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INTERVIEWER: Now when you were starting out as a writer, you were black, impoverished, homosexual. You must have said to yourself, “Gee, how much more disadvantaged can I get?”
BALDWIN: No, I thought that I‘d hit the jackpot. It was so outrageous that you could not go any further, so you had to find a way to use it.
I first read this James Baldwin quote in my early 20's while reading an essay (I think) where I distinctly recall Baldwin using both “the n-word” and “the f-word” epithets. I didn’t find the language unduly harsh (for Baldwin, anyway) but I did instinctively think, at the time, that it was also an easy statement for Mr. Baldwin to make. Of course, Baldwin’s experience was extraordinarily similar to my own (other than growing up in poverty). But he had made it over. True enough, Baldwin meticulously charted how he “got over” in his novels and essays, so I knew that there was “hope” (for lack of a better word). But I had absolutely no idea how to navigate my way toward the light.
The quote remained with me, though.
What I did recognize in the Baldwin quote, even at that time, is the illusory nature of categories and boxes like “black” and “homosexual.” I knew what these words were supposed to describe, define and quantify. I resented the fact that I could neither live up to these “standards” nor did I particularly want to. After all, so much of what these words seemed to connote was the very existential state of being “disadvantaged” that Baldwin seemed to so easily evade.
I came to the conclusion, rather quickly, actually, that Baldwin was correct; I was in possession of a “jackpot.”
What I lacked was an understanding of what to do to be “made over.”
It was this theme of being “made over” that leapt the furthest from the pages of the collected autobiographical essays of noted gay Mexican-American author Richard Rodriguez.
(because the theme of this blues/funk gospel tune fits and...do I really need an excuse to fit Tina Turner into anything?)
Some biography:
Born July 31, 1944, in San Francisco, Rodriguez was the third of four children born to working-class Mexican immigrants. While raising the family in Sacramento, his father, Leopoldo Rodriguez, worked as a dental technician while his mother, Victoria Moran Rodriguez, stayed at home with the children and worked part-time as a typist. "They were nobody's victims," Rodriguez stated in Hunger of Memory. "Optimism and ambition led them to a house many blocks from the Mexican south side of town. We lived among gringos and only a block from the biggest, whitest houses."
For the first five years of his life, Rodriguez spoke only Spanish, knowing just enough English to run errands for his mother at stores a block away from his home. The familiar sounds of Spanish were soon invaded with the strange words of the English language when young Richard's parents enrolled him in the local Catholic school. Frustrated by six months of silence and little progress, three Irish nuns from the school visited the Rodriguezes and insisted that Richard practice his English at home. His parents were obedient to the "Church's authority," Rodriguez recalled in Hunger of Memory. "They agreed to give up the language that had revealed and accentuated our family's closeness. The moment after the visitors left, the change was observed. "Ahora, speak to us en ingles, ' my father and mother united to tell us." With the acquisition of a new language came the acceptance of a new identity: "At last, seven years old, I came to believe what had been technically true since my birth: I was an American citizen."
Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, Rodriguez’s first collection of autobiographical essays that became a best-seller, primarily gained notoriety because of Rodriguez’s controversial positions against bilingual education and affirmative action programs. I knew of his positions prior to reading Hunger of Memory. I have points of agreement and disagreement with Rodriguez’s; for example, I think that a second language should be a more intricate part of the education of ALL American children, regardless of their “first” language. I found Rodriguez’s articulation of his political positions (which have not changed over the course of the past 35+ years, for the most part) on bilingual/affirmative action issues to be overly didactic, in part, because of Hunger of Memory’s more subtle yet overpowering theme; the ability and role of language in helping one to be “made over." The process of being “made over” does come with a price, though:
What I am about to say to you has taken me more than twenty years to admit: A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that schooling was changing and separating me from the life that I enjoyed before becoming a student.
HOF p.45
I was aware of this process at a much earlier age than Rodriguez, I think. In fact, I don’t ever recall not being aware of being different, changed, and separated from many (including my immediate family) simply because of some of my “successes” in the classroom; for that very reason, I resented the entire process and frequently rebelled against it. Mr. Rodriguez, it seems, had a much more...mature view of this process than I ever did.
I also wonder if and to what extent the knowledge of being changed and separated and “made over” had anything to do with the awareness of sexual orientation. In Hunger of Memory, of course, Rodriguez doesn’t say much about sexuality...oh, but there is this:
I continued to see the braceros, those men I resembled in one way and, in another way, didn’t resemble at all. On the watery horizon of a Valley afternoon, I’d see them. And though I feared looking like them, it was with silent envy that I regarded them still. I envied them their physical lives, their freedom to violate the taboo of the sun. Closer to home I would notice the shirtless construction workers, the roofers, the sweating men tarring the front of the house. And I’d see the Mexican gardeners. I was unwilling to admit the attraction of their lives . I tried to deny it by looking away. But what was denied became strongly desired.
HOF p.126
Hmmmmm….yes, I remember being on the outside looking in at the street basketball courts thinking much the same thing, lol.
Later, as a student at Stanford, Rodriguez secures a part-time job doing construction work and, of course, uses physical labor as an opportunity for yet another sort of “made over” experience. Unlike his previous made over” experiences with language, however, Rodriguez readily accepts that in so many ways, the los pobres were “so different from me.”
(Maybe, maybe not, depending on the eye of the beholder.)
I suspect that Mr. Rodriguez probably overstated the differences between himself and los pobres; after all, in his latest work, Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography, Rodriguez is fully capable of rightly seeing a dizzying amount of similarities between peoples across the lines religious, ethnic, and sexuality boundaries.
By far, my favorite essay in Darling is the essay “Ojalá,” a Spanish word with etymological origins in Arabic (like many other Spanish words); a word that Rodriguez’s mother often used and a word that serves as the primary catalyst of another of Rodriguez’s primary themes; how really “mixed” we all are in so many fearful and wonderful ways. It occurs to me that the more that we can begin to acknowledge accept that “mixture,” the closer that our society will truly come to being “made over” in a truly profound way.