05 February 2009

We Are a Nation of Many Voices

Novelist, editor and literary critic Marie Arana was born in Peru.

By Marie Arana

One in four Americans has strong ties to a foreign past, and from these diverse cultures, a new, vibrant American literature has sprung.

Marie Arana is the author of the memoir American Chica, as well as two novels, Cellophane and Lima Nights. She is also the editor of a collection of essays, The Writing Life.

“We glory in an America of diversity,” U.S. Vice President Hubert Humphrey (1965-1969) once said, “an America all the richer for the many different and distinctive strands from which it is woven.”

At no other time has this been more true. Today, one in four among us has a strong tie to a foreign past. More than one in five was born elsewhere or has an immigrant parent. We are a nation of many voices, myriad histories — a hotbed of artistic possibility. It’s little wonder that from this vibrant and variegated culture, a new American literature has sprung.

The birth of American multicultural literature was not easy; much might have stunted it; but it had the good fortune to grow in a land that had a fluid sense of identity. Even the bedrock novels of Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald capture three entirely distinct Americas. Still, by the 1950s, a different writer had begun to emerge — one whose works attempted to reflect not the nation at large, but a single ethnic sensibility. First came Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, with their deeply felt Jewish-American novels; then Ralph Ellison, with his harrowing tale of racism, Invisible Man. 

The literature of black America had begun almost one hundred years before with the slave narratives of Frederick Douglass. After slavery was outlawed, it passed from the fiery rhetoric of W.E.B. Du Bois to the striking imagery of Langston Hughes. It would go on to many great works by James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Gwendolyn Brooks. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that black voices began to flow freely through America’s literary bloodline. With Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, Maya Angelou, and Jamaica Kincaid, this singularly American literature became part of the mainstream.

Bridging the Cultural Divide

But multicultural literature took a few more years to arrive, and it involved more than black-white America. That new wave was heralded by Maxine Hong Kingston’s 1976 bestseller The Woman Warrior, a highly imaginative memoir that dared speak in an entirely new way. Filled with ghosts of Chinese ancestors, it broke all the rules, mixed dreams with reality, juggled identities freely, and put a firm foot across the cultural divide.   

“I read that book as a young woman and thought ‘Wow! You can do that?’” the novelist Sandra Cisneros once told me. “You can think in another language with another mythology, but write it in English?” And so, a new era of American literature was born.

For Hispanics, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. Precisely at the same time, a Latin American boom was in progress. The works of Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa were being translated furiously into English. They quickly penetrated the North American consciousness. Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude was soon followed by Fuentes’s The Death of Artemio Cruz and Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero — each book a watermark in the rising tide of our awareness.

The first Hispanic American to break onto bestseller lists during this time was a writer who didn’t need to be translated: Richard Rodriguez’s eloquent memoir Hunger of Memory, published in 1981, was fierce and elegiac, a striking work that challenged the tired stereotypes of Chicano identity. Three years later, it was joined by Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, a spare and affecting novel about a seven-year-old Mexican girl in a poor ghetto in Chicago. Readers received it as a glimpse into an America they hardly knew.

By the 1990s, the interest in Hispanic-American letters had become brisk commerce. After Oscar Hijuelos won the Pulitzer Prize for his sizzling novel of Cuba, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, publishers competed to bring out books by Latinos from a variety of backgrounds: Julia Alvarez’s vividly told How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, about four Dominican sisters in the Bronx; Cristina Garcia’s sprightly Dreaming in Cuban, about her immigrant family in Miami; Francisco Goldman’s The Long Night of White Chickens, set during Guatemala’s military rule; When I Was Puerto Rican, Esmeralda Santiago’s dreamy paean to her childhood; Drown, Junot Díaz’s prickly stories about Dominican street punks.

Our notions of American culture were morphing quickly. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, published a scant decade after The Woman Warrior, gave way to a vigorous industry of Asian-American letters. Soon there were Gus Lee’s China Boy, a novel about a boy on the mean streets of San Francisco; Lisa See’s Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, a historical novel set in ancient China; Gish Jen’s Typical American, focusing not on the Chinese but on what it means to be a citizen of the United States. Today, that literature has expanded to include works by the children of immigrants from other Asian backgrounds: Japanese-American Wakako Yamauchi; Vietnamese-American Fae Myenne Ng; Korean-American Chang-rae Lee. 

Writing New American Stories

But America’s romance with diversity is still unfolding. Today, multicultural writers include Americans of South Asian ancestry: Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies), Manil Suri (The Death of Vishnu), and Vikram Chandra (Love and Longing in Bombay). Or African Americans with roots in foreign places: Edwidge Danticat, who writes about Haiti, and Nalo Hopkinson, born in Jamaica. Recent years have brought, too, the work of Americans of Middle Eastern heritage: Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner), Diana Abu-Jaber (Crescent), and Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran).

What do these writers have in common? They share an impulse to honor their ancestors — a desire to hold fast to roots. Unlike American immigrants of an earlier era, they balance assimilation with a staunch ethnic pride.

W.E.B. Du Bois called it a “double-consciousness;” Richard Wright, a “double vision.” Whatever we choose to call it, this new literature, born from black experience, forged by an immigrant will, can no longer be considered alien. It is American now.

My own appreciation for my roots came late in life and not until I became a writer. As an editor for many years in New York’s book publishing industry, I had little reason to dwell on having been born in Peru and growing up half-Peruvian. I was too busy trying to be all-American, publishing books by wonderful writers, focusing on the “typical” reader. What did Americans want?

Well into my forties, I went to work at the Washington Post, first as the deputy of the book review section and then as editor. The newspaper’s management, deeply aware of the burgeoning culture of American Hispanics, urged me to write about it. I began with opinion pieces on Latin America, then moved on to articles about the immigrant population, the lives of migrant workers, the intricacies of the Latin American mind. Eventually, I began to recall the observant 10-year-old I was when I arrived in this country. By the time I sat down in the late 1990s to write my memoir of growing up bicultural, there was a vast population of people like me, a strong and lively fellowship of hyphenated Americans.

There is no turning back now. This is a nation, as Humphrey so aptly put it, that glories in diversity. We are the richer for it: The literature of multiculturalism is wildly original, steeped in a wider world, yet unmistakably American. Junot Díaz’s Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a bodacious novel about Dominican identity, cannot have been written without its New Jersey streets. Edwidge Danticat’s stirring memoir of Haiti, Brother, I’m Dying, would not exist had her family not moved to New York City. What these pioneering writers do is reach behind to fashion a new America. One foot lingers in a distant country, but the other is firmly here.