Giannina Braschi - United States of Banana

Mother Tongue: Why were you such a fool to let them colonize you?

Foreign Tongue: I suck the blood of your economy, drain your natural resources, make you a beggar poorer in thanks — make you defenseless, powerless, homeless, useless, speechless, foreign, more foreign, so foreign that you’ll lose touch with families and familiarities so that you’ll lose control of reality so that you’ll start hallucinating, wandering with no return address, nowhere to go, boundless, without a chain to your collar, worse than a house pet, a stray dog, in the air, like a bird, spaceless and without wings to fly.

Hamlet: When I spoke to you in my native tongue, you answered me with a wicked tongue — a tongue unaffectionate — a tongue unloving and uncaring. So, I decided to speak that chilly language you taught me when you taught me the meaning of love. I don’t know if you understand me anymore — or if you ever did. So now that I am speaking in a foreign tongue I might become more irrelevant to your affections. Who cares? I am losing my speech in both native and foreign — and speechless in native and foreign means without a word to say — Ground Zero to the chilling bones. Terrorized by both worlds that terrorized me since I was born. And I lived with plenty of illusions. First I said, well, if the native doesn’t like me, I’ll become foreign to the native and native to the foreigner. The foreigner will like me because he’ll see that I’m a monkey see, monkey do. When in Rome I do as the Romans. And I did like the monkeys. I climbed the monkey bars as a foreigner becoming more intimate with natives who had been foreigners in the first generation and who forgot where they came from and where they wanted to go. They were more confused than me because they didn’t know who they were — even if they spoke native they were so foreign to themselves that they lost perspective — and I was always there as their mentor. But a colonizer never recognizes a monkey out of a jungle — and if this doesn’t make sense — ask a colonizer of natives to make sense in his own language where nobody cares for him.

I am a foreign tourist. I have no roots. I am not a plant. I have a voice. I sing. I sing from my stomach and I sing from my brain and I sing from my diaphragm and from my womb. I rock in a cradle and I piss and shit on roots. I am not stuck in dirt like a plant. I walk on my feet and conduct with my hands an orchestra of thoughts. They all sing from different locations — from the balcony — from the basement — from the address where I left off yesterday — from the e-mail I don’t know how to open — from a gift I opened last night (the package gave me anxiety when I opened it) — from nobody is home — home has no return address — no telephone — no TV — no e-mail — nothing that comforts my spirit — nothing that says I live here because I was born here because I don’t believe my country is the place where I was born nor the one I was raised to be who I am and I don’t have a who I am in I am who I was or who I will be .

