"Para virar al macho: La autobiografia como subversion en la cuentistica de Manuel Ramos Otero." Revista Iberoamericana 59. 162-63 (1993): 239-63.
"What a Tangled Web!": Masculinity, Abjection, and the Foundations of Puerto Rican Literature in the United States
Resistance to power does not have to come from elsewhere to be real, nor is it inexorably frustrated through being the compatriot of power. It exists all the more by being in the same place as power. (Foucault 142)
It's on the ruins of what surrounds me that I build my manhood. (Fanon 173)
For Alberto, toda la sangre
.overing like some rare bird over land and sea, the protagonist of the tale of national foundations by the Puerto Rican Luis Rafael Sanchez,"; Jum!" (Hm!), straddles his village's border.* But with his ass "pressed tight enough to choke his buttocks,"- the "sissy . . . the queer . . . the queen" that is the protagonist in the villagers' taunts, is not just a sign for a monstrous other (57). He is rather the opening that, in an allegory reminiscent of Octavio Paz's myth of national origins,^ allows for permeability, for penetration. Neither masculine nor feminine affiliation, neither institutional ritual nor gossip sustains his identity. Instead, his shifting signification is propped up by a heterotopian series in which the most disparate signifiers are invoked in order to summon the other—the external, the non-communal —by means of lubricity, lubrication: the white linen suit, the talc "May's Dream," the eau de toilet Com tu mi (Come To Me), the comb, the ring, and the jar of petroleum jelly (60). With a narrative tone halfway between the ironic distance of a chiste colorao, or dirty joke, and the identification of sentimental pathos, cruelty, and kindness, Sanchez describes how that unnamed and unnameable d i f f e r e n c e s :
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character who is the homosexual searches with assiduous despair, as in a horror film, all communal spaces for a safe haven —a room of his own: En cada recodo, en cada alero, en las alacenas, en los portales, en los anafres, en los garitos. —/Jumf Por las madrugadas, por los amaneceres, por las mananas, por los mediodias, por las tardes, por los atardeceres, por las noches y las medianoches. -/Jumf Los hombres, ya seguros del relajo, le esperaban por el cocal para aporrearle a voces. [...J —iPatito! -iPateto! —iLocal —/Mariquitaf /Loqueta! -/Maricastro! Las mujeres aflojaban la risita por entre la piorrea y repetian quedito. [...J -/Mujercitaf Hasta el eco casquivano desnudo su voz por el rio con un inmenso jjj uuu mmm. (57-58) In every corner, under the eaves of every home, in the cupboards, in the doorways, in the ovens, in the gambling halls. "Hml" At dawn, at daybreak, in the mornings, at noon, in the afternoons, at dusk, at nighttime, and at midnight. "Hm!" The men, confident now in their jiving, would wait for him by the coconut grove to slug him with their words. [...] "Little Fagr "Queer!" "Queen!" "Sissy! Fairy!" "Big Faggot!"
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The women would unleash their hushed laughter through the pus of their rotten gums and softly repeat. [...J "Girly!" Even the empty-headed echo stripped off his voice once by the river with a huge hhh mmm. But despite his search, the homosexual here, like the abject in Rristeva, is neither a subject nor an object. Before him one can only invoke an approximating w o r d - a n insistently repeated insult that falls on his amorphous body in an attempt to mold it, to give it shape. An attempt whose very repetition is but an indication of the homosexual's nonexistence, of his ghostly state. Dead man, specter, the homosexual, let us say, is a hole, and through that hole slips in all that otherness that the community seeks to repel—treason: —iQue el hijo de Trinidad es negro reblanquiao! —iQue el hijo de Trinidad es negro acasinao! —iQue el hijo de Trinidad es negro almidonao! (59) "'Cause Trinidad's son is a whitified nigger!" "'Cause Trinidad's son is a social-club nigger!" "'Cause Trinidad's son is a starched-up uppity nigger!" An entangled sort of precariousness, one could say, joins the village and the protagonist, Trinidad's son. For the community that repudiates him here is also living haltingly, stalked by whiteness and power, permanently besieged. And its insults, desperately hurled at the homosexual's body, bounce back to its own communal body like blows in order to reveal, rather than the fixity of a secured identity, the precariousness of a norm that must be constituted compulsively in the expulsion, not of the radically different, but of the proximate other, of Trinidad's son.^ Like the homosexual's body, the black body in "jJum!" is spectral, undefinable, unformed, and its borders must be delimited and shored up by what Judith Butler (135-36) has called the compulsive performance of the prohibition, of the Law: —iQue se pone carbon en las cejas! —iQue es mariquita fiestera! —iQue los negros son machos! —iYno estdn con nenenes! (58)
