"Santo Domingo Confidential" - excerto da obra de Junot Diaz para análise literária

SANTO DOMINGO CONFIDENTIAL

In some ways living in Santo Domingo during the Trujillato was a lot like being in that famous Twilight Zone episode that Oscar loved so much, the one where the monstrous white kid with the godlike powers rules over a town that is completely isolated from the rest of

the world, a town called Peaksville. The white kid is vicious and random and all the people in the ‘community’ live in straight terror of him, denouncing and betraying each other at the drop of a hat in order not to be the person he maims or, more ominously, sends to the corn. (After each atrocity he commits whether it’s giving a gopher three heads or Banishing a no longer interesting playmate to the corn or raining snow down on the last crops — the horrified people of Peaksville have to say, It was a good thing you did, Anthony. A good thing.)

Between 1930 (when the Failed Cattle Thief seized power) and 1961 (the year he got blazed) Santo Domingo was the Caribbean’s very own Peaksville, with Trujillo playing the part of Anthony and the rest of us reprising the role of the Man Who Got Turned into Jackin-

the-Box. You might roll your eyes at the comparison, but, friends: it would be hard to exaggerate the power Trujillo exerted over the Dominican people and the shadow of fear he cast throughout the region. Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own

private Mordor;↓ not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind the PlaÅLtano Curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers,

mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about ‘the great honeymoon’ he’d had the night before.

≡ Anthony may have isolated Peaksville with the power of his mind, but Trujillo did the same with the power of his office! Almost as soon as he grabbed the presidency,

the Failed Cattle Thief sealed the country away from the rest of the world — a forced isolation that we’ll call the Plátano Curtain. As for the country’s historically fluid border with Haiti — which was more baká than border — the Failed Cattle Thief became like Dr. Gull in From Hell; adopting the creed of the Dionyesian Architects, he aspired to become an architect of history, and through a horrifying ritual of silence and blood, machete and perejil, darkness and denial, inflicted a true border on the countries, a border that exists beyond maps, that is carved directly into the histories and imaginaries of a people. By the middle of T-illo’s second decade in ‘office’ the Platano Curtain had been so successful that when the Allies won World War II the majority of the pueblo didn’t even have the remotest idea that it had happened. Those who did know believed the propaganda that Trujillo had played an important role in the overthrow of the Japanese and the Hun. Homeboy could not have had a more private realm had he thrown a force-field around the island. (After all, who needs futuristic generators when you have the power of the machete?) Most people argue

that El Jefe was trying to keep the world out; some, however, point out that he seemed equally intent on keeping something in.

His Eye was everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyone’s who lived in the States; a security apparatus so ridiculously mongoose that you could say a bad thing about El Jefe at eight-forty in the

morning and before the clock struck ten you’d be in the Cuarenta having a cattleprod shoved up your ass. (Who says that we Third World people are inefficient?) It wasn’t just Mr. Friday the Thirteenth you had to worry about, either, it was the whole Chivato Nation he helped spawn, for like every Dark Lord worth his Shadow he had the devotion of his people.↓

≡ So devoted was the pueblo, in fact, that, as Galíndez recounts in La Era de Trujillo, when a graduate student was asked by a panel of examiners to discuss the pre-Columbian culture in the Americas, he replied without hesitation that the most important pre-Columbian culture in the Americas was ‘the Dominican Republic during the era of Trujillo’. Oh, man. But what’s more hilarious is that the examiners refused to fail the student, on the grounds that ‘he had mentioned El Jefe’.

It was widely believed that at anyone time between forty-two and eighty-seven percent of the Dominican population was on the Secret Police’s payroll. Your own fucking neighbors could acabar con you just because you had something they coveted or because you cut

in front of them at the colmado. Mad folks went out in that manner, betrayed by those they considered their panas, by members of their own families, by slips of the tongue. One day you were a law-abiding citizen, cracking nuts on your galeriÅLa, the next day you were

in the Cuarenta, getting your nuts cracked. Shit was so tight that many people actually believed that Trujillo had supernatural powers!

