Yaqui Easter: A Reflection on Cross-Cultural Experience

Yaqui Easter A Reflection on Cross-Cultural Experience FrantisekDeak FOR TWO DECADES I HAVE BEEN living between two cultures. It's an every day, almost casual occurrence-the possibility of two worlds I can inhabit at will or slide into without even realizing it. As many others who have left their native country I can have at least two identities, take part in or distance myself from two cultures, and cherish or dread the experience, depending on circumstances or mood-to live two lives side by side, if ever that were possible. However, I don't dwell on it or turn it into a drama of displacement, a focal point from and to which everything in my life flows. On the contrary, I like to wear this double identity lightly, at times nonchalantly , but mostly as a matter of fact. Coming to the United States was no travel in time for me. The cultures of industrialized countries used to be distinct, but, today, the differences among them are less obvious and the similarities more pronounced. The voyage from Prague or Bratislava to Paris, New York, Los Angeles or San Diego is relatively easy: one can retain the same interests and attitudes, at least those that matter, and acquire new ones. The world of modern art, literature, theatre has been international for some time. And it is in fact this world, besides personal relationships, that made my entry into this culture a relatively easy one. 69 Another way that I think about interculturalism is in the context of the continuous internalization of the arts which is one of the important characteristics of modernism and, of course, postmodernism. This again is in part a personal preoccupation since my generation acquired its attitudes toward art in the climate of modernist opinion, for which an openness to other cultures was an important prerequisite. The variety of contemporary attitudes toward non-Western cultures, mainly the perception of cultures as offering distinct possibilities for art making, to be freely incorporated and cross-fertilized with our own art and culture, were already part of the early avant-garde and modernism. By adopting aspects of African masks and sculpture (African tribal art), Japanese prints (Hokusai), ritualistic or hieratic gestures of rituals for their own works, artists not only accepted some formal aspects of non-Western arts as is often assumed, but also raised a more substantial question about the idea of art and culture. This fundamental reappraisal of the Western tradition, which is one of the important characteristics of the avant-garde, was happening in the context of a resurgence of interest in other cultures. It was not only the new sciences of cultral anthropology and ethnography that were responsible for disseminating the information about distant cultures but also contemporaneous commercial and colonial ventures. A series of World Expositions that were held during the second half of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth century, not only informed people of distant cultures but also created great intellectual and artistic excitement. The colonial exposition of 1900 presented Parisians with the entire exotic world from the Orient, Africa, South America, etc., with their recreation of wondrous environments , staged scenes from life, exhibits of artifacts and performances. The fact that these exhibitions were commercial and colonial in nature does not mean that they had no relationship to art or literature, including the avant-garde. We should remember that Artaud wrote his seminal essay "On the Balinese Theatre" after a visit to such a colonial exposition. The artists' crossing over into other cultures did not take place only toward geographically distant cultures. Moreover, non-Western, popular, and folk arts offered not only new formal and thematic possibilities but implied a different idea of culture. From the turn of the century on, non-Western, popular, and folk arts constituted a powerful triumvirate of alternative possibilities that influenced and even formed much of the artistic experience in the twentieth century. We can see this not only in specific works, but also in theoretical thinking about art. Jifi Veltruskj writing about "Structure in Folk Theatre" in a 1987 Poetics Today pointed out how important the study of the avant-garde theatre, classical Chinese theatre...