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"'Cause he draws on eyebrows with charcoal!" "'Cause he's a flaming sissy!" "'Cause black men are real men!" "And don't go for all that prissiness!" So it is that "jJum!"-which would seem at first to reproduce that terrorizing logic that demands every representation of the homosexual be relegated to the arena of expiation and martyrdom, that piously prescribes that we identify with him solely on his deathbed, returning him thus to the communal fold—invokes a disturbing and incongruous mix, akin to a Puerto Rican tradition ofthe grotesque in which, as in Francisco Oiler's painting. El Velorio (The Wake, 1893), the Puerto Rican nation is finally, and joyfully, gathered around an image of death.^For "iJum!"is as much a wake as it is a feast—as much a celebration as a crucifixion. And in it the blows delivered against the homosexual's body accumulate until they form, as has been lucidly shown by Agnes I. Lugo-Ortiz, another body: the community's choral corps(e). Assembled on the very edge of the village, the river bank, this chorus sings its ritual foundational song in a counterpoint typical of literary negrismo and reminiscent of the exorcizing logic ofthe Cuban Nicolas Guillen's "Sensemaya: Chant to Rill a Snake":« El agua hizo glu glu. Entonces que no vuel—va no — vuel—va, el hijo de Trinidad glu. . . que glu. . . no glu. . . vuelva glu. . . se glu. . . hundio! (62) The water went gloo gloo. And then don't come—back don't— come—back, Trinidad's son gloo . . . don't
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gloo . . . come back gloo . . . he gloo . . . sank! With a sangfroid whose very contrast underscores the terror that founds it, Sanchez would seem to say, then, that the constitution of the community is not merely an act of expulsion but of cannibalismliterally an absorption. For the community here has been wise enough not to waste any ofthe abject's body parts, not even his dying breath, in order to found, in close counterpoint, its identity. But has the abject, I wonder, a word of his own, a nondialectical rhythm, a breath that may not be profitably used for that counterpoint? Is there, that is, a space of his o w n a space not complicitous with the binary structure of sacrifice—from which to articulate his identity or toward which to direct it? Or are there other channels —channels of his own —through which to resist abjection? And if he were to come out ofthe river and travel along the foreseeable paths, retrace the route of his crucifixion, would he be able then to subvert the structure that repudiates him and absorbs him? Or would he end up falling once again into abjection's tangled web? Figure I
Francisco Oiler, El Velorio (The Wake) 1893, oil on canvas, 8 x 1 3 ft. Reproduced by permission ofthe Museo de Historia, Antropologia y Arte, University of Puerto Rico.
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Much of Puerto Rican literature in the United States, both the production ofthe first generation of U.S.-born Puerto Rican, or Nuyorican, writers as well as that of the homosexual exile writers of the Puerto Rican generation of the 70s, has been written from this des-tierro, this landlessness/banishment, this river of abjection.^ Elsewhere 1 have shown how, emerging from the context of 60s third-world political movements, one ofthe most representative currents of Nuyorican literature sought to found, through the demystification of social relations, an authentic space for the Puerto Rican nation and self ("Teaching"). And I have further argued how, in consonance with the model of internal colonialism then prevalent, this current set out to "unmask" the complicity ofthe colonized with the social relations that maintained his or her oppression—to transcend, that is, those hierarchical relations between master and slave that contain the identity of one in that of the other and that Fanon, no doubt their most sagacious analyst, called "dual narcissism" (9-10). And I have moreover identified