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Article Excerpt
"My Mami and Papi can feed us without your disgusting gringo imperialist food!"
--Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican (82)
"If you teach a man to fish, he will eventually grow tired of mackerel and want lobster."
--Esmeralda Santiago, The Turkish Lover (218)
Reflections on food bookend the three memoirs Esmeralda Santiago has written to date: When I Was Puerto Rican (1993), Almost a Woman (1998), and The Turkish Lover (2004). The first memoir opens with a nostalgic meditation on a green guava--a bittersweet reflection that seems to romanticize her memories of being Puerto Rican and to suggest that her childhood environment will be remembered with a measure of pride, and even a sense of cultural superiority. Her last memoir, by contrast, closes with an old Puerto Rican saying that warns against assertions of pride via an analogy with chicken: "Alabate pollo, que madana te guisan. Boast now, chicken, tomorrow you'll be stew" (Lover 337). In between these two bookends, her memoirs are characterized by an often contradictory relationship to pride and food. The epigraph to a key chapter in When I Was Puerto Rican, for example, highlights the power of food, and perhaps pride, to harm: "L0 que no mata, engorda" ("What doesn't kill you, makes you fat") (63). And some of the other cultural rules about eating that she is raised with also create ambivalent responses. For example, rules such as "once you kill the animal, it's a sin to waste anything that can be eaten" (Puerto Rican 43) and "when somebody gives you something to eat, you eat it, even if you throw it up later" (136) seem thoughtful and sensitive, and yet somehow unappetizing to follow. Taking my lead from the prominence of these ambivalent food-related pronouncements, I will show that close attention to Santiago's vexed relationship with food and food practices can shed new light on a critical understanding of her memoirs.
Critics most often discuss Santiago's memoirs in order to define her ethnic identification as either "Puerto Rican" or 'American." Evaluating her behavior and attitudes within a framework of anti-colonial politics, these critics note a progression from greater cultural identification with Puerto Rico and a corresponding rejection of colonizing forces, which they celebrate, to greater identification with and even assimilation to the colonizing culture, which they decry as evidence of an opportunistic striving that requires Santiago to reject and even betray her "own" culture. By focusing instead on some of the mechanisms that underlie both identifications, I will reveal a degree of continuity in her apparently contradictory choices and so complicate the evaluation of those choices--her former position is not so clearly to be valued, especially if it is valued uncritically, and her latter position is not so clearly to be devalued.
One mechanism that makes Santiago's relationship to culture so vexed has been identified by Frances Negron-Muntaner as paramount in the constitution of a prideful Puerto Rican or boricua identity. (1) Negron-Muntaner argues that Puerto Rican attempts to value themselves have "frequently been staged through spectacles to offset shame" and that boricua identity as we know it would not exist without the "shame" of being Puerto Rican (xiii). The shame that she theorizes is not the product of an individual inferiority complex, but a mechanism that constitutes "social identities generated by conflict within asymmetrical power relations" (xiii). Boricua identities have been produced in a political environment marked by various "sites of 'colonial' shame" in which Puerto Ricans have been degraded; as a result, boricua pride is not a freely chosen affirmation but the "effect of a subjection" (6). Since the identity that defines itself as a source of special pride is so closely tied to shame, the identity is "constitutively shameful" and is, inevitably, an "ambivalent" identity (8).
