The South Bronx's answer to Johnny Rotten is back. Abraham Rodriguez (he made fun of me for still using the Jr., though it's on the book cover) has made an intriguing sharp left into the mystery genre with the cleverly titled South by South Bronx.
Here's the interview I did with him for Viva. Our conversation was much longer, and more pleasant than I expected given how he came across in most of his early interviews.
In the mid-1990s, when he aspired to be a punk rock Balzac, and the language in his debut novel Spidertown made him the next Boricua literary hope (think of it -- how many known Nuyorican prose writers are there these days?), it seemed that every interview with him had him trashing "Latino writers" and "Latino literature."
In interviews like this one, he was portrayed as "an angry young man." Anarchy in the Bx. But after talking I realized he was engaging in a healthy polemic against the flattening wrought by marketing. The When I Was Puerto Rican syndrome, how only certain Latino narratives are seen as "marketable," as "representative," the sort of thing that prompted the McOndo rebellion.
"I am against this whole concept of homogenizing Latinos. Cubans have a different experience, Dominicans have a different experience. It's nice to be united, but we're not all the same. Fifteen years ago it was 'Hispanic.' I'm not 'Hispanic,' I'm Puerto Rican. I have a different history. I have different self-identity issues than a gangbanger from L.A."
He says he's not angry, just passionate, but there is some vinegar in his portrayal of how the art and literary worlds treat his two boricua artist stand-ins, Mink and Monk, who spend much of the novel suffering from post-success creative paralysis.
"I've been toying with the character of Monk for 15 years. I've never seen anyone write about the experience of being a Puerto Rican writer, a painter, a musician. You get the idea of what's out there in the market, how you've been marketed."
In another part of the conversation, boosting my thesis that we are in a Brown sci-fi moment, we discussed the myriad references to Kurt Vonnegut in the new novel. (Vonnegut will be the subject of an forthcoming post.)
Detective Sanchez, one of the main characters in the novel, talks about Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan as depicting the Puerto Rican condition. Earthlings are captured by Martians, have induced amnesia and are sent back to earth as soldiers to fight against their planetary fellows. "That's what's happened to us, we don't remember our condition as a colony," said Rodriguez.
"There were things [Vonnegut] said that were prophetic," said Rodriguez. "The nitty-gritty of the human condition. I was very sad to see how he was treated in the American press after he died, like he was a kook."
Rodriguez, like it seems a new generation of American artists, has found Berlin a hospitable artistic home. In some ways, he said, New York is more provincial than it thinks itself to be, and straitjackets identities. "I've always thought about the concept of the Puerto Rican as a world traveler. We have such a dualistic concept, of PR and the mainland. What if you're PR and the world?"
He's got five readings in town. One is at 7 pm in the B&N in Tribeca, the rest are in homier locales: Fri., May 2, 6pm at Cemi Underground in El Barrio; Sun., May 4, 3pm at Sunny's Bar in Red Hook; Sun., May 4, 7pm at KGB Bar and back on home turf on Wed., May 7, 6:30pm at the Longwood Gallery, within Hostos Community College in the Bronx.
[author's photo by Giancarli for the NY Daily News]