an evolution in this demystifying current of Nuyorican literature that entails the disappearance of that Utopian element, of that transcendent foundational space for the community and the self it was the poet's task to unveil. There is in the later work of an author as representative as Pedro Pietri a demystifying intention that, as a result of the absence of an anchoring foundational space, ends up multiplying and disseminating ad infinitum. In his play The Masses Are Asses, for instance, Pietri's characters unmask themselves in rapid succession without being able to leave the binary space of expulsion and banishment that is here, as in so much of Nuyorican literature, the bathroom, el toilet.^ Allow me now to return to this evolution of the demystifying gesture of the foundational texts of Nuyorican literature in order to suggest that a coming to terms vtdth the impossibility of transcending the binary structure of abjection is one of their defining traits. Indeed, to a great extent the strength and pathos of Nuyorican texts, such as Piri Thomas' Down These Mean Streets (1967), Miguel Pinero's Short Eyes (1975), and the anthology TVajoncart Poetry (1975), edited by Pinero and Miguel Algarin, derive from the fact that in them the attempt to transform that structure into the hypostasis of an authentic ethnic, or national, space is fully assumed and imploded —taken to its limits. It has been said that a new American marginal identity is born with the appearance of Nuyorican literature in the late 60s. But I would rather say that Nuyorican literature emerges in the gap that opens up when the transcendental subject that sustained Fanon's epistemology implodes and that its origins are in that
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lack of foundations, in its coming to terms with the condition of reversibility and implication that constitutes "Puerto Ricanness" in the United States. "Ricans are funny people," a "white" character assures us in Short Eyes; in a world ruled by ferociously defended racial and sexual limits, they represent, like the homosexual in "jJum!," the porous, the permeable-treason: "If a spic pulls a razor blade on you . . . and they ain't no white people around . . . get a spic to watch your back, you may have a chance . . . " (28). The founding texts of Nuyorican writing, I propose, persistently comment on that porous, treacherous condition that constitutes "Puerto Ricanness," but not so much in order to transcend it as in order to resignify it, to use it to authorize themselves—to find within it, that is, modes of resistance and validation. Homi Bhabha has suggested that the effectiveness of Fanon's thought lies still not so much in its yearning for "the total transformation of Man and Society" as in its being always in a state of emergence, of unresolved contradiction, "never dawning without casting an uncertain dark" (41). And in this sense recent analyses of Black Skin, White Masks may be seen to have shown that, much despite the vigilance with which Fanon turns to his own body in order to unveil the masks of his complicity with the structures that oppress him ("0 my body, make of me always a man who questions!" is the prayer with which his book ends, 190), his efforts to transcend the binary relations of expiation are also built on the expulsion ofthe other—of the homosexual.^ Contrasting the relationship between family and state in Europe and the Caribbean, Fanon argues that while in Europe a "normal" family produces a "normal" citizen in conformity with the state; in the Caribbean "a black child, having grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal at the slightest contact with the white world" (119). Unlike in Europe, in the Caribbean "abnormality" is not caused by the family but by the state. And he concludes: "Like it or not, the Oedipus complex is far from coming into being among blacks. . . . An inability on which we highly congratulate ourselves . . . " (125-26). This inversion of the relationship between family and state here is symptomatic ofthe general psychological structure that organizes the two pathologies that rule social relations between whites and blacks: negrophobia and paranoia. Like it these two pathologies describe chiasmic figures. In the end, the white man who is afraid of the erect phallus that is the black man in Western culture also desires him; just as the white man who imagines himself persecuted by the black man also
i 1 . ^ .
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^ „ ..
