TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/112089/11208900.068

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.9 KB | 184 lines

                                                                                INTERVIEW, Page 18

From the Tropic of L.A.


Novelist and poet KATE BRAVERMAN says Eastern editors think
Western writers are chimpanzees, but she sees the world quite
differently

By Cristina Garcia


    Q. The American literary scene is populated by many
regional writers like yourself, but few enjoy national
audiences. Why?

    A. Who was it that said, "The region is everything, the
nation is a fiction"? New York writers are really regional
writers. It's just that one region purports to be the
sensibility of the nation.

    Q. Is geography destiny in writing?

    A. Yes.

    Q. How is that so in your case?

    A. I am a native daughter of Los Angeles. I remember when
it was like a tropical fishing village. There is so little
tradition here that it lends itself to experimentation. No one's
been watching for so long that you don't have to worry about
taboos. Los Angeles is a new cosmopolitan refugee city for the
world. It's a city of confluences. I'm addicted to the metallic,
postapocalyptic sunsets, the tropical identity, the Santa Ana
blowing through its hot Spanish mouth.

    Q. As we've seen in the recent earthquake, nature here is
unruly, unpredictable. How does this affect your writing?

    A. Living the threat of arbitrary destruction keeps us on
the cutting edge.

    Q. Has being a Los Angeles writer worked against you?

    A. Yes, in certain ways. There's a bizarre prejudice that
exists in the New York publishing establishment that any work
outside the tri-state area is being done by trained
chimpanzees, that geography screens out sensibility. There's an
idea that all Los Angeles writing is about the movie industry,
that it's vulgar, shallow and banal.

    California is looked at the way Italy used to be viewed in
England. It's sexual and dangerous. Something could happen. A
person could change. There is an element of hostility to Los
Angeles that has a racist undertone. The fact that this is a
Latin region, with its patios of bougainvillaea and its streets
named for Spanish saints and psychotics. When you breathe the
air, you become infiltrated with the idea that you are in
another region entirely.

    Q. In your recent book Palm Latitudes, you portray a world
of poor Latin women. Why did you choose to write about them?

    A. I lived in the barrio for ten years. I spoke the
language. The Los Angeles novel, in a purely abstract sense,
would not be about Anglo people. Palm Latitudes is a book that
wrote itself out of the aesthetics of the region. My feeling
when I came to the end of it was "Yes, I see that. The 20th
century is increasingly to live in the palm latitudes."

    Q. Your work is replete with apocalyptic visions: drug
addiction, cancer, death, sexism, cultural brutalities. Do you
consider these to be the major concerns of the age?

    A. I've always been fascinated by the concept of the
untouchable caste, whether it's cancer victims, drug addicts,
Latin women, homosexuals. An overriding concern of mine is to
touch the untouchables and to show their humanity.
Unfortunately, the more chaotic the society, the greater is the
desire for conservative, nonconfrontational art.

    Q. You've said that the cutting edge beyond postmodernism
in contemporary fiction is "feminine and tropical." What do you
mean?

    A. There is a sense of the old great colonial powers being
colonized by the satellite populations from the south. It also
has something to do with a more anthropological vision of the
universe rather than a strictly European philosophical
framework. It is an ease with nature, a sense of cycles, of
roots, of the earth, of things that have been thought of as
being traditionally feminine. There's an element of fever and
heat and intensity, emotions and contradictions, a deliberate
rejection of decorum.

    Q. You are a feminist. Do you consider your books feminist
works?

    A. Male critics and men in the publishing industry want
from their women writers what they want from their wives. I'm
interested in presenting characters that are more challenging,
threatening, complicated and unpredictable.

    I believe a great feminist achievement is to experiment
with the language. It was my revolutionary intention in Palm
Latitudes to rearrange the language, to tropicalize and feminize
it. My second goal was to create a world in which there were
only women, and only non-Anglo women, and to give these women
a mythology, to have the city understood through them.

    I find women as writers and as characters are operating
within narrow confines. They inherit a kind of ghetto of the
soul. I'm trying to enlarge the spectrum.

    I'm influenced by something that I heard said about Israel,
about how you would know that there was a Jewish state when you
arrived and your luggage was picked up by Jewish bag handlers
and there were Jewish prostitutes in the streets. I'm trying to
come up with a world of women inhabited by women.

    Q. Didn't feminists criticize your book for a scene where
one woman kills another?

    A. Yes, but it's vitally important that women have the
authority to murder as well as to create on the page. There's
a real danger in women being relegated to only nurturing roles.
Women must be able to give death as well as birth, to have the
full alphabet of human possibility when they write.

    Q. What does living the literary life mean for you?

    A. I write. I rewrite. I lecture. I teach. I review. I
edit. I perform. I don't watch television. I don't read a
newspaper. I don't read magazines. I have few conventional
pastimes. I have to protect myself from the toxicity of this
culture. I read poetry out loud every day. I read my work out
loud. I meditate.

    It appears that writing is a sedentary form, but in fact it
requires incredible physical, emotional and spiritual stamina.
When I finish writing at the end of a serious day of work, I
feel like I've been mountain climbing. I remember A. Alvarez
said about Sylvia Plath, "Poetry of this order is a murderous
art."

    I was in Bulgaria recently, and I was being shown so many
statues of executed poets that I finally said, "You know, in
Communist countries, you execute your poets. In the free world,
the poets execute themselves."

    Q. In a world where poetry is considered nonessential to
even many cultured persons, what do you see as its role? Does
the world need more poets?

    A. I think the world has the right amount of poets. More
people would turn to poetry if the poetry that was available
were more exciting and spoke more to their lives rather than the
anemic, base, listless, redundant poetry that apologizes and
hates itself. People do read poetry in times of crises. Writing
has a healing power. But in all times, there are few real poets.

    Q. You talk about giving your women characters a mythology
of their own. What is yours?

    A. One of my characters says, "To be one woman, truly,
wholly, is to be all women. Tend one garden and you will birth
worlds." A garden requires discipline to tend it. It needs
flexibility, stamina. I think I was also talking about the
garden as being a metaphor for art, a life well lived.

    I try to do that, to dare to be an individual, an
eccentric. In America we don't have a tradition of eccentricity.
In this society we're just supposed to go until we drop. We
don't even have nervous breakdowns anymore. We have episodes,
and then we're expected to be back at work on Monday.

    Q. Is the American novel healthy?

    A. It is evolving as it recognizes other accents, other
rhythms, other struggles. There was a moment when certain East
Coast urban men told us everything about the universe that we
could know. Then the trade routes shifted. I think that the
great mesa to stand on now is on the Pacific Coast. Not a
mountain, but a mesa.