Mayra's Siren Song
Jaime Manrique -- Críticas, 4/1/2003
One night early last December, novelist Mayra Santos-Febres took the stage at
a packed reading at Manhattan's City College to celebrate the publication of
Thomas Colchie's new anthology of contemporary Latin American literature, A
Whistler in the Night World. To the audience's delight, the celebrated
author of Sirena Selena vestida de pena (Sirena Selena) launched
into a performance of "Majestad negra" ("Black Majesty"), a famous poem by Luis
Palés Matos, Puerto Rico's central figure in the Caribbean Negritude movement of
the 1930s, which appropriated African identity for artistic inspiration:
Sashaying down the lighted Antillean street
is Tembandumba of the Quimbamba
Flower of Tortola
Rose of Uganda...
As she declaimed these verses with the confidence of a seasoned performer and the panache and abandonment of a pagan earth goddess, Santos-Febres became Tembandumba de la Quimbamba, a sexually charged black woman proud of her abundances.
When she was a girl in Puerto Rico, Santos-Febres told the audience, she was often asked to perform this poem at school functions. There was something poignant in this admission of always being the one person in her class singled out to represent Puerto Rican blacks.
Later I ask her how she felt about being the "official" black person.
"Well, very confused," she says. "On the one hand, this was the only literary work I knew of that presented the beauty and regalness of a black woman. On the other hand, Tembandumba was a chimera. So there was a validation of Puerto Rican blackness, but at the same time the picture drawn seemed mythical, unreal, almost impossible by current standards. I had to dress up as Tembandumba to become a valued black woman and that separated me from my time and place. As if in order to be a black queen I had to renounce my Puerto Ricanness and vice versa. It took a long time for me to realize that confusion is at the heart of Puerto Rican race relations."
That feeling of being an outsider is at the core of Santos-Febres's work. In her poetry and fiction, she celebrates destitute women, transvestites, and the petty criminals of the Puerto Rican urban and nocturnal demimonde.
Although her debut novel, Sirena Selena vestida de pena (Críticas, Summer 2001), catapulted her onto the international stage, the young author (born in 1966) had already compiled an impressive body of work. Santos-Febres, who started out writing poetry, published her first volume of poems, Anamú y Manigua (Editorial La Iguana Dorada, o.p.), in 1991. In this collection, she writes touchingly about Puerto Rican women: her grandmother, an uneducated woman who provided for her family; and her mother, who worked as a maid before she became a teacher. The volume also celebrates several important women in Puerto Rican history: the great poet Julia de Burgos (who died homeless and was buried in a potter's field); Antonia Martínez, a college student killed by the police during a protest march; La Lupe, a popular singer and Santería devotee turned evangelical preacher; and Lolita Lebrón, nationalist firebrand who was part of a group that staged an attack on the U.S. Congress in 1954.
She followed Anamú y Manigua with another volume of poems, El orden escapado (Escaped Order), and in 2000 the Mexican house Trilce published Tercer Mundo (Third World), a collection of poems Santos-Febres says she wrote in two weeks and describes as "seventeen angry cantos." Over the years, she has remained loyal to her poet roots, she says, because "poetry is my master. Nothing gives better shape to the emotional mappings of a description or the subtexts of a dialog. A poetic consciousness makes any writer very aware of the sensual content and shape of every image and every word. It slows you down a bit, but if you (as a writer) are not concerned with speed and productivity, as you shouldn't be, then poetry is what gives taste and sound and glare and smell to your narrative."
Although writing poetry was what gave Santos-Febres an identity as a writer, it was her short stories that first brought her major recognition. She launched herself as a fiction writer with Pez de vidrio (Glass Fish), published by the Puerto Rico's Ediciones Huracán, for which she received the 1994 Letras de Oro Prize; another collection, El cuerpo correcto (The Correct Body) followed. Then, in 1996, her short story "Oso Blanco" ("White Bear") was awarded the Juan Rulfo Prize, a prestigious award given in France that often announces the emergence of an important new voice in Latin American writing.
These two awards were a turning point in Santos-Febres's career. "The Letras de Oro award enabled me to visualize myself alongside other Latin American writers," she says. "It meant I could compete and win a literary prize outside the island. But the real deal was when I won the Juan Rulfo. Only one other Puerto Rican in the history of the prize had won it before me, and that was Ana Lydia Vega. So it put me on the map. I could feel something big had happened, that there was a before and after thing to it. It also gave me the courage to widen my scope. I started Sirena Selena after winning that prize."
