Giannina Braschi - United States of Banana

— It looks worse than before. Go back to the surgeon and say that you need another operation. So you can be worth even more.

— Corruption —I said— cashing in on my nose. Twice. When you said it looked bad, I believed you. That’s why I had the operation. To fix what was wrong. But I realize that what was wrong was your perception of me. You saw me as a cash machine.

I don’t know which was worse, my accident or my lawyer. For me, the lawyer — because he was cashing in on my pain and suffering. The first suffering was unavoidable. The second and the third, abuses at my expense.

Iam writing in my foreign language, not in my native language. I am writing in the language that makes me grow into awesome thoughts. I encounter in my foreign language a culture that doesn’t understand my native language. A culture that thinks I write from my stomach not from my brain because if I wrote from my brain — I would not be a piggybank — I would be a boss — a mandatary of guinea pigs — an office control freak — and I would not have to sweat like a pig — I would just plop myself in a big leather chair and drink coffee and speak through both sides of my mouth — but never mean what I say — never express awkward feelings. Feelings and smoking are strictly prohibited, but ass-kissing is highly recommended. Just say:

— Fabulous! Extraordinary! Sweet!

Never admit doubt. Never say it’s unlikely.

— Yes sir, you’ll have it on your desk first thing in the morning — even if I have to wipe my ass with a paper towel for dinner.

I don’t mean to offend you, but good for me if you are offended. You show me your flag of pride — your Pledge of Allegiance to freedom of speech — but where is my freedom of speech — if I can’t offend you — because you will recite a declaration of facts and notes of my impracticality, my insensitivity, my avoidance of the issue — to create waves — to imply that as a foreigner I don’t understand because I don’t laugh at the jokes of the chattering mouthtrap of the smiling damned villain.

The problem with foreign speaking English, apart from it being flawed, is that it doesn’t play by the same rules — it has its own passport — it could barbarize, it could terrorize — it could plant a bomb in the Oval Office — destroy national treasures — piss and shit on the roots of the White House lawn. Minorities will become majorities if we don’t patrol the borders.

— Howdy, amiga, bienvenida.

— Go back wherever the hell you came from.

— Shut the fuck up.

— Don’t scream.

— Don’t give excuses if you didn’t do what you had to do.

— Don’t tell me why you didn’t do it.

It is my desire to express my native self with my foreign tongue and to make my foreign tongue part of my native self. The fact is that speaking my foreign language I have become more distant. I hardly remember the tongue I first spoke — and as I grow and mutate in this language — day after day — I observe that some days I regress to the memory of the day I was born but my cradle is empty.

I have always looked for what is foreign to my nativity. I don’t want to understand what I already know. I want to feel confused, be bewildered, sense awe, make the comfortable, uncomfortable. I want to misplace myself. When I am misplaced — I am noticed — as a misplacement — and I like to be figured out — as somebody who you have to keep misplacing, and changing the view you had, because the foreigner is invading the native — the native is becoming foreign — and in a country where foreigners become natives — and natives foreigners — languages must be demolished and rebuilt — not on a geographical continent with a boundary called flag, but in the infinite space of a nutshell.

Familiarity doesn’t bring nearness — it breeds stagnation — ease. Why am I drawn to what is hard to get, hard to achieve, hard to control, hard to center. The motion is always awkward and slow because in the process I lose control. What I do to control myself is shout and scream — the opposite of what is required of me to enter the grammatical system of my foreign language because in order to speak native with foreign I have to be who I am on both sides of the speeding highway — unable to cross — until I shout and scream my head off. Breaking the rules of the game means not playing by the rules of my native tongue or by the rules of my foreign tongue but by the rules of what is native and foreign to me — as a human being — in revolt.

We leave the revolt for another speaking term of four years maximum — at any location where tongues roll like dice — and there is no TV to program our minds, fabricate consent, steal elections, and change the subject with a remote control. Right now, we have to clear our objectives which are a little confusing, but such is the nature of the subject, as such, a controversial subject that needs years, to say the least, and time to organize parades of agitation, ribbons and flags. We don’t need to create a slogan:

— All political parties are parted into piddley parts and partied out.

When the economy falls over, we won’t be jellyfish. We’ll still have backbones and teeth, white teeth, and double standards to equalize the equilibrium that is never the same.

I’m in exile from the mother tongue — in exile from the foreign tongue — in exile from all the tongues that wag with the familiarity of knowing — with the credibility and the certainty — and without any kind of doubt that this is their town and country. I laugh out loud — and my laughter is as mother tongue as any laughter in any foreign tongue — but the joke is on me — because my laughter is not cheering for the other team which is roasting the barbaric tongue over an open flame of racist jokes and innuendoes — which is what the mother of all eggs laid in the foreign tongue wants — to leave me speechless — without a motherland — a land to mother my thoughts or a bed to lie down in. If I become a beggar in the streets, which is a possibility for an unemployed poet of underground revolutions, at least I’ll know what to do when the abuser speaks native and I speak foreign.

Mother Tongue: Get your feet off my sofa!

Hamlet: I beg your pardon?

Foreign Tongue: I am too farfetched. My language is foreign, Germanic, barbaric, but with you I am as native and intimate as a foreigner waiting for the master-slave relationship.

Hamlet: I never thought my mother tongue was my mother. I never felt the certainty of a mother tongue as the language of my house — of my fire — of my desire. I don’t believe my mother tongue protects me from enemies. From what enemies have you protected me, may I ask? And now that I’m speaking in my foreign tongue — you — Mother — claim that you don’t understand the language of my affections. The truth, Mother, is that you never understood my feelings. So, I became affectionate in my foreign tongue where I found a word named love to be chilly. You taught me the meaning of love. You said to me love means cold. So, I speak English — cold language of love — and my flesh shivers to the bone — brrrrr.

Mother Tongue: Hamlet, speak to me no more! Your words are daggers! Why do you torture me with English when my language is native? Why do I have to speak foreign to you?

Hamlet: I never thought lands belonged to languages. That a tongue controls a land, imposing its sovereignty, so there are no misunderstandings about the way we speak, our eating habits, our desires, when to laugh, what time to wake up, when to work, how to act at school, in a job interview, at a tennis match — and don’t forget to wash your hands after you piss in a public bathroom.