pursues him, summons him up. "Fault, Guilt, denial of guilt, paranoiaone is once again," states Fanon, "in homosexual territory" (150). Certainly the territory in which Fanon feels himself immersed and from which he tries to extricate himself is the same one surveyed by Freud in his exemplary cases of Schreber and the "Wolf-man": cases in which the patient's phobia and paranoia stem in fact from the neurotic repudiation of what he desires-the passive copulation with the father, which Freud called elsewhere the "negative Oedipus complex."'" It might be understandable then why Fanon exorcized the Oedipus complex, so susceptible of reversibility, from the Caribbean family and how, in order to do so, he had to relegate, to banish all discussion of Martinican homosexuality to the footnotes of his text. Even in these notes-after reviewing the traditional case of Martinican men who dress up like women and are called comeres (approximately, godmothers) and the no less typical one of fellow countrymen who have been forced by economic circumstances to serve in the metropolis as "passive pederasts"—he assures us that he has not as yet had "the chance to establish the overt presence of pederasty in Martinique" and that this must certainly be a direct "result of the absence of the Oedipus complex in the Caribbean" (148). It would seem then that before the dangerous advancement of the homosexual territory that threatens to overwhelm all relations between the colonizer and the colonized, containing them in its chiasmic grasp, Fanon has tried to preserve a space for romance, safeguarded from inversion, where eros might not be implicated in the binary relations of expulsion, where desire may neither be defined in opposition to repudiation nor be susceptible to turning into it —its apparent opposite. This space would be both an origin for and an anticipation of those mature object relations that will some day exist when whites and blacks alike take off the masks of their "dual narcissism." But in works like Short Eyes and Down These Mean Streets there is no space for romance outside the binary relations of expiation, and even if throughout them their characters successively and ferociously attempt to delimit desire from repudiation, they all end up falling once again into abjection's implicated web. Bildungsromane of sorts, these texts are rites of passage that figure the Nuyorican subject's attempt to gain authority, to emerge, as it were, into maturity and maleness. But on concluding the ritual, upon leaving the initiatory precinct of the jail in order to return to his family, Julio "Cupcakes" Mercado, the protagonist of
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Short Eyes, knows he has gained that heterosexual space at a cost-at the cost of his contamination-and that he carries with him "the jail" (119), its relations of expiation. Similarly, Piri, the protagonist of Down These Mean Streets, on finishing his voyage of education, ascends onto the rooftop for the last time, the rufo of his dreams, in order to realize that his ambition to gain a name, a territory, a "turf," through the performance of "machismo," racial affifiation, or a romantic union is a mirage, equivalent to drug addiction, and begins to descend—with no assurances but hopeful-onto abjection's "mean streets"-streets ruled by the "other," "the Man"-while, in the background, a "sad-assed bolero" is heard announcing the defeat of all illusion, of all romance (314)." Carlito, the eponymous character of Carlito's Way, philosophizes. Speaking of sexual relations with "faggots" in jail, he says: "Bad news. Once a guy starts on that you got to put him down—pretty soon you don't know who's the poger and who's the pogee" (Torres 42). And certainly in Short Eyes, Down These Mean Streets, and Nuyorican Poetry, homosexual practices occupy that zone of reversibility where the Nuyorican author's struggle to emerge from the spectral state of abjection to which he is subjected by "internal colonialism," by "the System," "the Man," always inevitably falls back on contested territory. In them, one could say, the "queen," the "faggot" are not so much the antithesis of their "macho" characters and poetic personae as that "proximate other" in whose likeness the latter see refiected the catastrophic condition of their own manhood, what in one of his poems anthologized in Nuyorican Poetry Algarin describes as the "cockless," mongo (flaccid) state ofthe Nuyorican condition (52). No wonder then the insistence on homosexuality in these texts. And if it is true that their characters and poetic personae desperately try to overcome that reversible and ghostly condition that simultaneously emblematizes homosexual practices and the Nuyorican condition, it is also true that they must assume it, incorporate it. Rather than repudiate homosexuality, Nuyorican texts seem, like the short story "jJum!," to exhibit its problematic absorption. Thus, a blurb from the original edition of Down These Mean Streets introduces it in an unwittingly perceptive way: "Piri Thomas," it says, "describes the passionate, painful search to validate his manhood, for which, with dead-pan cool, he had to fight, steal, submit to buggery . . . take any dare, any risk" (my emphasis). To validate masculinity with its ruin, to submit to sodomy, to "buggery" in order to construct a male national identity, there is the paradoxical foundational project that Nuyorican texts set for themselves.