It was whispered that he did not sleep, did not sweat, that he could see, smell, feel events hundreds of miles away, that he was protected by the most evil fukú on the Island. (You wonder why two generations later our parents are still so damn secretive, why you’ll

find out your brother ain’t your brother only by accident.) But let’s not go completely overboard: Trujillo was certainly formidable, and the regime was like a Caribbean Mordor in many ways, but there were plenty of people who despised El Jefe, who communicated in less-than-veiled ways their contempt, who resisted. But Abelard was simply not one of them. Homeboy wasn’t like his Mexican colleagues who were always keeping up with what was

happening elsewhere in the world, who believed that change was possible. He didn’t dream of revolution, didn’t care that Trotsky had lived and died not ten blocks from his student pension in CoyoacaÅLn; wanted only to tend his wealthy, ailing patients and afterward

return to his study without worrying about being shot in the head or thrown to the sharks. Every now and then one of his acquaintances — usually Marcus — would describe for him the latest Trujillo Atrocity: an affluent clan stripped of its properties and sent into exile, an entire family fed piece by piece to the sharks because a son had dared compare Trujillo to Adolf Hitler before a terrified audience of his peers, a suspicious assassination in Bonao of a well-known unionist. Abelard listened to these horrors tensely, and then after an awkward silence would change the subject. He simply didn’t wish to dwell on the fates of Unfortunate People, on the goings-on in Peaksville. He didn’t want those stories in his house. The way Abelard saw it — his Trujillo philosophy, if you will — he only had to keep his head down, his mouth shut, his pockets open, his daughters hidden for another decade or two. By then, he prophesied, Trujillo would be dead and the Dominican Republic would be a true democracy.

Abelard, it turned out, needed help in the prophecy department. Santo Domingo never became a democracy. He didn’t have no couple of decades, either. His luck ran out earlier than anyone expected.

Italian diaspora

Mambo Italiano 

This movie is an example of Italian diaspora in the Canadian city of Montreal. 

A Descolonização do Amor

Uma entrevista de Junot Diaz , http://www.bostonreview.net/eggers-diaz.php

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Excerto para Análise Literária

This is how it all starts: with your mother calling you into the bathroom. You will remember what you were doing at that precise moment for the rest of your life: You were reading Watership Down and the rabbits and their does were making their dash for the boat and you

didn’t want to stop reading, the book has to go back to your brother tomorrow, but then she called you again, louder, her I’m-notfucking-around voice, and you mumbled irritably, Sí, senora.

She was standing in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, naked from the waist up, her bra slung about her waist like a torn sail, the scar on her back as vast and inconsolable as a sea. You want to return to your book, to pretend you didn’t hear her, but it is too late.

Her eyes meet yours, the same big smoky eyes you will have in the future. Ven acá, she commanded. She is frowning at something on one of her breasts. Your mother’s breasts are immensities. One of the wonders of the world. The only ones you’ve seen that are

bigger are in nudie magazines or on really fat ladies. They’re 35 triple-Ds and the aureoles are as big as saucers and black as pitch and at their edges are fierce hairs that sometimes she plucked and sometimes she didn’t. These breasts have always embarrassed

you and when you walk in public with her you are always conscious of them. After her face and her hair, her chest is what she is most proud of. Your father could never get enough of them, she always brags. But given the fact that he ran off on her after their third year

of marriage, it seemed in the end that he could.

You dread conversations with your mother. Those one-sided dressing-downs. You figured that she has called you in to give you another earful about your diet. Your mom’s convinced that if you eat more plátanos you will suddenly acquire her same extraordinary

train-wrecking secondary sex characteristics. Even at that age you were nothing if not your mother’s daughter. You were twelve years old and already as tall as she was, a long slender-necked ibis of a girl. You had her green eyes (clearer, though) and her straight hair

which makes you look more Hindu than Dominican and a behind that the boys haven’t been able to stop talking about since the fifth grade and whose appeal you do not yet understand. You have her complexion too, which means you are dark. But for all your

similarities, the tides of inheritance have yet to reach your chest. You have only the slightest hint of breast; from most angles you’re flat as a board and you’re thinking she’s going to order you to stop wearing bras again because they’re suffocating your potential

breasts, discouraging them from popping out of you. You’re ready to argue with her to the death because you’re as possessive of your bras as you are of the pads you now buy yourself.

But no, she doesn’t say a word about eating more plátanos. Instead, she takes your right hand and guides you. Your mom is rough in all things but this time she is gentle. You did not think her capable of it.

Do you feel that? she asks in her too-familiar raspy voice.

At first all you feel is the heat of her and the density of the tissue, like a bread that never stopped rising. She kneads your fingers into her. You’re as close as you’ve ever been and your breathing is what you hear.

Don’t you feel that? She turns toward you. Coño, muchacha, stop looking at me and feel.

So you close your eyes and your fingers are pushing down and you’re thinking of Helen Keller and how when you were little you wanted to be her except more nun-ish and then suddenly without warning you do feel something. A knot just beneath her skin, tight

and secretive as a plot. And at that moment, for reasons you will never quite understand, you are overcome by the feeling, the premonition, that something in your life is about to change. You become light-headed and you can feel a throbbing in your blood, a beat, a rhythm, a drum. Bright lights zoom through you like photon torpedoes, like comets. You don’t know how or why you know this thing but you know it cannot be doubted. It is exhilarating. For as long as you’ve been alive you’ve had bruja ways; even your mother will begrudge you that much. Hija de Liborio she called you after you picked your tía’s winning numbers for her and you assumed Liborio was a relative. That was before Santo Domingo, before you knew about the Great Power of God.

