Dubya, Post-Heche & Crypto Jews
As a card-carrying cynic, sometimes I just want to run around like Big Daddy in Tennesee Willims' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof shouting: ''Mendacity!" I regret I am unable to feel sympathetic towards disingenuous folks even when they are dealing with real problems. The idiot box brought two such souls into the living room Wednesday night ( Sept. 5 ) . Dubya at his first state dinner in the "Casa Blanca" must have felt some satisfaction eating off the gold millennium china purchased by Hillary Clinton. ( Hillary probably felt she would enjoy many a meal on them with a Democratic President. Not to worry Hillary, you can probably get a plate when they eventually come up for auction on eBay. ) The "formal yet festive" occasion hosted by Dubya in black tie and cowboy boots included his toast to Mexican Presidente Fox with a champagne glass full of 7-Up. Why do I feel it would have been more honest and less hokey if he had held up a simple tumbler of branch water?
The Heche tell-all played that night also. The next morning, post-Herch-ers rushed to deconstruct her confessional. ABC-TV had two gay activists, Fox 32 a psychotherapist, and NBC-TV had Heche herself. The gay Mr. Signorelle and lesbian Ms. Renna seemed to imply that Heche was doing for bi-sexuality what Rock Hudson did for AIDS...that is, bringing a high-profile discussion to a sub rosa topic ( thus redeeming herself, and gays for making her an icon in the pre-split Anne/Ellen days ) . Dr. Bolen, after giving clinical explanations for escape techniques used to create safe spaces from childhood trauma, would assess Heche's performance as sensationalistic, saying "the only thing missing was how to lose weight."
Why was I more inclined to nod sympathetically when Oprah and Roseanne talked about their childhood experiences with sexual abuse and how it led to similar dysfunctional behavior?
Achy Obejas & Days of Awe
Author Achy Obejas deals with another kind of dishonesty in her latest book, Days of Awe. The narrator of the novel, Alexandra, gives us a fascinating history of crypto-Jews in Cuba; Jews who from the time of the Spanish Inquisition publicly proclaimed their Catholicism while secretly practicing Jewish rites.
Achy is one of those blunt, edgy people who often appear confrontational. As an activist in the Hispanic and gay/lesbian communities in Chicago she rubbed some folks the wrong way. One can question her politics or her methods...but there is no doubt about the quality of her writing. I have mentioned in this space before that the first time I heard Achy read her poetry ( at a fundraiser for a Canadian gay newspaper that had been torched ) , I was struck by her passion and talent. In the decades since, her short stories, journalism, and earlier novel have more than evidenced that promise. After a number of years churning out 50 or 60 reviews annually, I don't do book reviews as such anymore. I read for pleasure or background for my history projects. When I find a book that excites me, I e-mail my friends and/or mention it in a column...the last such was the late Hollis Sigler's art book Breast Cancer Journals.
Days of Awe is a novel, unique in my experience with footnotes, a glossary and a selected reading list appended. The setting is Cuba with protagonist Alexandra, born when Castro overthrew Batista, brought to the U.S. concurrent with the Bay of Pigs, returning in the 1980s and '90s to find her roots and uncover family secrets. The style is Woolf-ian as Obejas ebbs and flows between past and present; she uses letters as a literary device...perhaps not as successfully as Alice Walker in The Color Purple, but effectively. There are allusions, illusions, allegories and metaphors in profusion. The new generation of academics and critics who finally discovered homosexuality in literature should have a field day with this one. They now discuss Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as a lesbian novel. After all, hero Jacob Barnes lost his penis in WWI and therefore makes love like a dyke. He was likely ( they tell us ) named after one of two lesbians Hem knew in Paris...Djuna Barnes who lived at the Hotel Jacob or Natalie Barney, who held court at her rue Jacob house. Hemingway admired Djuna and drank with her at the Dingo...he didn't fair so well with Miss Barney to whose "at homes" he was brought by an American poet. Imagine what the pedagogues will do with the Cuban Orlando with whom Alexandra has "sexual" encounters. Is he a metaphor for the emasculated revolution? Or perhaps, they will counter, because when Orlando "makes love" as Alexandra says "He never enters me ... he never comes" he is a metaphorical lesbian. Perhaps the nuevo critics will see this is an homage to Virginia Woolf's gender bending 1928 novel about her lover, Vita Sackville-West, titled Orlando: A Biography.
Obejas's novel has garnered favorable reviews in many venues. I read the book before the reviews and was totally engrossed by the first 150 pages of Days of Awe. The socio-political unfolding was no less interesting then the life and loves of Alexandra and her extended family. This is a meaty book...the melding of indigenous and imported religions, the assessment of the revolution by those who lived it, the impact of U.S. policy on the lives of ordinary Cubans, the burdens of those who fled...all told with authority and played out within webs of guilt and passion. Alexandra's romantic fascination and later affair with Celina ( whom she meets as a teen during her first visit to Cuba ) will probably assuage the hearts of loyal Naiad readers. Then there is the obvious comparison to the gay closet...functioning in a hostile world while hiding one's true self. I have no hesitation recommending Days of Awe to readers of this column with every level of interest.
Copyright 2001 by Marie J. Kuda.
e-mail: kudoschgo@aol.com
