Author: Christina Garcia, author of "Dreaming in Cuban"
Source: Time, Nov 20, 1989 v134 n21 p18(2).

Q. The American literary scene is populated by many regional writers
like yourself, but few enjoy national audiences. Why?
A. Who was it that said, "The region is everything, the nation is a
fiction"? New York writers are really regional writers. It's just that one
region purports to be the sensibility of the nation.

Q. Is geography destiny in writing?

A. Yes.

Q. How is that so in your case?

A. I am a native daughter of Los Angeles. I remember when it was
like a tropical fishing village. There is so little tradition here that it
lends itself to experimentation. No one's been watching for so long that
you don't have to worry about taboos. Los Angeles is a new cosmopolitan refugee
city for the world. It's a city of confluences. I'm addicted to the
metallic, postapocalyptic sunsets, the tropical identity, the Santa Ana blowing
through its hot Spanish mouth.

Q. As we've seen in the recent earthquake, nature here is unruly,
unpredictable. How does this affect your writing?

A. Living the threat of arbitrary destruction keeps us on the cutting
edge.

Q. Has being a Los Angeles writer worked against you?

A. Yes, in certain ways. There's a bizarre prejudice that exists in
the New York publishing establishment that any work outside the tri-state area
is being done by trained chimpanzees, that geography screens out
sensibility. There's an idea that all Los Angeles writing is about the movie
industry, that it's vulgar, shallow and banal.

California is looked at the way Italy used to be viewed in England.
It's sexual and dangerous. Something could happen. A person could change. There
is an element of hostility to Los Angeles that has a racist undertone.
The fact that this is a Latin region, with its patios of bougainvillaea
and its streets named for Spanish saints and psychotics. When you breathe the
air, you become infiltrated with the idea that you are in another region
entirely.

Q. In your recent book Palm Latitudes, you portray a world of poor
Latin women. Why did you choose to write about them?

A. I lived in the barrio for ten years. I spoke the language. The
Los Angeles novel, in a purely abstract sense, would not be about Anglo
people. Palm Latitudes is a book that wrote itself out of the aesthetics of
the region. My feeling when I came to the end of it was "Yes, I see that.
The 20th century is increasingly to live in the palm latitudes."

Q. Your work is replete with apocalyptic visions: drug addiction,
cancer, death, sexism, cultural brutalities. Do you consider these to be the
major concerns of the age?

A. I've always been fascinated by the concept of the untouchable
caste, whether it's cancer victims, drug addicts, Latin women, homosexuals.
An overriding concern of mine is to touch the untouchables and to show
their humanity. Unfortunately, the more chaotic the society, the greater is
the desire for conservative, nonconfrontational art.

Q. You've said that the cutting edge beyond postmodernism in
contemporary fiction is "feminine and tropical." What do you mean?

A. There is a sense of the old great colonial powers being colonized
by the satellite populations from the south. It also has something to do
with a more anthropological vision of the universe rather than a strictly European
philosophical framework. It is an ease with nature, a sense of cycles, of
roots, of the earth, of things that have been thought of as being
traditionally feminine. There's an element of fever and heat and
intensity, emotions and contradictions, a deliberate rejection of decorum.

Q. You are a feminist. Do you consider your books feminist works?

A. Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their
women writers what they want from their wives. I'm interested in presenting
characters that are more challenging, threatening, complicated and
unpredictable.

I believe a great feminist achievement is to experiment with the
language. It was my revolutionary intention in Palm Latitudes to rearrange the
language, to tropicalize and feminize it. My second goal was to create a world in
which there were only women, and only non-Anglo women, and to give these
women a mythology, to have the city understood through them.
I find women as writers and as characters are operating within narrow
confines. They inherit a kind of ghetto of the soul. I'm trying to enlarge the spectrum.

I'm influenced by something that I heard said about Israel, about how
you would know that there was a Jewish state when you arrived and your
luggage was picked up by Jewish bag handlers and there were Jewish prostitutes in
the streets. I'm trying to come up with a world of women inhabited by
women.

Q. Didn't feminists criticize your book for a scene where one woman
kills another?

A. Yes, but it's vitally important that women have the authority to
murder as well as to create on the page. There's a real danger in women being
relegated to only nurturing roles. Women must be able to give death as well as
birth, to have the full alphabet of human possibility when they write.

Q. What does living the literary life mean for you?

A. I write. I rewrite. I lecture. I teach. I review. I edit. I
perform. I don't watch television. I don't read a newspaper. I don't read
magazines.I have few conventional pastimes. I have to protect myself from the
toxicity of this culture. I read poetry out loud every day. I read my work
out loud. I meditate.

It appears that writing is a sedentary form, but in fact it requires
incredible physical, emotional and spiritual stamina. When I finish
writing at the end of a serious day of work, I feel like I've been mountain
climbing. I remember A. Alvarez said about Sylvia Plath, "Poetry of this order
is a murderous art."

I was in Bulgaria recently, and I was being shown so many statues of executed
poets that I finally said, "You know, in Communist countries, you execute
your poets. In the free world, the poets execute themselves."

Q. In a world where poetry is considered nonessential to even many
cultured persons, what do you see as its role? Does the world need more poets?

A. I think the world has the right amount of poets. More people
would turnto poetry if the poetry that was available were more exciting and
spoke moreto their lives rather than the anemic, base, listless, redundant
poetry that apologizes and hates itself. People do read poetry in times of
crises. Writing has a healing power. But in all times, there are few real
poets.

Q. You talk about giving your women characters a mythology of their
own. What is yours?

A. One of my characters says, "To be one woman, truly, wholly, is to
be all women. Tend one garden and you will birth worlds." A garden requires
discipline to tend it. It needs flexibility, stamina. I think I was
also talking about the garden as being a metaphor for art, a life well
lived.
I try to do that, to dare to be an individual, an eccentric. In
America we don't have a tradition of eccentricity. In this society we're just
supposed to go until we drop. We don't even have nervous breakdowns anymore.
We have episodes, and then we're expected to be back at work on Monday.

Q. Is the American novel healthy?

A. It is evolving as it recognizes other accents, other rhythms,
other struggles. There was a moment when certain East Coast urban men told
us everything about the universe that we could know. Then the trade
routes shifted. I think that the great mesa to stand on now is on the
Pacific Coast. Not a mountain, but a mesa.

COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1989.