Literature, Difference, and the Land of Witness

Literature, Difference, and the Land of WitnessAuthor(s): Jeffrey GraySource: Profession, (2002), pp. 51-62Published by: Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595730 .

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Literature, Difference, and the

Land of Witness

JEFFREY GRAY

Yo soy el hombre; he sufrido; estaba alii.

?Walt Whitman

My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the

reality of a whole people.

?Rigoberta Menchu Turn

For a graduate course at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala City, where I was teaching on a Fulbright in 2000, I designed a syllabus on

North American and Latin American literary confluences in the "long" twentieth century, starting from Whitman, Emerson, Marti, and Dario. Since I wanted to talk not only about influences back and forth but also about what the South and the North have represented to each other, I

thought I would present at the outset some more or less stereotypical de

pictions, ironic or not, of Latin America in English and North American

writing. I had three at hand: the first two pages of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, which describe a small-town parque central with its

statuary, palms, and sleeping peasants (9-10); John Ashbery's "The Instruc tion Manual," an ironic tourist's view of a festival in Guadalajara; and

William Carlos Williams's "Adam" (which refers to the "sounds and glanc ing looks / that Latins know belong / to boredom and long torrid hours"), not much anthologized in the United States but included in my tiny book of Williams's poems in Spanish.11 had already shown the Greene passage

The author is Associate Professor of English at Seton Hall University.

51 Profession 2002



52 II LITERATURE, DIFFERENCE, AND THE LAND OF WITNESS

to my sixteen-year-old daughter, born and raised in Mexico, who shrugged and said, "That's not a stereotype; that's the way it is." She had a point: there are, in Mexico as all over Latin America, a thousand static, sun

stroked plazas with busts of ex-generals and buzzards circling overhead, and one can find them more easily in Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Juan Rulfo than in Graham Greene. When, a month later, I stood in front of my

class, made up of professors from the University of San Carlos and other

Guatemalan universities, their response was very much like that of my

daughter, something like "<:Y que?" ("So what?").

Perhaps the Graham Greene anecdote requires no comment, but I

would like to connect it to a larger observation about the American con

cern with stereotypical representations of races and ethnicities, a concern, at least as it is formulated in American universities, not shared by other na

tions, perhaps particularly "underdeveloped" nations.2 We may well regard that last adjective with suspicion, telling as it does much more about the

beholder than the beheld; I use it here in order to cast suspicion on it in a

different context. In other words, are American ideas about race or multi

culturalism "developed" or "advanced" in the same way that we assume the

American economy, industry, military capability, or computer technology to be? Or is there not a sense in which American exportation of ideas of

difference might fit in with larger hegemonic systems?

On 29 February 2000, Otilia Cotij, a Cakchiquel Indian, gave her first

public speech since her appointment as Guatemala's minister of culture?

or as President Alfonso Portillo purportedly said, when he appointed her, "minister of cultures." This was arguably a momentous occasion: the first

public speech by the first indigenous person?and a woman?to occupy a

high government post in the history of Guatemala. The speech, curiously, was delivered under the auspices of United States Black History Month, celebrated by the American Embassy with a special exhibit at the Guate

malan American Institute (IGA) in Guatemala City. An American, Michael

Franklin, a representative of the Organization of Africans in the Ameri

cas, had arrived from Washington to give a talk on the accomplishments of Martin Luther King, Jr., which was followed by a shorter speech by

Cotij herself.3

I thought of a comment by Derek Walcott concerning a similar event

that the American Embassy staged on his native island of Saint Lucia, again

featuring likenesses of and speeches about King. Walcott pointed out to

the ambassador that Saint Lucia was not purely or even principally a black

country, as the United States saw it, but that it contained a large population of Indians. According to Walcott, the ambassador was surprised to learn



JEFFREY GRAY ||| 53

this. "Indians?" he asked. "Yes," said Walcott, "not the kind you killed off, but the kind from India."4

What does Martin Luther King, Jr., have to do with the struggles of In

dians (not from India) in Guatemala? People of African descent in

Guatemala are very few, concentrated in the Caribbean coastal towns of

Puerto Barrios and Livingston.5 No one, of course, officially suggested an

analogy between the situation of the Maya and that of the African North

American. Does the American government offer the King exhibit and

speech as a show of national pride in a hero who, persecuted by that same

government, achieved a measure of justice in a racist society? And should it

matter what or where the host country is to which the United States sends

these exhibits, since the exhibit is meant to express something about Amer

ican history, not about other countries? Or does King, as Walcott's remark

suggests, serve, in the view of the American government, as a template for

ethnic and multicultural issues abroad? Exporting him, as government and cultural institutions continue to do, certainly raises issues about the 1960s

progressivist politics of which he was a part, as compared with the very dif ferent left political currents in the United States today. King's words and

ideas, though still widely circulated in American society at large, are not

generally quoted by left intellectuals in universities now. Indeed, his key antiessentialist idea, that one should be judged not by the color of one's

skin but by the content of one's character, has become a byword of political

conservatives?notably in anti-affirmative action efforts?and forms the

title of a book by the black conservative Shelby Steele.