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But, as Carlito rightly warns, once the bodies of two men are joined, once they are tangled up in homosexual practices, in "sodomy," who is to say who gives and who takes, who attacks and who surrenders, if he who gives it surrenders, or if he who takes it devours? Once, that is, the bodies of two men embark on an erotic act, however conventional and predictable it might seem, who is to say for sure what final figure will contain that movement? Who will remain standing? Who will end up on his knees? Yet it is precisely to this paradoxical and precarious movement that Short Eyes and Down These Mean Streets submit themselves, all the while attempting to channel it and to contain it through rhetorics of displacement and of transfiguration, respectively. As in a dramatization of Althusser's notion of ideology, the characters of Short Eyes appear before us, emerge into the light by being interpellated by the prison guard, who warns them that they must answer because "your ass is mine" (5). Thus, in Short Eyes sodomy is what subdues the subject, both what subjects him and subjectifies him, fixing him into place within the network of distinctions of the prison system, assigning him a name and a space. And all of its characters, the guards as well as the inmates, are defined in it in real or symbolic relation to sodomy: they either penetrate or are penetrated, they are either "daddies" or "stuff" in a hierarchical, unilinear chain of abjection. Just as according to Foucault power cohabits with resistance, here abjection and eros share the same path: sodomy. And even if the play's characters attempt, through an asymmetrical erotic choreography, to keep desire at bay by transforming it into repudiation, by compulsively reproducing the abjection to which the prison system subjects them, that very repetition begins also to undermine the distinctions that this system had sought to fix into place. Thus in what is perhaps the pivotal scene in Piiiero's play, the desire of one of its characters, Paco, for the "Puerto Rican pretty boy," Cupcakes, threatens to disrupt the hierarchical chain of subjections on which the prison system is based by inverting its directionality and offering instead the possibility of "going both ways" (69). Turning to the linguistic repertoire of Puerto Rican seduction, from the falsely humble confessional plea ("Oyeme, negrito . . . tii me tiene[s] . . . " [Listen, negrito, . . . you're driving me . . . ]) to the defiantly luring dare ("Cupcakes: [E]cha, que esta[s] caliente, Paco. / Paco: Pue[s] ponme frio" [Cupcakes: Get away, you're hot, Paco. / Paco: Cool me off then]), byway of hyperbolic adulation ("Cupcakes, [nene Undo], que dio[s] bendiga la
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tierra que tu pise[s]" [Cupcakes, pretty babe, may god bless the ground you step on]), Paco transforms the place of expulsion—the bathroom— into a romantic space (66-67). Faced with the threat of disruption, the system engenders its own "pure" object of sacrificial restoration, the presumed molester of girls, Clark Davis, in the lingo ofthe jail, "Short Eyes"-a character whose sole qualification for occupying the abject place ofthe "stuff" rests on his being the other, the marked one, "the freak." And all of Paco's desire for Cupcakes, now transformed into violence, is discharged upon him. Not only Paco but all of the characters who participate in the rape and murder of "Short Eyes" are implicated in this inversion of abjection into desire —an inversion that forces them to resort to displacement as a strategy of containment. For deep down all of the inmates desire Cupcakes, and Cupcakes, walking among them like a tantalizing delicacy, losing at card games so as to have to bend down and do push-ups, summoning them all with the eloquent promise of the culinary moniker that identifies him, also desires to be desired. In the end, the displacement of all ofthe characters' desire toward the murder of "Short Eyes" is simply revealed as just that: a strategy of containment. And the strength of their desire is accurately and paradoxically confirmed by the brutality with which the latter must be contained, by the ferociousness with which it must be denied. If Short Eyes seeks to assume and to transform the state of abjection represented in Nuyorican foundational texts by homosexual practices through displacement, Z)ow;«^ These Mean Streets tries to assume it and to contain it through a rhetoric of transfiguration. Invoking the paradoxical Hegelian dialectic that affirms that all self-consciousness in-itself and for-itself exists only by virtue of its recognition by another self-consciousness, Fanon argues that, to the degree that the Caribbean black man has not been able to make himself acknowledged by the white man through struggle, he has not yet attained the condition of selfconsciousness that would confirm his humanity; he does not exist (177 and ff.). Unlike the American black man who "battles and is battled" (181), the Caribbean black man, he affirms, does not even occupy the predictable space of otherness, of contestation.*- Consumed by that paternalist animal that is European culture, "unable ever to be sure whether the white man considers him self-consciousness in-itself and for-itself" or not, the Caribbean black man must devote himself incessantly, he explains, "to uncovering resistance, opposition, challenge" (182) in order to prove through them his own existence.