Negron-Muntaner concludes that the most vital cultural productions that deal with boricua identity have "sprung not from the denial of shame, but from its acknowledgment into wounds that we can be touched by" (xviii). It is in this context that I wish to examine Santiago's negotiations of shame, pride, and identity in her memoirs. Tracing her development from a young girl in Puerto Rico to a young woman in the States, I will also examine the way that a "constitutive shame" operates in the arena of gender and sexual politics as well as cultural and colonial politics. These political axes, which are all defined by asymmetrical power relations, interact with each other; but the primary significance shifts from a focus on culture and colonialism to a focus on gender and sexual relations in a roughly chronological pattern as Santiago moves from Puerto Rico to the States and as she transforms from Negi (a term of endearment that establishes her as a favored child in her parents' home) to Chiquita (a term of endearment that establishes her as favored protege and companion to her lover Ulvi). These multiple arenas become more closely linked, however, as she matures into Esmeralda (an official name that she reclaims when she begins to assert more control over her own life) and struggles, in her final identifications and values, to come to terms with the shameful bases of her sense of self and her possibilities. (2)
For much of her history, Santiago speaks her vexed relationship to issues of pride and shame via her vexed relationship to food and food practices, and her strategies share a pattern with eating disorders that may not be entirely coincidental. For the issue of control is central to both; indeed, the issue of control in eating disorders is often tied to feelings of shame that food and eating can evoke. Anorectics speak this shame through their eating practices; and appetite becomes voice, a way to say something about identity (Brumberg and Striegel-Moore 212, 213).
Santiago sometimes speaks through acts of vomiting. As a trope, purging--which has risen to prominence as a symptom of twentieth-century eating disorders--holds first place among the strategies that Negron-Muntaner lists for resisting shame: boricua cultural productions are "made up of the desire to purge, flaunt, deny, destroy, resignify, and transfigure the constitutive shame of being Puerto Rican from our bodies and public selves" (xiv). But the practice is inherently ambivalent. Associated with abjection, it can itself be potentially shameful. As the memoirs progress, attention shifts from vomiting to the meaning of hunger--another concern that underlies the widespread existence of eating disorders--and the resignification of hunger becomes vital to Santiago's changing experience of self. Her early attitude toward hunger is a product of anti-colonial politics. In the colonial context of the island during the 1950s, when she is first introduced to politics, her primary defense is to deny the shameful possibility of being poor and hungry. Her final attitude is a product of transculturation. By the time she is a young woman who has lived in the states and experienced shame in terms of gender and sexual politics as well as colonial politics, she rejects formulations that attach shame to a hungry subject and begins to decrease the hold of eating disorders on her life. An anorectic complies with cultural scripts as she attempts to maintain control by living in a state of hunger, even as she denies being hungry. Santiago, by contrast, rejects the cultural scripts that keep both colonial and female subjects hungry and undernourished. She defends the right to be hungry for more--i.e., to want to eat more and differently, both literally and metaphorically--in the multiple political arenas that have meaning in her life. And by the end of her third memoir, ice cream replaces the guava as the most telling food for understanding her relationship to eating: while it was once a food consumed as a form of self-feeding to cope with shame and anxiety, with a sense of greater self-confidence, it is finally enjoyed in a free and easy manner, with giddy and unselfconscious pleasure.
Food and Colonial/Cultural Politics
The episode that most exemplifies the politicized nature of food in the author's early formation is narrated in "The American Invasion of Macun," a pivotal chapter that has been anthologized and also remarked on in much criticism of When I Was Puerto Rican. It is most commonly read as a relatively straightforward assertion of Puerto Rican identity based on rejection of all things American, particularly in criticism preoccupied with issues of ethnic identity in a colonial setting. Joan Torres-Pou, for example, reads the episode unequivocally as social criticism intended to expose the paternalistic, prejudiced, and even racist colonial system that the United States has set up on the island (416). Carmen Torres-Robles reads it as an episode intended to contrast Puerto Rico and the United States, to emphasize the colonial relationship, and to insist on rebellion against the imposed system (209). In an article with a pedagogical focus, Colleen Ruggieri explains that teachers can help students respond to the events of 9/11 by using the text to teach and celebrate diversity. Promoting the literature as a source of socio-historical knowledge, she uses the episode to reveal the colonizing practices of the US, to emphasize the natural beauty of the island and its culture, and to debate whether or not Puerto Rico should become a state (59). While I do not deny the anti-colonial features of this episode, I believe that an extended reading that pays closer attention to the mechanism of pride and shame can complicate this chapter's meaning.
This series of...
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