There are two movements in the history of colonization: invasion and immigration. Emigration is a reaction to the invasion of a nation. Because they have been invaded — they will emigrate. This is about changing perspective from the point of view of the colonizer to the point of view of the colonized. The colonizer organizes the invasion but doesn’t prepare for the counter-invasion. The colonized moves from the land of the invaded to the land of his invader with the same adventurous spirit of the conqueror — not to avenge with arms but to reap the spoils of war — to infiltrate that new culture and to conquer it with his own culture. Now, he is two. He speaks the language of the invader and the language of the invaded. His experience is bilingual. It is very hard to be two — and two who are in love — but their love doesn’t match — it doesn’t fit — it has larger legs than a giant — and a very short neck — or it could be an abomination — like the Royal Academy of Spain has declared Spanglish — but it is the language of the new man. The Renaissance had its man — Il Cortesano. The 20th century had its man — the businessman. The new man is a messenger. He is a mixture of races and cultures. He has Chinese eyes — blue or hazelnut. He has freckles and an afro. He speaks Spanglish with a Russian accent. Cold turkey leaves me cold. I will never be roasted on Thanksgiving Day — although I like the holiday — because it is a holiday just to say thank you. I like Pilgrims because they are on a pilgrimage — and they don’t have to finish the unfinished business. Hamlet and Segismundo are princes of Denmark and Poland, but their native tongues are English and Spanish, so when I read them, I read them in exile — in exile from the language of their native land. This distance from the native makes me love more the foreign. Socrates prefers to die in his homeland than to live in exile. I prefer to live and never feel at ease in any land or language. I wonder why I was chosen, but I also wonder why the chosen are never the most prepared — and why they are chosen when they never asked to be chosen. I read Dante in Spanish and I read Dante in English, but I have never read Dante in Italian, anche parlo italiano e sono italiana . I’m more French than Beckett, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein. I hear the voices of Artaud, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Montaigne, Rabelais, Villon, and Joan of Arc. They all want to write a part of my Hamlet and Segismundo. They all want to say something. And Artaud and Rimbaud are constantly fighting in my house — barking like dogs — and insulting each other. That they insult each other is kind of amusing — except when they involve me — blaming me for not being a good enough medium for their thoughts. If I’m not good enough — then get out of my house. Then they laugh the laugh of the Medusa — because I answer them — and that is what they want — an answer — constant attention. Baudelaire is more lax. Sometimes too indulgent. Always buying strange glasses and books to read — a collector of toys and antiques — a decadent. And always looking in the mirror, taking a peek at my face, and sizing up my hair and clothes, ready to criticize my underwear and my external affairs. Joyce thinks he is better than all of them and can only be compared to Dante, but Dante is already in paradise and doesn’t want to talk to him or to anybody but Beatrice. Colonize your colonizers — they say — learn from those bloody bastards. Which bastards — I ask. The American bastards — they colonized your colonizers — Spain and England — and look how phony they look — like prairie dogs — following the Bushes into the oil fields of Iraq. With all these writers in my home, I hardly have time to write. They keep interrupting my writing. If I am listening to Joyce, Artaud storms into my brainstorm, interrupting Joyce who is hard to stop — but Beckett is happy — because they had a stormy marriage — they were upset that I turned out to be a girl and not a boy. They would have liked me to be named Dante not Giannina — so they could claim a lineage to the past. These fights drag on — and Joyce gets drunk — and Rimbaud wants sex — and Artaud wants to get out of the mental asylum — Baudelaire loves the masses and clothes too much — and Artaud loves suicide bombers and pulls Rimbaud’s greasy hair and lashes his tongue at him. Why don’t you two become lovers — but they hated their bodies — then become Muslims — but they hated the Jews too — and I was caught in the middle of the screaming match. Soy boricua. In spite of my family and in spite of my country, I’m writing the process of the Puerto Rican mind — taking it out of context — as a native and a foreigner — expressing it through Spanish, Spanglish, and English— Independencia, Estado Libre Asociado , and Estadidad —from the position of a nation, a colony, and a state — Wishy, Wishy-Washy, and Washy — not as one political party that is parted into piddley parts and partied out. Hamlet crawls between madness and suicide — like he crawls between loving Ophelia — and loving her not. His fantasies of madness and suicide become realities in her. She is the doer of his being, of his eternal doubt and vacillation. Hamlet would have never wanted to kill his father — because he loved being under his control — and even when he has no father — he still feels controlled by his ghost. He needs an author. Zarathustra talks of the Death of God — but he wants somebody to replace that God — the overman. I too need control from the top — not because I lack control — but because I lack authority. The author — I have never been. I’m a player — and I want to be played upon. I can’t authorize. I don’t like the way Hamlet deals with his father. Too much of a kiss-ass. I love that Segismundo wants to throw his father off the balcony for locking him up in the dungeon. I only wish Segismundo didn’t forgive his father. Why? It is not forgivable. And it would be more radical as a Greek tragedy — as something that couldn’t be undone — as an answer to the Oedipal complex — kill the father — consciously — not unconsciously — knowing that he deserved to die. And I would have liked Hamlet to beat Claudius at his own game and inherit the throne. Hamlet, the king. And I would have liked his relationship with Ophelia to be more on par with his relationship to Horatio. Let Ophelia recoil when Hamlet is about to reach orgasm — at that moment let him curse her with the gift of prophecy — so that only she can see and nobody will believe her. And then Hamlet would cut his ear off and send it to Ophelia in an envelope. His ear would be the prop of madness representing the critical mind of the modern artist who goes ballistic. Hamlet doesn’t need to commit suicide, society does it for him, it fabricates proof against him when his madness is most lucid, right on target, right on cue, like Artaud and Van Gogh. T. S. Eliot says Hamlet has no objective correlative — but how can I have an objective correlative when I lost my job? The objective correlative is an absence I miss — a hole I want to fill with a character that breathes through my life every single day. I wake to this absent presence — that has no objective correlative except in what I want to exist — not in what exists. And even if I find a job the job would be what I do not what I am. So, again, the objective correlative would be in absentia with no sofa on which to rest my weary feet. Oh — people tell me — why are you so ungrateful to those who support you and so grateful to others who give you nothing. I am grateful when I find people who understand me and whom I understand. When these people enter my life — we are usually eating under the table — and doing illegal transactions — under the table — as illegal aliens who have to eat leftovers — scraps thrown to the dogs — and we chew those bones — and make collections of bones — and bury the collection of bones under the earth — only to dig them up again with our paws — to rediscover trinkets, teeth, or shards — and they are treasures — new world treasures that musty and bored four-eyed scholars will unbury one day — and exclaim: Eureka! Yo-Yo Boing! Inside this treasure chest are languages in transitory states, minority verbs without a status quo or a nation, sounds of laughing children with baby teeth ready to suck the milk from the udders of the motley cow. Bilingualism is not the language of the fatherland or the motherland — but of udderlands that are free of motherlands and fatherlands. Emigrants move their tails while they walk — and they bury their roots to dig them up again — and eat them because that is what roots are for — to be dug up and eaten by a stray dog howling at the infinite and sinking in quicksand. And, while the dog becomes smaller and smaller looking at the infinite migratory combinations that can drive him crazy because there is no limit except the horizon of the Promised Land, las vacas sagradas keep chewing the same ol’ cud and never get tired of posing in public like the pope — and no matter how old — they never abdicate their throne. But they abdicate their art and become politicians ruled by visibility — ubiquity. They become writers of the market — publishing the same book every few years — using the same structure — plotting while yawning. Not even if they cough a thought would they recognize the germs of a new beginning — and if they don’t recognize themselves in themselves anymore — they look for the audience that was there the first time — afraid of risking what they have — and so it is always more of the same and nothing new. How do you not realize you’re repeating yourself? That your record is not just scratched — it’s worn out. Your bank account has a zero balance. You ran out of gas. You have to fill your tanks. You have to withdraw from the panorama. You have to learn how to be yourself again. The same, but in another encounter with the same — it’s not the same, but another who speaks to you and recognizes you as different. Like when I walk and walk the same streets over and over again — year after year — looking for something new when the new thing here is me — in myself — me in myself is new when I recognize my capacity for transformation. Metaphors are the beginning of the democratic system of envy. They look for what is dissimilar and try to make it similar. Everything that is similar cuts the edge of what is unique. Everything is related to something — and if that cutting edge can be cut shorter or rougher — better. The power of the poet is in his hair. His fertility is counting grains of sand like strands of hair. Pardon my lack of reference when I disjoin metaphors. Instead of making comparisons that work I make comparisons that don’t work. Duchamp’s bicycle is the modern metaphor because it is a useless comparison — it doesn’t join — it disjoins — it tries to unite things that can’t be united — and nevertheless the stool and the wheel that I can’t ride like a bicycle creates music. I can elucidate its thought — shine on its shadows, blow on its horns, whistle the thought, chant the memory, and play the saxophone.