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Piri Thomas and Puerto Rican writers in the United States are, I believe, in an analogous position to that ofthe Caribbean black man in European culture. Situated between the lost maternal paradise of Puerto Rican roots and the paternal world of assimilation, straddling two contradictory systems of racial classification—that of American society and of the Puerto Rican family—which configure blackness respectively as an ontology and as a condition, oscillating between adolescence and adulthood, Thomas desperately seeks an identity from which to make himself visible, from which to emerge. But standing in that not-yetrecognized invisible middle ground, his first gesture of affirmation will be not so much to express a repressed identity as to engage in a practice: to go against the Law, to trespass the limit, to penetrate alien turf, to transgress. And in penetrating enemy territory to discover in the blows, the bruises, the cuts that the structures of "the System" accumulate on his skin, his own body. To realize that he exists: to feel his fiesh, to taste his blood, and to hope that out of that gushing wound is born—as out of the martyr's stigmata a fiower—the valor, the stone-faced coolness, the rigidity before one's opponent, the heart that prove, in the midst of the forlornness of the wound, the presence of that redeeming quality, intangible and elusive, that is masculinity: Then . . . everybody starts dealing . . . [and you] feel somebody put his damn fist square in your damn mouth and split your damn lip and you taste your own sweet blood—and all of a sudden you're really glad you came . . . you're glad somebody punched you in the mouth; you're glad for another chance to prove how much heart you got. (67) So it is that in Down These Mean Streets the chapter on the protagonist's initiation into manhood culminates with a visit to the apartment of some Puerto Rican "faggots" (63-70). For the "faggot" incarnates for the "macho" the state of abjection through which his own masculinity is constituted. And even if he may thus represent the final trial to which the "macho" must subject himself in expectation ofthe transfiguration of his body by the signs of masculinity, he can also conjure up the terrifying image of his possible fixation in that state, of his inability to transfigure abjection. The entire homosexual adventure of Piri and his friends in this chapter is traversed by the fear of cannibalism, by the fear, that is, of being absorbed or sucked in by the other—the homosexual hypostasized as a hole, a vacuum, an anus, or a devouring mouth. In fact, the trial to which
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Piri and his friends subject themselves is the practice of fellatio. Impassive, like heroes withstanding the enemy's assault, the characters of Down These Mean Streets bear on their bodies the "outrage" ofthe "blows" (68). But, with each suction, with each "blow," they feel their bodies distending and dispersing, disappearing in the homosexuals' avid mouths, conforming to their rhythm, to their breath. And while the homosexuals' mouths sucks their members, their "joints," they in turn inhale a huge cigarette of marihuana, a "king-sized joint," gobbling it up.*' It would seem then that the symmetry between the "faggot" and the "macho" has managed to expand dangerously. Exhausted, exsanguine, spectral, the "macho" and the "faggot" are confused and fused. They are now one single entwined body—a body that shares orifices in which it would be impossible to disentangle receptivity and aggression. But at that very moment in which the bodies of the "macho" and the "faggot" are entangled, leveling their differences, there appears, as in Short Eyes, the violence that restores the system, transforming desire into repudiation; and Piri, emerging from his spectral state over the screeching sound of the beating of a "faggot," begins to ascend onto the rufo, the rooftop of his dreams, from which he now projects himself as owner of "his" barrio and of himself, as "king," as "boss," as "man," transfiguring himself thus on the ruins of his own virility. It is a partial, precarious solution that the novel itself takes care to dissolve. For in having Piri descend from the rufo of his identity onto abjection's "mean streets," the novel confirms his inability to acquire a territory of his own through the performance of "machismo," racial affiliation, or a national romance. Looking at himself in the mirror, he now feels all of the masks with which his attempts at plenitude had covered his face fall off, and he sees in their stead, not the much anticipated transcendental subject of Fanonian epistemology, but a hole: "I felt as though I had found a hole in my face and out of it were pouring all the different masks that my cara-palo face had fought so hard to keep hidden" (306). It is that hole, that opening onto the other—mediating mouth or anus, site of transaction and decantation—in which the efforts to assume and to transform male abjection in Puerto Rican literature in the United States culminate, where 1 would hke to place the work of that other Puerto Rican author who would at first seem to shun all affifiation wdth the national foundational poetics of Nuyorican texts. I am referring to the homosexual exile writer ofthe Puerto Rican generation ofthe 70s, Manuel
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d i - - ~ -
Ramos Otero.** No other Puerto Rican writer has so insisted on founding his writing on what could destroy it—on abjection. No other has so surrendered to the communicating and excluding paradoxes that rule the relationship between the master and the slave.'^ And no other has so dared to assume the language of the torturer in order to make visible at last—bruised and battered—his own body. At the beginning of this essay I asked myself whether the abject could emerge from his des-tierro, from his landlessness/banishment, whether he could constitute a voice of his own, or whether he would be destined irrevocably to fall back into abjection's tangled web. And emerging from the decaying Hudson River Figure 2 Angel Rodri'guez-Dfaz, Tsuchigumo 1983, oil on canvas, 60 x 66 in. Reproduced by permission ofthe artist.
