"Sometimes the American Dream is written in Spanglish," wrote Gustavo Pérez Firmat in an essay on Cuban Miami in MQR's special issue, "Bridges to Cuba," in 1994. As The David Feinson Professor of Humanities at Columbia University and the author of many volumes of essays, poetry, and fiction, he has explored issues of binational consciousness and identity, as well as the implications for all writers of bilingualism. In Life on the Hyphen (University of Texas Press, 1994) and Next Year in Cuba (Anchor Books, 1995), especially, he reflects on the vexed situation of Cuban-Americans. In this interview he speaks more personally about the condition of exile and "the prosodic hide-and-seek that we call 'linguistic play.'"


 
dick: You've published a memoir, a novel, five books of criticism, and at least fifty scholarly articles. One wonders when you find the time to write poetry.

pérez firmat: I guess the answer is twofold: 1) poetry (for me) doesn't take a lot of time; and 2) sometimes I go for long stretches—months or even years—when I don't write a single line.

I didn't begin writing poetry until I was in my thirties. The first poem I ever wrote, "Carolina Cuban," was written the night my son was born. I used to carry around a little pocket notebook where I would jot down quotations, ideas for critical essays, book titles, new words. While Rosa was in labor with David, I took out the notebook and, out of the blue, the Carolina blue, scribbled the poem (I use the word loosely). So for me poetry and fatherhood, creation and procreation, seem to go hand in hand. After that night, I continued to write "poems," sometimes in Spanish and other times in English. Many of them, I now see, had to do with my astonishment at being a parent—no, not a parent, a father (I hate the whole "parenting" business: a parent is nobody's mother and nobody's dad). As the father of two children—my daughter came along a couple of years later—who were born not only in the States but in the South, I began to worry in a more deliberate way about issues of identity, culture, choice of languages, and that led to more poems. But I'll always be an "occasional" poet, not only because my poems are triggered by specific, usually trivial, occasions, but also because I write them very occasionally.

dick: Most of your poetry has appeared the same year as your longer, critical work—Equivocaciones and The Cuban Condition in 1989, Bilingual Blues and Life on the Hyphen in 1995. Does one kind of writing inspire the other? Or, as you've questioned in the past, is there really little difference between your critical writing and your creative writing?

pérez firmat: That some of my books of poetry and of criticism have appeared at the same time is only coincidence. I'm not sure how much of a connection there is between the poetry and the scholarship. At least overtly, very little, but then again everything one writes, whether it's a laundry list or War and Peace, bears one's signature in some way. So it may be that Carolina Cuban is Literature and Liminality by other means, and that inside The Cuban Condition there's a bunch of Equivocaciones trying to get out. The repetition of phrases or sentences is sometimes deliberate—I couldn't think of a better way of saying it the second time around—but at other times inadvertent. The advantage of not having a good memory is that you can quote yourself (and others) convinced that you are inventing something.

I do think that if I hadn't written so much criticism, I'd be a more consistent poet; and that if I didn't have the choice of languages, I'd be a more complete writer. Last year, when I turned fifty—fifty in Cuban years; in American years I'm thirty-nine (even if they are light years)—I decided to drop English (the way one drops a lover perhaps) and return to Spanish, my mother and father's tongue. I found that I had to learn how to write in Spanish all over again for the first time. So I wrote a book of poems, Cincuenta lecciones de exilio y des exilio, about the process of relearning. But I wish I could just write rather than always seeming to be writing about being or not being able to write in this or the other language. It's the critic in me that makes me think twice.

There are dumb writers and there are smart writers. I'm a smart writer, but that doesn't necessarily make me a better writer—just the opposite, I think (there I go again). Hemingway was a dumb writer, and his work is the better for it. Scott Fitzgerald was a smart writer, and his intelligence ruined him.

