Writing Off the Hyphen: New Critical Perspectives on the Literature of the Puerto Rican Diaspora

11. Writing Home: Mapping Puerto Rican Collective Memory in The House on the Lagoon

Mapping Puerto Rican Collective Memory in The House on the Lagoon KELLI LYON JOHNSON ---------------------------------------------------------------W hen Rosario Ferré chose to publish her novel The House on the Lagoon in English, her choice drew sharp questions from other Puerto Rican and Caribbean writers and critics.1 Several of her previous works had appeared in English—Sweet Diamond Dust and The Youngest Doll among them—but only after having been translated by Ferré herself from the initial Spanish-language versions.2 The publication of the first edition of The House on the Lagoon in English reopened the debate among literary critics about the political and intellectual significance of selecting English as the language in which to encode the complexity of Puerto Rican history and literature. Writer and critic Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert describes Ferré’s choice as “an unthinkable heresy,” Ferré’s decision “a most regrettable error in judgment , a seduction, a responding to the siren song of a multicultural, postcolonial book market.”3 Paravisini-Gebert’s indictment of Ferré’s “heresy” highlights the extent to which identity has been constituted through language . A primary marker of identity, language has emerged as paramount in delineating categories of ethnic, exile, and diaspora writing. Language constitutes contested space for processes of assimilation, resistance, and cultural reclamation; as such, language provides new territory for elaborations of identity for those in exile or diaspora. Those who continue 239 11 WRITING HOME W KELLI LYON JOHNSON to speak the language of their culture of origin are seen as more closely connected to that culture and, thus, more authentic. In her frequently cited article, “Displacements and Autobiography in Cuban-American Fiction,” Isabel Álvarez-Borland argues that with the adoption of the language of the exile’s new country, the writer becomes an ethnic writer—not a writer in exile, as Ferré has sometimes referred to herself.4 Critics such as Álvarez-Borland generally present this linguistic transformation as progress, a desired evolution in identity that presupposes acceptance, assimilation, and integration. In her work on Cristina Garc ía’s Dreaming in Cuban, for example, Álvarez-Borland suggests that because García’s childhood “occurred in English,” García “integrate[s] issues of past and present more easily. As one of the first ethnic CubanAmerican writers, García envisions questions of identity and heritage with less anxiety and thus greater distance from her material,” giving her the ability to “walk the path from exile to ethnicity.”5 For ÁlvarezBorland , this path from exile to ethnicity creates a psychological wholeness unfettered by issues of biculturalism—linguistic or otherwise. In After Exile Amy Kaminsky similarly envisions the transition from Spanish to English as psychologically and culturally salubrious, suggesting that “[i]n today’s United States this embrace of ethnic identity does not mean a denial of origins, but rather a fuller participation in the cultural life of the new country.”6 Such a construction of linguistic identity leads in one direction only—movement toward the future—and fails to account for a crucial element of ethnic identity: history, memory, and the collectively shared past. The connection between language and movement toward or away from the cultural past emphasizes the importance of translation for Rosario Ferré and for Puerto Rican identity in diaspora. Ferré translates her works from Spanish into English and from English into Spanish, allowing her to move not in a single direction but back and forth between languages, countries, and cultures. As a result, Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican history emerge as fluid and changeable, contingent on evolving constructions of the past as it transforms the future. Despite accusations about her desire to break into the literary market of the United States by writing in English, Ferré has pointed out in several interviews that she is more interested in (absent) memory than markets . Rather, she has said that she writes or translates her own work into English in order to include Puerto Ricans living in the United States as part of her audience and to provide them with memories of the island. 240 Kelli Lyon Johnson In her essay “On Destiny, Language, and Translation; or, Ophelia Adrift in the C. & O. Canal,” Ferré evokes the problem of “absent memory,” asserting her belief that “it is the duty of the Puerto Rican writer, who has been privileged enough to learn both languages, to try to alleviate this situation, making an effort either to translate some of her own work or...