However, the collection Urban Oracles (Lumen Editions, 1997), was the first of Santos-Febres's fiction to appear in English. The stories in Urban Oracles continue the magic realist and baroque Caribbean traditions. What's new about them is the bold and irreverent manner in which Santos-Febres looks at race and gender, fully in command of a prose style teeming with surrealist images and electric rhythms.
One day while she was visiting Macondo, the legendary bookstore in Manhattan devoted to the best writing in the Spanish language, the store owner suggested to Santos-Febres that she contact the eminent literary agent Thomas Colchie.
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Colchie says he sold Sirena Selena as a new version of The Blue Angel, except that instead of Marlene Dietrich the chanteuse was a Puerto Rican transvestite. The novel tells the story of Martha Divine, an aging transvestite who becomes the Svengali of a pubescent homeless hustler with a celestial voice. Martha shapes him into Sirena Selena, a legendary cabaret performer who wreaks havoc in the lives of married men.
What led a heterosexual woman, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico with a Ph.D. in literature from Cornell University, to write a novel set in the gaudy and violent world of female impersonators? "It's because I'm fresh, and I'm shameless," says Santos-Febres. Besides, she theorizes, "women are transvestites. We wear the garments of beauty and success to ensure our men will not leave us for blonder or thinner women." In an interview with Mexican reporter Silvia Isabel Gámez, Santos-Febres described transvestites as"a mixture of woman and chimera; the transvestite constructs her identity for the same reasons that the gender she imitates does--to awaken an illusion."
This saucy, sparkling, irrepressible pop novel was an international critical and commercial success. In Spain alone, within the first two months of its publication, Sirena Selena vestida de pena sold a respectable 10,000 copies, and in Puerto Rico, it sold 5,000 copies in a few weeks. When the novel was later translated into English by Picador, The New York Times, in a favorable review, " said, "Santos-Febres examines questions of sexuality and power...blend[ing] lyrical hyperbole with social observation...in her lush and tragicomic first novel."
Last November, Random House Mondadori published her most recent novel, Cualquier miércoles soy tuya (I'll Be Yours Any Given Wednesday, Críticas, Jan./Feb. 2003). The first printing sold out in a month, and a second printing has nearly sold out in Spain and in parts of the Americas. This noirish novel follows the adventures of Julián Castroad, an ex-journalist who takes a job on the night shift at the seedy Tulán Motel, which rents rooms by the hour to a motley crew of drug dealers, prostitutes, and corrupt politicians. A beautiful, older woman starts arriving at the motel in her Mercedes, only to lock herself up in her room with a bottle of brandy. Julián becomes intrigued by this mysterious femme fatale, and his curiosity leads to mayhem and murder. The novel has been acquired by Riverhead Books at Penguin USA and is currently being translated into English.
This extremely visual novel reads like Raymond Chandler. Santos-Febres admits to reading and rereading the classic American master of noir while composing Cualquier miércoles soy tuya. But she also acknowledges her debt to the tradition of noir novels written in Spanish by such authors as Rolo Diez, Leonardo Padura, and Paco Ignacio Taibo ll. In contrast to the darkness of their world, Santos-Febres says her novel is closer to a shade of pink. "I try to portray our brand of violence and corruption on the island and [in] the Caribbean," she tells me. "At the core of this novel there is a question about masculinity and its connection with violence, power, and corruption in a country that still is a colony of the United States. Is that masculinity also colonized? And in which way? How is it different from some 'femininities'? I guess that was why my 'dark' novel came out so weird. I couldn't leave aside gender formation as a point of departure."
The Race Factor
The great majority of Latin American writers, both men and women, are white or identify as white, and are middle or upper class. How does it feel to be a black woman writer in that context? "I feel like Tembandumba de la Quimbamba," Santos-Febres says. "Racism hurts. You can argue against it in ideological terms, using intellectual weapons of logic and analysis, but basically racism just hurts bad. Right now I'm writing my first novel on the subject. I think that now I have the maturity to go for it." Has she been discriminated against because of her color? "Discrimination comes with the territory," she shoots back. "The question is, what do you do with the experience? I laugh at it when I can, cry when I have no other way to go, use it to inform my teaching, and write like crazy to exorcise the bad vibes from my mind and spirit."
Is there new fiction in the works? Her many fans will be happy to hear she's writing a novel about "Isabel, La Negra Luberza, a madam who owned Elizabeth's Dancing Place, a fabulous Puerto Rican brothel of the 20th century. It's going to be the first of the historical novels about famous and infamous black women in Puerto Rico," she adds, tantalizingly.
Jaime Manrique is a novelist, poet, and essayist. He is an associate professor in the M.F.A. program at Columbia University.
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