or me, and because the workers communism was supposed to help were all Peronists. I had, like the biggest part of my generation, an emotional answer to an era that in many senses was about to end, though nobody really could predict what the change would be. I was just for a quick move to a better world, whatever this might mean in the future, like all the Argentine baby boom generation.

This generation defined itself as Peronist as a reaction to the powerful and repressive military, and as Socialist because baby boomers had been --thanks to Perón-- massively well fed and well educated, and had an access to books and to the Marxist international movement. Even the middle class who rejected Perón had to give their kids a better education, and this meant an upper class foreign private school to split them from the modest dark newcomers who invaded the public schools. Both breeds, the dark and the European descent whites, would meet in the following years --with their new gained books and their youthful strength-- in the greatest revolutionary movement in Latin America. Hollywood missed the story and it was a British author who would write later a famous and incongruous Evita addressing in English the Argentine people and asking them not to cry for her, which we couldn’t help doing, watching both opera and film.

When I finished my French double Baccalaureate, I started to teach French in an English school. I was Miss Ferraro for two years, living some days a week a real Anglo life that had little to do with my Italian and Spanish roots. When Kennedy was shot, I was teaching and pupils and school staff had to gather in the courtyard to pray in English for his soul, our Father thou art in heaven. And so God, who usually spoke to me in French because of the Catechism taught at school, became an Anglo-Yankee divinity, confirming that Atheism could be safer for an independent and national spirit. After all, Perón had also quarreled with the Catholic Church, and the Argentine military who subjected him to a coup d’état were Catholics, reaffirming the fact that they didn’t like women to be sexy.

The projection of a film lent to the school by the US embassy about life in the colonial times opened a window in my heart while I watched the green lands of Virginia and the so cute farmers battering butter in a wooden bucket on their cute little wooden farms, as ancestors of a rural romantic life that could have been lived in any country of America, including mine. The film ended and I was in love again for a while with the luminous land as if it were mine. This film had a fingerprint of destiny, but then I didn’t know that.

After two years working as a teacher, I entered a Film School and began to work in movies as an assistant producer, and later as a producer and director. I had a battle to fight: Hollywood had to be replaced by Argentine films, like in the past, when the Argentine movie industry conquered all the Spanish- speaking countries. It was a worthy cause and I couldn’t feel more comfortable in that kingdom of images, where I didn't have to use my mother language as an expressive instrument and where I wouldn’t have to face the unpleasant question of which language spoke God.

As my teenage speech had predicted, China became important, as did Cuba and Russia, and soon the same Latin American kids who dreamt cow-boys dreams in their childhood and who died for Bazooka bubble-gums, became rebellious against any power, parents, military, rich ruling classes and of course against the too powerful antagonist in the Continent, the United States, supporters of all the military anti-socialist and anti-peronist movements. I joined the energetic crowd and cried Yankees, out of Santo Domingo, and felt that all Latin American countries should get together, with Cuba, of course, and fight the Yankees who were the friends of our enemies, the local militaries. I danced though with Elvis Presley and Chubby Checker, and my lasting love affair with Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra continued to grow in the most secret channels of my soul as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Joe Cocker found a place there too.

The public story is well known: the military trained in the United States to fight all the continental guerrillas in the frame of the Cold War organized more and more coups d’état with the help of the United States who wanted to make sure that the Soviet Union didn’t go beyond Cuba on the American Continent. The Beatles sang, and there were also the hippie times with the demonstrations against the Vietnam war, with the French May calling imagination to power, and with the whole planetary baby boomer generation blaming the United States for being the cruel rising empire after World War II. Real life was in those years definitely more interesting than films, and when Perón came back to Argentina --after eighteen years in which the military could neither unite nor rule the country-- a new chapter began. The Argentina hidden behind the screen appeared then for the first time to our already adult eyes, and with the leading of Perón, a new consciousness about what was ours and what was others' suddenly emerged. I became the proud owner of a now luminous Argentina –as luminous as the Yankee land of the screen -- where my roots had their regular place and my language was my mother’ s language and not the school's language or the language of any foreign group.. I left the films and began to write in Spanish for small union magazines, in a lasting political writer career. With a new born love for my country, I discovered a nation and a history as worthy as others. I was no less than a French or a British person, and Spanish was just as worthy a language as theirs. Perón had a very talkative relationship with the youth, and we soon learned that Marxism was as foreign a thing to us as the Yankee obeisance to the military. Neither Yankees nor Marxists, just Peronists, was the most popular cry, with the opposition of course of the Marxist guerrillas, which began then to fight Perón. The Perón doctrine considered that there were two empires at war on the planet and that we were a different thing between them, a Third World, for which they were struggling. Perón soon died, and the military –who didn’t listen to him-- went behind the guerrilleros as well as behind the Peronists, considered by them the most dangerous because of their bright nationalism. The seven years of military government are known all over the world, because of the thousands of missing young and not so young people, and because of the world famous Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, no longer the Manuel Puig heroines but the suffering women whose kids had been taken away and killed by the military.