Friends of mine tell me that I'm striking a pose when I say that I'm not a writer but only a man who writes, but it's not a pose. I'm not comfortable being—or being called—a writer. It doesn't seem like what I was cut out for. It's vaguely embarrassing. I can't explain it to my father. In spite of my success, I have the abiding sense that I've ended up in a place where I wasn't meant to be. Two roads diverged in a wood, and the one I took was the garden path. These feelings of vocational misplacement—vocación as equivocación—haunt me, and they arise as much from my career as a professor as from my career as a writer—I mean, as a man who writes. Sometimes I'm angry at myself for not having made more conscious and conscientious decisions when I was young. You're twenty years old, in college, feeling worthless; you don't know what to do after you graduate, all you want to do is hide, and so you find a hiding place in an MA program in Spanish, not realizing that you've just signed over your life to literature. Then, thirty years later, still hiding, you sit in front of a computer making a living from literature by bitching about it. Even though my writerly signature is Firmat, I'm really un Pérez cualquiera, Spanish for an average yo.

dick: I just finished reading Anything but Love, your recently published first novel. I was wondering why the empingue resurfaces? It seems you'd exorcized a lot of your anger in some of your earlier writing, including your poetry.

pérez firmat: Anger can be relieved, but I'm not sure it is ever exorcised, unless the conditions that feed it change and normally they don't. I wrote much of Anything but Love in the aftermath of a very stressful period in my life. The basic story had originally been a chapter in Next Year in Cuba, but my publishers refused to include it in the memoir because they found it offensive. So I turned it into an independent narrative and called it fiction because everything in it is true. People who know me and who've read the book are made uncomfortable because they see the links to my own life. I'm not quite sure how to react to this. Others have been bothered by the "machismo" in the book. I'm not sure how to react to this either (what Americans call "machismo" is to me only manliness.) Since writing is done alone, it seems like a completely private act at the time you are doing it, though of course in the back of your mind you know that what you're writing will eventually be read by others, including friends and family perhaps. But apparently my need or compulsion to make a record outweighs any potential embarrassment I might feel (or cause) upon publication.

Also, I'm not very good at gauging how others will react to what I write. I've written some things that I thought were fairly harmless, yet others regarded them as scandalous. Years ago I wrote a couple of poems, "A Sensitive Male's Mea Culpa" and "The Poet Discusseth the Opposite Sex," generally on the subject of the gender wars. I liked the poems and thought one of them in particular was very funny, but when I sent them to a friend of mine he wrote back: "Don't ever publish this!" Of course I went ahead and published the poems, and perhaps I've paid a price for having done so, but not to have published them would have been an act of cowardice. My tacit compact with the reader is: I DON'T HAVE TO PLEASE YOU; YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ ME. This way I am free to say whatever I want and he or she is free to disregard it.

This doesn't mean, obviously, that I write without any awareness of an audience, and I know that at different times I have been concerned about what my children will think of what I write—I mean, what they will think of me as a result of reading those "sexist" poems and whatever else I have written (including poems I have written about them). But even in this situation I generally end up giving myself and them the benefit of the doubt and betting that if they read me fairly they will not love me any less than they do—and maybe they will love me more.

dick: In Next Year in Cuba, when discussing one of the classes you taught at Duke University, you state that "writing poems is something done by a real human being in response to concrete, often banal circumstances," that "a head cold is sometimes just as good as the Trojan War." You've written about "head colds," but you've also explored larger subjects, such as "life on the hyphen." Could you respond?

pérez firmat: The remark about the head cold is a reference to A. E. Housman, who wrote A Shropshire Lad when he was laid up with the flu or some other similar affliction. It's true that I've written about "larger subjects," but always from a personal and even idiosyncratic angle. In fact, I'm still trying to learn how to speak ex cathedra, a useful talent when one is a professor (catedrático in Spanish). Some of my colleagues do it wonderfully well. So well, in fact, that they've forgotten how to speak any other way. But since I'm not Hegel, and since I'm generally clueless about general schemes, I tend to stick to details and leave the phenomenology of the spirit to others.

