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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Toni Morrison said that Clinton was our first black president and most people took that as a tongue-in-cheek statement. You write that Bush is the first Hispanic president. What do you mean?
Texas is the first state that seems to be on a north-south axis in a way that New York isn't. Certainly the intellectual-literary New York that I visit is so preoccupied by London so as to be almost an embarrassment. Maybe the advantage Bush had of growing up in Midland and maybe because the long acrimony between the Mexican and the Texan had such a deep influence on the way Texans understand themselves ... in Texas, there is always the sense of the South and the North and the inevitability of that. And I think when George Bush comes up with solutions to our energy crisis that engage Arctic wilderness areas and Mexican oil fields, it's inevitable for him to think that way. Most other Americans still think on an East-West map.
And I really do think that he has a kind of physical ease of a sort that Clinton had with black audiences. I've seen Bush with Hispanic audiences, especially when he's allowed or allows himself to speak high school Spanish. There's just this kind of physical pleasure that he has with it. And it's true. It doesn't seem to me fake; it seems to me a true joy that he has.
You say that Americans care more about their future than their past and you seem to feel that this is a good thing. But don't you think that Americans' inadequate knowledge of their own history is a problem?
Certainly, I speak as a son of immigrants, but that was also a great joy in America that my father did not dwell on Mexico, that we didn't have to look back and that I didn't have to become my father. My father made false teeth for a living, that's what he did. I knew as early as I began to speak American English that that would not be my destiny, that I did not have to have this past, that the whole point of this country was culture and I could move into a new culture. Culture gap. Culture shock. The whole notion that you could change your life that way was really quite amazing to me as a child, which is why I turned to Franklin. He was the son of a man who made candles and the family was large and had no money to send him to school. He was apprenticed at a young age and it broke my heart because that wasn't what I wanted from Franklin. I wanted the reassurance of his success. A country that had no past meant that you didn't have to be mired in memory of grandmothers. It was free.
But still people of different backgrounds seem to look for or hold onto some sense of authenticity, which implies that they're looking for something in the past.
You may be onto something really important. This lack of a sense of history has allowed us a kind of romance with race and ethnicity that is fanciful. I did a documentary some years ago about America and teenagers and the past and all these kids who were announcing themselves as wanting to recover their history, as though it was some reassurance, when everything I've ever read about American history is an embarrassment. It's filled with tragedies of all kinds. The notion that we would study history in order to feel better about ourselves is just ludicrous. But we have this romantic sense because we know it so little, our past really seems noble.
I don't look to Aztec Mexico for any reassurance about my identity. I'm aware that Aztec Mexico was a decadent society; its bloodlust was so extreme that its ultimate sexual energy was its pursuit of death. There's nothing in that history for me that leads me to the romantic calendars that you see in Mexican restaurants with the Aztec, almost naked with the feathers coming out of his head, and the Aztec princess at his knees. Nothing of that is convincing to me. History is a terrible, terrible burden which we need to confront, but I don't think the search for authenticity begins there. In many ways, that's a false romance that Americans are engaged in -- by seeing themselves as black or white or Scottish or Mexican through this search for authenticity.
In the end, you have an optimistic outlook for this browning of America.
In many ways, I do, yes. "Brown" has allowed me to reconcile myself to myself, that is, to allow for the unevenness of my life, to allow for its contradictions, to not have to figure everything out in my life, to see it as whole rather than as partial. Maybe this is some wisdom of middle age too, but I realize now that life is uneven, that I will always be Catholic as inevitably as I will always be a homosexual, that I will always be at odds with my identity, that I will always belong in some odd way to Latin America and that I will always belong to this other place, this country that is not at all like Latin America. That I will have all of those identities and that I will live with them in a brown way. For a man who has struggled with this and has sort of turned his life into an odd exercise in self-laceration, it comes with some great peace, almost as though I don't need to write anymore.
It's interesting because you write that our sexual history had so much to do with the violence of our history -- meaning miscegenation and so forth -- and then in the end, you're saying that our sexual future might have a lot to do with reconciliation.
Oh, yes. My advantage as this gay little boy was to always know that the most dangerous thing I could say was "I love you." What I learned from that repression was to notice just how often it occurs in history and to always look for it, especially where it was never announced.
There's a woman who shows up at my family Christmas every year, this blond lady who comes with all my relatives from India. I keep bothering my mother, "Who is she?" and my mother says, "Why do you keep asking about her? She's married to your uncle's nephew. She met him at Berkeley when they were law students. That's who she is. What do you want to know?"
What I want to know is how did she come to be here? Where does eroticism take us? Where does desire take us? Well, it takes us to this brown Christmas with Dr. Gupta singing Hindu hymns over the turkey and my mother with her American English accented by Spanish. What I realize now was that that woman's blondness was not an exception to our brownness but was deepening our brownness, was darkening our brownness. Her very blondness was making our brownness deeper and richer.