I feel it, you say, too loudly. Lo siento.

Às vezes perdemo-nos profundamente. Perdemo-nos quando perdemos um ente querido, quando nos dizem que não somos tão inteligentes ou tão engraçados ou tão tolerantes quanto pensamos ser. Quando nos roubam o telemóvel e de repente não podemos fazer uma chamada quando a caminho de casa, sozinhos, e sem saber o que fazer às mãos. Sentimo-nos muitas vezes perdidos, é isso. Mas muitas vezes não imaginamos o quão desesperante será realmente perdermos a nossa voz. Digo voz exterior, mas também interior. Falo, para ser mais precisa, da perda da linguagem, das nossas palavras: a forma de comunicação que aprendemos para nos fazermos existir no mundo exterior, mas, sobretudo, a comunicação que aprendemos a estabelecer connosco próprios a partir do cruzamento deste mundo exterior concreto com a nossa experiencia dele.  

Nunca vos aconteceu? Sentir a batalha entre lábios, língua e saliva, e gritos, sussurros, sorrisos, tristeza, amor, repulsa? Mas este desacordo entre exterior e interior existe de uma forma tanto mais dolorosa quando somos privados do uso da nossa linguagem mais intima. Isso levar-nos-á também a perdemo-nos com mais facilidade e, para sobreviver, é por vezes necessário adaptarmo-nos para que nos possamos re-situar. 

Por exemplo, ao atravessar a Golden Gate em São Francisco e observando as águas da entrada da baía, talvez pairem sobre elas as palavras Tejo, destino, adeus, ou estava em paz quando atravessei a ponte 25 de Abril naquele dia. Rio é isto, na linguagem da consciência, mas river poderá materializar novas ideias e acrescentá-las às vivências anteriores.

E se, ao passar numa rua, o súbito cheiro a sardinhas assadas é suficiente para nos impedir de continuar ao ritmo da pressa e da abstracção, pois nos assalta a sensação de que estamos mais perto de casa? As palavras Mar, Alecrim e Alfama poderão atravessar o oceano Atlântico e contaminar com os seus perfumes os odores do Central Park.     

E se enunciarmos poeticamente a palavra love? Talvez a nossa voz de dentro logo nos sussurre ao ouvido Amor é fogo que arde sem se ver.

E quando, à entrada de um bar no Harlem, uma voz nos lembra a tristeza do Fado, cantando-a, embora, na linguagem dos Blues?

Viajamos por terras cujo desconhecimento não advém só da distanciação física. 

Penso que, quando não nos é permitido dar corpo na nossa língua ao que sentimos e ao que pensamos, damos um longo passo em direcção ao desconhecido. Para evitar o silêncio e a alienação, por vezes uma das formas de não nos perdermos totalmente é a adaptação a uma nova língua que possa ser reflexo da nova realidade, mas que não anule as origens linguísticas. Por exemplo, as palavras café con leche, mama têm um sabor diferente quando pronunciadas por um nativo do Espanhol Mexicano e é bem possível que se afaste mais da fronteira quando obrigado a dizer coffee with milk, mother. Mas, talvez, com o passar do tempo, coffee with leche, mama passe a espelhar a realidade da existência de diferentes referências culturais.

Contudo, por vezes o que fica da nossa linguagem apenas vive no nosso consciente, o que não impedirá que ela de alguma forma se infiltre secretamente naquilo que de novo é dito. O que quero dizer é que somos uma série de inscrições na linguagem e que a memória se constrói através de palavras e expressões que nos são tão intimas, que nunca se poderão desvanecer totalmente, mesmo quando nos afastamos da nossa fronteira.

Perder ou ignorar a nossa linguagem, é apagarmo-nos como seres.

- So gently I offer my hand and ask,

Let me find my talk

So I can teach you about me.

