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Redalyc.ON the ETHICS and POETICS of HOW WE MAKE OUR LIVES: ESMERALDA SANTIAGO and the IMPROVISATION of IDENTITY

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Redalyc.ON the ETHICS and POETICS of HOW WE MAKE OUR LIVES: ESMERALDA SANTIAGO and the IMPROVISATION of IDENTITY Centro Journal ISSN: 1538-6279 [email protected] The City University of New York Estados Unidos Rosario, José R. ON THE ETHICS AND POETICS OF HOW WE MAKE OUR LIVES: ESMERALDA SANTIAGO AND THE IMPROVISATION OF IDENTITY Centro Journal, vol. XXII, núm. 2, 2010, pp. 107-127 The City University of New York New York, Estados Unidos Available in: http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=37721056005 How to cite Complete issue Scientific Information System More information about this article Network of Scientific Journals from Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal Journal's homepage in redalyc.org Non-profit academic project, developed under the open access initiative CENTRO Journal Volume7 xx11 Number 2 fall 2010 ON THE ETHICS AND POETICS OF HOW WE MAKE OUR LIVES: ESMERALDA SANTIAGO AND THE IMPROVISATION OF IDENTITY José R. RosaRio a b s t r a c t This interpretive essay explores the early memoirs of Esmeralda Santiago, When I was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman, to show how narrative literature contributes to understanding how lives unfold as improvised ethical and aesthetic projects. Santiago’s storied inventions are cast as relating more to oppositional ethics than to ideological struggle. Santiago pursues the life she owes to herself, not the life she owes to others. The ethical lapses in Santiago’s life-making process are construed as the necessary improvised tactics individuals are constrained to make when fabricating a life with the culture and history they inherit. [Key words: Improvisation, ethics, aesthetics, life-making process] [ 107 ] JILL KER CONWAY REMINDS US THAT HOW WE ACCOUNT FOR our lives matter. She urges that we not frame the past as either the outcome of “fate or luck,” or as something “fully determined.” She asks instead that we think of the past in ways that do not cast ourselves as “victims” in “stoic resignation” to our experiences. Her preference is that we construe our life-making process “as a moral and spiritual journey.” This view would allow us, she believes, to imagine and fabricate a life as a moral and ethical project (Conway 1998: 176). I agree with Conway that fate, luck, or any other force cannot account fully for our lives. Making a life, as she rightly argues, is an ethically laden enterprise driven by imagination and created over time. This “spiritual journey,” as she calls it, is a poetic fabrication, a series of “identity performances” (Bateson 1989; Butler 1990; Mishler 1999) that no calculative model riding on deliberate and rational decision-making can fully explain. There are, as Michel de Certau (1974) observes, moral and aesthetic elements—poetry, drama, and dance—underlying the mystery of making a life, of manufacturing what one wants to be. This more fluid, poetic, and ethically grounded model of life or identity making is clearly evident in Latino/a narrative. As Karen Christian aptly demonstrates in Show and Tell: Identity as Performance in U.S. Latina/o Fiction, there is nothing essentialist about Latino/a identities. Such identities are “perpetually being transformed through the enactment and interpretation of ethnic performances that appear in literary texts and at other sites of artistic production” (Christian 1997: 20). For William Luis, the idea of identity as performance in Latino/a literature is best captured by the metaphor of a dance. “Latinos and their culture are engaged in a metaphorical dance with Anglo- Americans and the dominant culture,” he argues. “The dance suggests a coming together of the two and influences the way they dance, to the same tune in the same dance hall. Though the dance refers to Latino and U.S. cultures, it is not restricted to one dance or one partner…. Once the two partners engage in the dance, both will change; neither one will remain the same” (Luis 1997: xv). In Daughters of Self-creation: The Contemporary Chicana Novel, Annie Eysturoy construes this “dance” as oppositional self-development. “[T]he Chicana protagonist,” Eysturoy writes, “uses her creativity to claim her identity as a unique, self-defined woman. This self-definition,” she goes on to add, “emerges out of a conscious opposition to patriarchal norms and values. Through the act [ 108 ] of narrating her own Bildungs story, the Chicana protagonist claims not only her own individual subjectivity, but a subjectivity that is rooted in a shared socio- cultural context” (Eysturoy 1996: 131). THESE SCRIPTS APPEAR THROUGHOUT HER EARLY WRITINGS AS THE RECURRENT TROPES AND SYMBOLS THAT POPULATE HER CHILDHOOD AND ADOLESCENT MEMORIES: JÍBARA, PUTA, PENDEJA, JAMONA, SINVERGÜENZAS, BUENOS MODALES, AND DIGNIDAD. In her early memoirs, When I was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman, Esmeralda Santiago offers a compelling vision of life making