Theft of the Musings of Another

"Small nations are not only politically impotent, but they are also helpless in the face of the vulgarization and the plagiarism of their own suffering by the literature and the mass media of the great nations." -Joanna Rostropowicsz Clark

I was skimming through Sunday's WaPo, my new local paper, and I felt the need to share the lucid musings of Peruvian-American writer Daniel Alarcon.  So here goes:

""That night at the San Francisco bar, I understood perfectly the sentiment my paisano was expressing.  In fact, the entire conversation was one I'd had with myself before: You tend to reduce a place--because it is unfathomably complex and you know too little about it--to its artifacts, to easily definable expressions of culture: your favorite fruit, your favorite ice cream.  The longing for these stands in for other, more complicated yearnings: to know, for example, why your parents are laughing at a Peruvian joke you can't quite understand.  I wasn't offended by my countryman equating Peru with a profesional football team.  This abstracted variety of patriotism--the love for a place one's parents are from--is special and requires idiosyncratic expression.  The emotion would not have been any more authentic, the love any more genuine, if my paisano had sung a Peruvian national anthem.  In fact, what he did was much more real: A man conversant in thie lore of two cultures used a detail of one to define his affection for the other."

Alarcon strikes me as brilliant and well-versed.  He draws upon his own experiences and his massive intake of other literature to spin a beautiful column musing on his authorship that surely carries over to his actual works.  I look forward to reading them--he strikes me as a follower of the Oscar Hijuelos school of Latin literature, where an experience that characteristically is rooted in the Spanish or Portuguese tongues is expressed and told through the English language.  A wonderful experiement, and here, a vivid imagination.  I empathsize especially through the mystical attitude I hold towards Croatia, Austria, Slovakia...and places where my own feet or mind have traveled, regardless of ancestral ties: New Zealand, Morrocco, Turkey, Bolviia.....  a cacaphony of sights and sounds, wafting sensory experiences that collectively blanket a deeper longing, a deeper connection.  Having a love affair with a country may not be the same notion that Alarcon is tackling, but his prose connects.

Beautiful.

technorati tags:Travel, Alarcon, Latin, literature

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