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- 172 chaPTeR seven The Spell of the Hyphen The hyphen can play tricks on the unwary, as it did in Chattanooga when two newspapers merged—the News and the Free Press. Someone introduced a hyphen into the merger, and the paper became the Chattanooga News-Free Press, which sounds as though the paper were news-free, or devoid of news. Obviously we ask too much of a hyphen when we ask it to cast its spell over words it does not adjoin. sTRunk and WhiTe, eleMents of style By adJoining “cuban” and “ameRican” in The course of this book, perhaps I have done what Strunk and White warn against. I may have succumbed to the spell of the hyphen. For if the compound title of the Chattanooga daily turned it into a newspaper without news, in other situations an errant hyphen can manufacture the semblance of continuity between people or entities that have little in common. Is there really a “Cuban-American Way,” as the subtitle of this book proclaims? Have American-born or American-raised Cubans created a culture, an exile-engendered mix of style and substance distinct yet not divorced from the Cuban condition and the American way? And what of the relation of Cuban America to the other Hispanic ethnicities in this country? These are large questions, which I will address by discussing some examples of the literature that this culture, if it exists, has produced. Since its emergence in the 1980s, Cuban-American literature has occupied an ambiguous place within the canon of imaginative writing by U.S. Hispanics . As the only segment of this canon produced by political exiles and their children, this literature exhibits a regressive, nostalgic streak - 173- The Spell of the Hyphen not shared to the same degree by Chicano, Dominican-American, or U.S. Puerto Rican writers. Instead of focusing on how the García girls lost their accents, Cuban-Americans seem more intent on explaining how the Pérez family managed to keep theirs. The title of Isabel Álvarez Borland’s book Cuban-American Literature of Exile (1998) captures this ambiguity. Although hyphenated literatures tend not to be created by political exiles, Cuban-Americans seem to have merged the chronic exile with the unmeltable ethnic. Along with remembered or received memories of Cuba comes ideological baggage, and this too is an inheritance. Although the politics of the Cuban-American community are more complex than is sometimes recognized, it’s nonetheless true that sympathy for the Cuban Revolution among Cuban-Americans is—understandably, I trust—as rare as snow in Havana. Gusanos, worms, has been the label applied by the Castro regime to its opponents inside and outside the island. For the most part, Cuban-American literature has been a canon of worms. Whatever else may separate them, these novelists, poets, playwrights, and essayists rarely blink their worm’s-eye view: gusano rhymes with cubano.This too removes Cuban-American literature to the margins of the Latino mainstream, whose sources in the social movements of the 1960s have shaped its ideological commitments.1 And then there is language. In “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin makes the striking remark that languages are not strangers to each other.2 Although his context is unrelated to mine, his statement applies to Cuban-American writing, a body of work deeply marked by the intimate acquaintance of its two tongues, Spanish and English. Like Latino literature, which has become the monolingual expression of a bilingual community, Cuban-American literature exists predominantly in English. But unlike Latino literature, in which the Spanish language tends to be used ornamentally, as a dash of Latin spice or a dab of exotic color, Cuban-American literature has not abandoned the Spanish language. One of the challenges facing the student of this body of writing is its linguistic variety, which runs the gamut from English-only to Spanish-always. The canon of worms contains writers—Cristina García, Ana Menéndez, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Virgil Suárez—who write in English; but it also includes some who write in Spanish: not only José Kozer, whose work was discussed in the preceding chapter, but Lourdes Gil, Amando Fernández, Iraida Iturralde, and Orlando González Esteva; and still others who travel back and forth between their mother and their other tongue: Roberto Fern ández, Pablo Medina, Elías Miguel Muñoz, Eliana Rivero. These linguistic positionings do not result from generational differ- [18.223.196.59] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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