as an aesthetic and ethical project in the manner Eysturoy and other theorists postulate. The purpose of this essay is to explore this view, which I describe later, following Eysturoy (1996), as oppositional improvisation. Since I believe this model appears most clearly in Santiago’s early writings, I omit from this analysis the last installment of her biographical trilogy, The Turkish Lover (Santiago 2004). Focused principally on the years she spent with Turkish filmmaker Ulvi Dogan, this later work does not speak to Santiago’s early formation and feminist struggles in the 1950s and ‘60s to make a life for herself independent of her mother’s strong cultural legacies. It is in her first two memoirs that we find Santiago working with and against the gendered scripts she experiences as a child. These scripts appear throughout her early writings as the recurrent tropes and symbols that populate her childhood and adolescent memories: jíbara, puta, pendeja, jamona, sinvergüenzas, buenos modales, and dignidad. We also see in these early works how Santiago references these cultural materials in fabricating a life sufficiently meaningful to call her own. By the time she leaves home with her “Turkish lover,” she appears to have accomplished the childhood and adolescent tasks of what to make of and how to shape the inherited labels and models swirling about her. In examining Santiago’s early writings, I will be exploring literary themes that fall within the tradition of Nuyorican literature. The two memoirs represent works typically identified with Puerto Rican writers living in New York and writing in English or “Spanglish,” a blend of English and Spanish, about the experience of Puerto Ricans living in New York City (Algarin 1975; Mohr 1982; Flores 1993; Hernández 1997). Nuyorican literature is essentially literature by Nuyoricans about Nuyoricans. As Juan Flores points out, Nuyorican literature “is a literature of recovery and collective affirmation” (1993: 152). Based on the themes the [ 109 ] memoirs recover and celebrate, María Acosta Cruz positions the writings within the tradition of “jibarismo literario” (2006: 173), a narrative form that traffics in what José Luis González calls “the mythification of the small town Puerto Rican peasant” (González 1982). Thus, as I explore Santiago’s early works, I will be interpreting mostly how Santiago manages the jíbarismo she is born into in Puerto Rico and is haunted by in New York City. What I mean to show specifically is that Santiago’s early life is constructed out of and in resistance to the material she inherits, and that she accomplishes this project, not according to the grand narratives that populate the social science literature, but in much the same poetic way a jazz musician makes music: through improvisation or spontaneous invention. In the world of social science, success is typically the outcome of one’s personal traits or qualities, one’s family, one’s social advantages and opportunities, or a combination of these. I refer to these narratives here as the narrative of individuality, the narrative of family, and the narrative of structure. To explain Santiago’s achievements, I argue, one needs to move beyond these three schemes to a more literary interpretation of how Santiago mobilizes her own individual agency to make a life. THUS, AS I EXPLORE SANTIAGO’S EARLY WORKS, I WILL BE INTERPRETING MOSTLY HOW SANTIAGO MANAGES THE JÍBARISMO SHE IS BORN INTO IN PUERTO RICO AND IS HAUNTED BY IN NEW YORK CITY. Drawing on the distinction Kwame Anthony Appiah (2005) makes between ethics and morality in accounting for identity, I also construe Santiago’s life making as essentially ethical because of what she appears to be most concerned about in her early memoirs. Santiago is principally preoccupied, I point out, with what she owes to herself (ethics) and not with what she owes to others (morality). In deconstructing Santiago’s approach to life making, therefore, I am only interested in delineating the aesthetic and ethical contours of her view. I am not ultimately concerned here with uncovering the motives or reasons that might account for such a view. That is a subject for a radically different paper. A summary assessment of Santiago’s life trajectory will set the context for this one. Santiago against the narratives of individuality, family, and structure When I was Puerto Rican and Almost a Woman are cast in a coming-of-age, rags-to- riches form, and trace Santiago’s life until she leaves home for Florida “to begin [her] own journey,” as she puts it, “from one city to another” (Santiago 1993: 2). When I was Puerto Rican recounts her childhood years while living with both her parents in Macún, a barrio in rural Toa Baja on the northern coast of Puerto Rico. The memoir [ 110 ] spans an eleven-year period, from the time she was four until she was fourteen and her family moves to Brooklyn, New York. Almost a Woman spans an eight- year period. The memoir covers her Brooklyn years while living with her mother, grandmother, and eleven siblings, and until she reaches the age of twenty-one.
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