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piers in the painting by Angel Rodriguez-Diaz which illustrates the cover of one of his books, Pdgina en bianco y stacatto (Blank / White Page and Stacatto), Ramos Otero would seem to answer this question for us. Wrapped up in a modernista kimono and brandishing the umbrella of one of his poems against the storm, Ramos Otero, unperturbed, walks on.*^ Is he then on his way to vindicate or to assimilate, to surrender or to attack? Is he, like the repressed, returning from an origin buried there in the city's very edge? Or is he, like a specter, traveling to the center to reclaim his image, his rightful place? Oscillating between these two poles, using the very paths of abjection, Ramos Otero, with his kimono and his umbrella, summons us to the traveling theater*^ that is his walk —a pure will to exist, dispossessed of all grounding, contingent but also alone, fierce and forlorn.
I would like to thank Alberto Sandoval Sdnchez, Doris Sommer, Efrain Barradas, and Ruben Rios Avila for their generous comments on an earlier draft of this essay and New York University Press for permission to publish it here. This essay will appear in Sex and Sexuality in Latin America and is published here by permission of New York University Press.
ARNALDO CRUz-MALAv£ is Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at Fordham University in New York City and member of the board of directors ofthe Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies of the City University of New York's Graduate Center. He is the author of El primitivo implorante: El "sistema poetico del mundo" de Jose Lezama Lima (Rodopi, 1994) and of numerous articles on Caribbean and U.S. Latino literatures and cultures. He is currently working on the construction of masculinity in Caribbean and U.S. Latino texts. Notes
The protagonist's liminal condition is established from the very first paragraph of "jJum!": "Que era ave rarisima asentando vacacion en mar y tierra" (They said he was a very rare bird vacationing both on land and sea [57]). Unless otherwise noted all translations are my own.
identity and gender in Paz's classic book on Mexicanness, El laberinto de la soledad. For an excellent analysis of Thomas's Down These Mean Streets from the perspective of Paz's categories, see Marta E. Sanchez, "Revisiting."
"Que el hijo de Trinidad se prensaba los fondillos hasta asfixiar el nalgatorio" (57).
DoUimore argues in favor of what he calls the "perverse dynamic" that subverts through the "unstably proximate" the norm, the Law (229).
I am referring here to the categories of "the open" and "the closed" as they relate to national
Positioning the dead child around whom the nation gathers below a
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i i e r e n c e s traditionally roasted pig. Oiler turns his national allegory into a grotesque tale of incorporation, of cannibalism. As in "jJum!," the nation here is constituted in and through the death of an other. But, if we consider that since the nineteenth century Puerto Rico's colonial status has been figured either as an infantile condition or in terms of death, then the other against which the nation is constituted is also itself. One could argue then that Oiler's painting belongs to a tradition in which the Puerto Rican nation is paradoxically constituted in and through an act of selfannihilation, in which the representation of its failure to constitute itself as a nation also provides the opportunity for a joyous act of self-affirmation, of national foundations. For an analysis of infantilization as a trope in Puerto Rican writing, see Gelpi. For a meditation on impotence and lack as a means of authorization in Puerto Rican literature, see my "Toward an Art of Transvestism." 6
Like "jJum!," Guillen's poem from West Indies Ltd. (1934) may be read as an act of communal constitution through the exorcism of an "evil" other—an act whose dual structure is formally reproduced by the Afro-American musical structure, typical of negrista poetry, of "call and response." Lugo-Ortiz has similarly shown how, in "jJum!," the community is constituted through an equivalent AfroCaribbean dialogic musical structure whose aim is the homogenization of all voices in what the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz has described as a moment of "rapture" or arrebato (124-26).
