Dona Aida, With Your Permission
2000; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 23; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cal.2000.0116
ISSN1080-6512
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American and Latino Studies
ResumoA few years ago the Caribbean Studies Association had its annual meeting in Santo Domingo, and they asked me if I would be its keynote speaker as a Dominican American writer along with Aida Cartagena Portalatin, the grand woman of letters in the Dominican Republic. She read in Spanish, and then I read in English, and thenas a kind of crowning moment-we were both brought together on stage to meet each other in front of everyone. Dofa Aida embraced me, but then in front of the mikes, she reamed me out. Eso parece mentira que una dominicana se ponga a escribir en ingles. Vuelve a tu pais, vuelve a tu idioma. Tu eres dominicana. (It doesn't seem possible that a Dominican should write in English. Come back to your country, to your language. You are a Dominican.) Since she was grand and old-and I was raised to have respeto for the old people-but also because she was arguing in Spanish-and I can usually only win my fights in English-I kept my mouth shut. What is it that I would have said? This is what this short essay is about. Doia Aida, con su permiso. Dofa Aida, with your permission. I am not a Dominican writer. I have no business writing in a language that I can speak but have not studied deeply enough to craft. I can't ride its wild horses. Just the subjunctive would throw me off. I know the tender mouth of English, just how to work the reins. I've taken lessons from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman and Toni Morrison and William Carlos Williams, whose Mami was Puerto Rican. And though I have read Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo and Julia de Burgos and Ana Lydia Vega and Aida Cartagena Portalatin, I can only admire what they do in Spanish. I cannot emulate their wonderful mastery of that language. No, I am not a Dominican writer or really a Dominican in the traditional sense. I don't live on the Island, breathing its daily smells, enduring its particular burdens, speaking its special dominicano. In fact, I would tell a different story and write poems with a different rhythm if I lived and worked there, ate there, made love there, voted there, dried my tears there, laughed my laughter there. If daily what I heard was Ay instead of Oh, if instead of that limited palette of colors in Vermont, gray softening into green, what I saw were colors so bright I'd have to look twice at things to believe that they were real.
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