It's true that the notion of a "life on the hyphen" has become something of a rallying cry for a generation of Cuban exiles—the Cuban-American baby-boomers, those of my compatriots born between the end of World War II and the Bay of Pigs—but I didn't set out to write a manifesto. Life on the Hyphen is basically a 250-page valentine to my wife, Mary Anne. I got the idea for the book when I fell in love with her, and I wrote it during the first couple years of our marriage. It's my happiest book and, for that reason, maybe my best.

dick: All of your writing celebrates verbal and linguistic play. But do you feel more freedom taking chances when writing poetry? To experiment more with both English and Spanish?

pérez firmat: In prose it's easier to play because the margin of error is larger. While in a short poem one misstep can ruin the whole thing, in prose you always get a second paragraph. But the "verbal and linguistic play" is not something that I set out to do; it happens. Some of it goes back to anger: puns are nasty; puns are instruments of aggression. (Have pun will travel.) They are a way of blowing off steam and settling scores with yourself and your languages. They're also indices of uprootedness, words unmoored from their meanings, exiles in language.

In the most recent things I've written I've tried to avoid going for the jocular (it's hard, as you can see) because to make a joke is a way of not facing up to the unfunny facts of life on the hyphen, a kind of cop-out. Given the choice, I'd rather make you cry than make you laugh. But the angst or anger that drives my language engine sometimes can find release only in word play.

It's also the case that the nature of the languages makes it easier to play with words in English than in Spanish. Puns don't work very well in Spanish, for example, because the language has very few homophones. So if you fall through a window in Spanish you can't say: I have a pane in the ass. In addition, Spanish has almost no nouns or verbs that are monosyllabic—the word for "pun" in Spanish is equívoco, four syllables instead of one—and this also hampers play because it slows you down, it imparts a certain stateliness and even solemnity to the language.

Every language has its distinctive voice print. The sounds of a language compose a kind of melody incommensurable with that of any other language. And since every sound has an affective correlate, the melody of a language—its collection of bright or blue "—imposes upon its users a gamut of non-grammatical moods. I believe that you can learn a lot about the temperament of a people merely by listening to the sound of what they say, provided that you don't understand a word they're saying. I like to watch broadcasts on SCOLA in languages I know nothing about—Croatian, Chinese, Russian—and see what I can glean from their music. I put myself in the shoes of the pretty news anchor from North Korea and I ask myself: Now, what would you be like if you sounded like that?

So to get back to your question about linguistic play, with me it's less genre-specific than language-specific. I'm fascinated by the sounds of words and the music of sentences, in English or Spanish, but I find that English lends itself a little better to the prosodic hide-and-seek that we call "linguistic play." What I like best, though, in prose or poetry, is interlingualism, where I can take advantage of the happy accidents that occur when my two languages bump into each other.

dick: In one of your poems from Bilingual Blues, you write, "I would recant that poem, if I could / except I never throw out text." Having stated this, has there ever been a time when you regretted publishing something you wrote? I was wondering, for example, how some of your colleagues might have felt about a poem like "The Poet Discusseth the Opposite Sex."

pérez firmat: I touched on some of this question above. I'm not sure how my colleagues at Duke reacted to some of my poems because we didn't talk much (maybe that was their reaction). But je ne regrette rien. As I said, I have this urge to leave a record, an urge that I don't quite understand but that I know is deeper than mere exhibitionism. So the things I've written are an account, good or bad, deft or artless, of whatever was bothering or bewitching me at the time.