I survived, and in between I was married and had my own children and I even had time to divorce, when I woke up a morning at war with Great Britain because of the Malvinas Islands. A new milestone in the complicated US- Argentine relationship was set: the United States, a friendly country to Peronism by then because of the common war against the Soviet Union, was supporting Great Britain and not Argentina, in spite of all the treaties of common continental defense. The military lost the islands as well as the government. With more young people dead on the altar of a war which was rather a British secret service plot than a nationalistic Argentine epopee, a new bleeding wound was inflicted on the US –Argentine relationship. Most Argentines felt betrayed by the United States, and I perceived in this the final result of the war: Great Britain would never allow The United States to rule in a country which had been before Perón and since the times of Independence, their informal colony. I suspected that something like a different war was running in Argentina, which had to do more with Europe than with the Soviet Union or the United States. After all, the United States had been divided at the beginning of the war between their European colonial obedience to Great Britain and their continental American identity shared with Argentina. In my increasing perception, against the predominant opinion, that Argentina and the United States were meant to be partners, I was influenced neither by the silver screen nor by memories of Hollywood stars, but led by the same nationalistic attitude that Perón brought to my life. I saw Argentina widening , and lengthening to its Continental dimensions and making the United States of America more than a neighbor, an American brother living in the same common house, son to the same mother Europe we both had to fight in the past and we both should fight in the future to assert our own American identity.

The rest of the recent history is more than well known-- how the Wall of Berlin fell and how the United States won the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Also how Argentina became, during the first Peronist government after Perón’s own, a political and a military friend to the United States, and how both countries support nowadays a Free Trade Area as a first step to a Continental Union, as predicted by Monroe, by Perón and by every American patriot from Martí to Bolívar. A union where an American girl could be either a US American girl or an Argentine American girl, making of America a country the size of a continent, and of eight hundred million Americans, the wealthiest population in the world, a happy ending that Hollywood hasn’t dreamt yet.

Two years ago, I met a man on the Internet, the new tilting seductive screen. He lived in Virginia. After a couple of hundreds of emails, which brought up the forgotten experience of American Girl, I met him. If Puig was alive, he could write an epilog to his novels. Real life has changed since the times of Peron. The distant and desirable tall handsome man, blond with blue eyes, has left the screen and walks, taking me by my arm, in the Buenos Aires streets. The girl who wrote letters to the people behind the screen lives now some months of the year in a cute little home in a cute neighborhood in the always green Virginia, writing now scenes from her Argentine life, read maybe by dreaming US American women, tired of their cute screen life and wanting something which looks as passionate as the Hollywood films promised to dreaming Argentine women of the past.

The nightmare of misunderstandings of the past seems to be over and the wind of history blows, bringing now the Free Trade Area for the Americas and with it, the beginning of an unavoidable Continental Union where Argentine and Yankees will be co-stars in the same film with thirty-five other countries, counting Cuba which has to be there to have a real Hollywood happy end.

In Virginia or Buenos Aires nights, love and written dreams don’t stop and ask now about the next step for us Continental Americans and how we shall arrive later, when the Continent is united, to the universal one land, where we will be just human being owners of a multitude of countries, a multitude of languages, a multitude of cultures.

Like Puig's heroines, unhappy women all over the planet could now be dreaming and seeing themselves through a Continental American film—made or written in the US or in Buenos Aires-- promising an era of friendship and love that will become again, after history weaves its material, a foreseen reality. Also, another American girl could be, without knowing, in her way to be more than she ever dreamt, a universal girl, writing letters to her future.