Rita Joe, I Lost My Talk ¹

¹ ARMSTRONG, Jeannette. GRAUER, Lally. Native poetry in Canada :  a contemporary anthology.  ed: Broadview, Toronto 2001

Frida Kahlo, Las Dos Fridas (1939)

 

Calexico - Crystal Frontier

Página Dedicada a Judith Ortiz Cofer

http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/coferJudith.php

Blog de Frank Chin

http://chintalks.blogspot.pt/

Página Oficial de Amy Tan

https://www.amytan.net/

GNR, os Pós-Modernos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuYBPiE0aSY

Back and Forth a Short Story

Back and Forth


I left Germany in 2010 with a university-entrance diploma, without a dime in my pocket and with the certainty that my parents would never forgive me for leaving them. Fortunately, I had a friend that took care of me, lending me crash for two months at her place in Lucerne, Switzerland. Although I was already 1000 kilometers away I felt like I could still hear their hearts breaking and their voices warning me to think it through. I was determined to get away no matter what it would ultimately cost me.
One day Joana, who had become the only stability in my life, told me that she would leave to accept a job offer in Portugal, that she just couldn't refuse. Knowing that I had no place to stay and that my biggest fear was to be completely alone, she offered me to come with her. At that moment my world seemed to fall apart. I didn't know if I was ready to leave a life, to which I became somehow accustomed to, again.
So, I took some time to evaluate the pros and cons. I became aware of the fact that it hadn't been that big of a challenge to move 1000 kilometers away to live in a country where my mother tongue is spoken and where my parents could easily contact me and maybe even successfully convince me to come back, but moving almost 2500 km away from the place I was born and raised, was up until then the biggest decision of my life.
Before we reached our destination, I asked Joana a million questions about Portugal and what I should expect. Her response was : “Oh! Don't worry! You'll see! In Portugal it's all about relaxing and living for the day!” Since I was used to doing things the German way (having a plan, being prepared, executing the plan, repeat it the next day), her answer left me even more anxious than I already was. Nevertheless, I was 20 years old and didn't know what to do with my life, so I spent my first month in Portugal sitting in one of those small cafés, looking at people, trying to understand what they would say to each other.
After a while, I noticed that their way of communicating was so much warmer than I was used to and although I found some similarities to my Italian heritage , like the excessive consumption of coffee, everything seemed interesting and unbelievably exciting.
There were so many things that felt so familiar and reminded me of my parents, grandparents and Italy and at the same time, felt strange and foreign to me. 
I still remember how confused I was by the signs on the doors saying
puxar  and how dumb I must have looked each time trying to get the door to open by pushing it. Or how amazed I was, when I discovered how many different ways there are to order a coffee. Also, I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that the week starts with  segunda-feira,  why the first day of the week would be called the second one. Or how I came to like and appreciate the many ways of preparing   Bacalhau  but what truly struck me about my Portuguese experience was the concept of    Saudade   that only exists in the Portuguese and Galician language and that no other language in the world can correctly describe with just one word.
I probably could continue with these examples all day long and I'm still discovering new things everyday, which at times leave me perplex.
The more time passed the more I learned how to get along without any help, I pushed myself further every day, trying new things, challenging myself.
Once I started university my life became even more interesting and although I had the advantage of being fluent in Italian the Portuguese pronunciation at times made me question my mental faculties. I remember a friend who used to tease me because I couldn't say or correctly pronounce   as janelas amarelas,   all those sch sounds made me dizzy.

After some time even my parents came to their senses. Everything seemed to come into place and as much as I missed my home, my friends and family I was to proud to admit that to my parents. For a long time a fought with myself until I realized, that I had to put my pride aside for the sake of having a healthy relationship with my family. I could never completely let go of them, I worried and thought a lot about what they would be doing. As my mother later told me, they felt the same way. My mother and I started to talk on the phone every Sunday for at least one hour. She would tell me everything that had been going on and also seemed quite interested in what was going on in my life.
I started travelling back and forth every chance I got no matter how exhausting it could get. However, my relatives still tended to comment and judge the lifestyle I had chosen. I was 30, when I got invited to Joana`s wedding. She looked like a princess and I was honored to be her maid of honor, I even prepared a beautiful speech but when I climbed on stage and felt all the people looking at me, whispering, I couldn`t suppress an awful memory and froze. It broght me back in time, to my cousin`s wedding in Sicily where everyone was talking about me because I was so dreadfully old and still not married. I must confess that it wasn`t easy, it affected me as I gave too much importance to what they said. Thus, my self-esteem plummed. It took me, once again, some time but I finally realized that I should be the one evaluating my decisions and as long as I was happy no one could ever take that from me.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed every single minute I could spend with them and at the same time I was grateful for the distance that brought us closer together.

I've remained in this new found home for 20 years now, I´ve built a family and  I´m happy. Every day I remind my children that family is one of the most important things in your life and that I'm standing behind them at any time.
Even if I now understand how difficult it is to let your children go, I take my experiences with me and pass them on to my children, as I hope they will do one day with their children.
I'm much older now and my relationship with my family has gotten amazing and peaceful.
My heart is divided into 3 pieces, evenly distributed between Italy, Germany and Portugal ;I came to finally understand the real meaning of  saudade,  I never stopped travelling back and forth. 
                                                                                   
Short story by: C.S. Cataldo