Regarding the autobiographical nature of much of my work: as a reader, I tend to take everything literally. I prefer nonfiction to fiction; and even when I read a novel for pleasure, I choose novels that place me in what I take to be a real world. That's why I have never been interested in science fiction or fantasy literature, because, naive as it sounds, I don't want to waste my time with stuff that's not true. When I was in college and everybody was reading The Hobbit, I couldn't get past the first page of the book. This literalist bent or bias extends to my writing. I don't like to make things up. What's the point of writing about it if it didn't happen? If it's too good to be true, leave it alone. I remember that years ago I had a colleague who also wrote poetry. One day I came across a poem by her that I liked very much; the poem talked about the differences between her and her sister. When I mentioned to her how much I had liked the description of her sister, she replied that she was an only child. I felt totally defrauded, and thereafter thought less of my colleague (and of her poems).

dick: In an early poem called "Carolina Cuban" you write, "I'm not mixed, just mixed up." Having lived in the United States for almost forty years now, do you still feel "mixed up"?

pérez firmat: I take the fifth. I don't think I want to answer this question. I'm tired of being mixed up and even more of writing about being mixed up. Wholeness. Wholeness. Wholeness. Wholeness.

dick: Well, stated a little differently: Exile from Cuba has provided you an "ambivalent cultural and linguistic positioning," a topic you continue to explore in your writing. You've lived in the United States a lot longer now than you ever lived in Cuba. Do you think there'll ever be a day when this ambivalence disappears, when your position will be clearer and more predictable?

pérez firmat: Ok, since you insist, I'll answer. I don't believe the ambivalence will ever disappear, it's become part of my core/corazón. Long-term exiles are damaged goods: the wrapping is torn and the contents are tarnished (ojo: I may be quoting myself again). I wish it weren't so, but I don't see what I can do about it. If it's broke, you can't fix it. But I'm not sure this makes me and others like me unpredictable, as you suggest. The pendulum is mightier than the sword—and how is a pendulum unpredictable? It's the monotony of my Cuban mood swings that tires me. No matter what I write, I always seem to return to the same issues: language, exile, family. Kafka once said that sometimes he had nothing in common with himself. I wish! No weird metamorphoses for me. I wake up in the morning, look in the mirror, and see the same gusano that I was the night before.

dick: Someone once described your writing as "wickedly funny." Having read most of it, I agree. But there's also a tragic element that creeps through—in your poetry, in your fiction and recollections of Cuba. In one poem you write, "It may be that happiness is no longer / a relevant category of experience." Are you speaking mainly for the poet, and at a particular time in your life, or for one particular individual? Or is this a condition you see as universally human?

pérez firmat: I'd say that the mood is more melancholic than tragic. And I think it comes through especially in the Spanish language poems, which, as I said, tend to be less playful than the English language ones. I blame (and credit) my melancholy on exile, of course, but that could well be my own sustaining fiction—the belief that things would have been different in Cuba. The poem you refer to began as a reaction to some news about a friend who never seemed to be able to get her life together. I do think that as you get older happiness becomes less important. You learn to settle for safety, comfort, companionship—all of which may add up to contentment, a more stable condition, rather than happiness.

Someone once remarked that the word that appears most often in my books is "Cuba." This is understandable, given my status as an exile, but every time I write "Cuba" I cringe a little. Even as I delight in the name, I realize that my obsessive repetition of it is a symptom of dispossession. Cubans in Cuba can take Cuba for granted; we exiles cannot. Naming is a poor substitute for having, but it's a substitute nonetheless. This naming what you don't have breeds melancholy. The task for me is not to let melancholy sour into bitterness.

dick: One has to wonder how painful some of your writing must be for those who read it. Next Year in Cuba, for example, has appeared in both Spanish and English, which would allow your father, mother, and other relatives to read it. Carlos, your brother, too. Did you ever have that kind of audience in mind when you wrote, or were you bent on showing how exile affected you and your family in so many different ways, shapes, and forms—no matter the consequences or emotional expense?