7
The term Nuyorican, like Chicano or black, is a "reclaimed" term. It
was originally used by Puerto Ricans on the Island as a pejorative term for Puerto Rican emigrants, most of whom settled in New York. In the late 60s Puerto Rican writers began to reclaim this term. In so doing, they were affirming the immigrant community's specific experiences, history, and social practices. See Algarin, "Nuyorican Language"; Flores; and, for a useful overview of Nuyorican literature, Mohr; Zimmerman; and the special section, "Multicultural Literature: Part IV," of the ADE Bulletin. In the late 60s, Puerto Rican gay writers ofthe so-called generation ofthe 70s exiled themselves in the United States where they have vsritten most of their work—writers such as Victor Fragoso, Manuel Ramos Otero, Carlos Rodriguez Matos, Alfredo Villanueva Collado, and Alberto Sandoval Sanchez. Edelman describes the men's room as a "border" where normative male heterosexuality is most vulnerable, most exposed, because it is there that it is elaborated, "definitionally produced" ("Tearooms" 159). And he adds that the men's room is thus a site of intense heterosexual male anxiety and cultural policing. One could argue that the foregrounding of the bathroom or men's room in Nuyorican texts, such as Pietri's The Masses Are Asses, Thomas's Down These Mean Streets, and Pifiero's "Paper Toilet" and Short Eyes, represents a similar anxiety over Puerto Rican national or ethnic identity understood as a male heterosexual identity. And one could further suggest, as I do, that the inability of Puerto Rican men to accede to the privileges of masculinity in the United States, and thus to a phallic national or ethnic identity, is obsessively
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represented in these texts as an inability to leave that abjected space that is el toilet. 9
Dollimore, Edelman, and Fuss point out in different ways how Fanon's attempt to go beyond the phobic structure that rules relations between whites and blacks, the colonizer and the colonized, ends up reproducing the same phobic structure vis-avis homosexuality. See Dollimore (346); Edelman, "The Part" (66); and Fuss (33).
10 See, for example, "A Child Is Being Beaten." 11 The most important romantic relationship in Down These Mean Streets is the protagonist's with Trina, whom he calls his "Marine Tiger," referring to the ship in which so many Puerto Ricans migrated to New York and, metonymically, to the mass migration of Puerto Ricans to the United States after World War II. Down These Mean Streets could thus be read as the attempt to unite the descendants of earlier Puerto Rican migrations, such as the protagonist, with their Puerto Rican roots through their union with the (then) most recent migration. It could be read, that is, as a sort of "national romance" which ends up in failure. On the "national romance" in Latin America, see Sommer's illuminating discussion in Foundational Fictions. 12 Fuss has recently argued that Fanon's theory ofthe black man as an other, as a "phobic projection of a distinctly Western imaginary," uncovers a "deeper, more insidious level of orientalism" in which the black man is even excluded from participating in alterity, as otherness is claimed by the white man (20-21). Fanon's distinction between the ontological condition
of the American and Antillean black man would accord with these two levels of exclusion identified by Fuss. To a great extent, one could argue, what drives Fanon's anticolonial project is this perceived "invisibility" of the Antillean black man vis-a-vis the African or American black man, whom, he thinks, has gained his visibility through armed struggle. In this sense, Fanon's yearning for a decolonizing struggle that would render the Antillean black man visible, and his dislocation of that struggle outside the contemporary Caribbean, would be part of a Caribbean tradition forcefully expressed in the writing of such authors as Aime Cesaire, Maryse Conde, George Lamming, Carpentier, and Rodriguez Julia. 13 This symmetry is pointed out by Reid-Farr in his excellent analysis of Down These Mean Streets. 14 Manuel Ramos Otero, who died of AIDS in 1990, was one of the most important Puerto Rican writers of the second half of the twentieth century. After 1969, he lived in exile in New York where he wi ote almost all of his work. He was the author of four books of stories: Concierto de metal para un recuerdo y otras orgias de soledad. El cuento de la Mujer del Mar, Pdgina en bianco y stacatto, and the posthumous Cuentos de buena tinta; of two books of poetry: El libro de la muerte, and the posthumous Invitacion al polvo; and of a novel. La novelabingo. For readings of Ramos Otero's critique ofthe Puerto Rican national(ist) canon, see my "Para virar al macho"; Gelpi, "La escritura transeiinte de Ramos Otero" (137-54); and Sotomayor. 15 For an examination of abjection in Ramos Otero's work, see
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especially his "Vida ejemplar del esclavo y el seiior" and "Loca la de la locura." On the importance ofthe Hegelian dialectic ofthe master and the slave in his work, see his interview by Columbia University's Center for American Cultural Studies. For an analysis of abjection in Ramos Otero's writing, see my "Toward an Art of Transvestism."
Works Cited
16 The poem on which this painting is based is "Esta es la segunda parte del Ulysses." 17 "Teatro rodante" is the expression used by Ramos Otero in his description of this painting in "Descuento" (105), which has been translated into English as "The UnteUing."
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