pérez firmat: The latter. In Next Year in Cuba I was trying to tell not only my story but that of my family and my tribe (Miami Cubans), a story that I don't think is sufficiently known. I wrote that book very fast; in a way I had been writing it ever since we arrived in this country in October 1960, but some parts of it were wrenching to get down on paper. My family didn't know anything about the book until after it came out, and although I wrote it out of love and respect and sorrow, they didn't take it that way. My mother in particular was very upset. She read the book as an attack on our family. She hated that I wrote about my strained relations with my brothers. The chapter on my father, which was the hardest to write, she took as an indictment of him, though I certainly didn't mean it that way. And not long ago she informed me that one of my uncles had gotten Alzheimer's when he read Next Year in Cuba and found out that his daughter—my cousin—was a lesbian. "He hasn't been the same since, Gustavito." So you can see why I have mixed feelings about being a writer. But would I write the book all over again? Yes. Why? Because it happened.

dick: You write about popular music in all of your work. I was wondering how you feel about recent CD releases such as Buena Vista Social Club or Afro-Cuban All Stars? Any comments on the film, Buena Vista Social Club?

pérez firmat: I find the whole Buena Vista phenomenon exploitative, and so I've refused to see the documentary. Ry Cooder is a contemporary version of the Great White Hunter who travels to the Tropics in search of Exotic Wildlife. Spare me! The exotization of Cuba is not a good thing for Cubans. Ultimately it strips us of part of our humanity, our like-everybody-elseness. As for the band, my impression is that they are well-meaning but second-rate musicians.

By the way, I write so much about popular music because it has been such an intimate part of my life. A son by Los Matamoros moves me much more deeply than a sonnet by Shakespeare. I was not raised with poems or symphonies or paintings; I was raised listening to popular music, Cuban and American. Songs speak to me in a way that great literature does not. What others find maudlin, I find profound. What others dismiss, I treasure. I have spent half of my life daydreaming to the tune of one or another popular song—from Doris Day's "Que será será" to Luis Miguel's "No me platiques más." My writing, poetry as well as prose, is full of echoes of lyrics by little-known (to the general public) Cuban singers: Willy Chirino, Hánsel and Raúl, Clouds, Carlos Oliva. I've told Mary Anne that when I die I want to be buried with two things: my c.v. and Willy Chirino's Greatest Hits.

dick: You're now teaching at Columbia. Do you care to discuss why you left Duke?

pérez firmat: Sure. Although I liked the university and the students very much, I left Duke because the atmosphere in my department was asphyxiating. The Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera says: La literatura no es estilo sino respiración (Literature is not style but respiration). I found it difficult to breathe at Duke. In New York City the air is dirtier but the breathing is easier, and my Columbia colleagues, unlike some people I know at Duke, actually like literature. But I still live in Chapel Hill because my children are here. Life on the hyphen now means spending most of my time between airports.

dick: Do you have any immediate predictions concerning Cuba once the Castro regime finally does come to an end?

pérez firmat: No, no predictions, though I am reminded of what Flaubert said after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War: Whatever else happens, we shall remain stupid. I try to live as if Cuba didn't matter, but I'm obviously not very good at it.

dick: How do you feel about being labeled Latino? You're on record as stating that you're Cuban, not Latino or Hispanic. Do you agree that some kind of label is necessary when referring to different peoples from Latin America now living in the United States?

pérez firmat: For years I've been saying and writing that "Latino" is a statistical fiction. But that is less true now than it was when I began saying it. Teaching a lot of "latino" students at Columbia, I see that the label does apply to some of them, second or third generation Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Colombians, or Cubans, who call themselves "Latino" somewhat in the way other Americans call themselves "Republican" or "Democrat." But for me nationality is way more important than ethnicity, and the term "Latino" erases my nationality.

Years ago I read a filler story in The Miami Herald about a man who had been left paralyzed as a result of a stroke. He would spend his days in his wheelchair by the window of his Miami Beach condominium, looking south and mumbling to himself the only word he was still able to pronounce: Cuba. Sometimes I think I am like that man.