Cotij, while she did not allude to African American matters, on which she was not called to comment, referred to the history of the past forty years of civil war in Guatemala and seemed at one point, if not to apologize for the government of which she is now a part, at least to acknowledge that it is the same government responsible for or complicit in the massacre of thousands of Indians and which in appointing her either is creating a "rep resentative" rainbow cabinet in the manner of Bill Clinton or George W Bush or is guilty of a grotesque co-optation.6 She noted that the coexistence

of ladinos and Indians has not been peaceful but that Guatemala "is not Yu

goslavia."7 The point is, she argued, that 68% of the people voted for Por tillo and that the government thus deserves the people's support. Ladinos and Mayas belong to the same country, "a beautiful country which we

should all love and work hard for." Cotij's talk was optimistic about the fu ture of indigenous people in Guatemala. She spoke of the good school she had attended but noted that she had always had to address her ladino class mates with the formal "usted" while she, as an Indian, had been called by the informal "vos." Now, however, matters are looking up. There is an



54 I LITERATURE, DIFFERENCE, AND THE LAND OF WITNESS

Indian minister of culture, an Indian governor, an Indian mayor, an Indian vice president for social security, and several Indian congresspersons.

After the speeches and a few questions, we adjourned to a reception room with a display of photomontages and posters of African Americans

and their achievements, which had been sent down by the State Depart ment: Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Queen Latifah, Wynton Marsalis, Maya

Angelou?all contemporary or recent figures. (Black "history" was oddly truncated: no Frederick Douglass, no W E. B. Du Bois, no Harlem Re

naissance figures.) A short time later, Michael Franklin, two black Brazilians from the

United Nations, and I had dinner at the Hotel Camino Royal on the

Avenida Reforma. (In the five years I spent in Guatemala in the 1970s, I

had never eaten or been invited to eat there. Fulbright subject position seemed to bring new perspectives.) I mentioned the progressivist and uni

versalizing beliefs of the Guatemalan novelist and 1974 Nobel laureate

Miguel Angel Asturias and of Martin Luther King, Jr., both of whom strove to deemphasize difference and to look for commonalities. Michael

responded by saying that we have differences and that we?ladinos and

Mayas, whites and blacks?should recognize them. Our two companions? she with the legal office of the United Nations, he a major in the Brazilian

army, here to ensure compliance by the Guatemalan military with the

peace accords?suggested to Michael that his ideas of black and white were

not universal, that societies have different rhythms, different sets of cate

gories. Michael's was the familiar American message, that the situation of

black people is global and that difference must be emphasized or cele

brated?though not, evidendy, difference within ethnic or racial groups. I was struck in this conversation, as I have often been in the United

States, by the universalist-particularist switches that characterize the dis

course of difference. Michael was dismayed to hear that President Portillo

had asked Cotij to be "minister of cultures," taking this as a deprecatory re

mark toward her and by extension toward Indian culture, when one might

expect a positive interpretation of an acknowledgment of difference.8

When is it appropriate to notice difference and when not? And which dif

ferences should be noticed, which repressed? The Brazilians' modest critique echoes that of others who have viewed

contemporary American versions of difference with misgiving. J. M. Coe

tzee, for example, suggests that Americans may have something to learn

from the South African critique of ethnicity. Coetzee notes that the idea of

"natural" groups seems to be accepted in an unexamined way in the United

States, whereas among the left in South Africa there is a strongly skeptical attitude toward the naturalness of groups (tribes, peoples, or races) and a



JEFFREY GRAY ||| 55

correspondingly strong deconstructive treatment of the histories and liter

atures of such groups. This is a logical reaction, Coetzee observes, to hav

ing lived for forty years under a regime whose social, educational, and

cultural policies were based on the postulate of separate, God-given groups with separate destinies (Begam 428). Leaving aside the fact that American

ideas about black continuity cannot readily be applied to black communi

ties abroad?one need only think of the tragedy of the Yorubas and the

Hausas in Nigeria or of the Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda?these ideas

also ignore ethnic realities and representations in many nonblack countries.

Intelligent proponents of difference reject universalism because they see

in it the disguised imposition of the universalizer's own values. One need not lose sight of this important perception in order to be alert also to the

subsequent or simultaneous universalizing of black-white relations world

wide and to recognize that this universalizing originates from the same

hegemony that is supposed to be under critique.

To return to the literature classroom where I began, it would seem that what we consider burning questions in American university literature courses are simply ignored in Guatemala. It must be added that a rather

minimal space is allotted to discussing literature at all. Here it is helpful to

recall events in Guatemala that in part account for the state of the humani ties or even for the state of education in general.

Since the CIA-backed coup of 1954, 150,000 people have been killed in

Guatemala and another 40,000 have disappeared; there are above 50,000 widows, 80,000 orphans, and more than 60,000 refugees in neighboring countries, as of this writing. There are a total of 1,000,000 people internally displaced?all in a country that numbers fewer than 11,000,000 inhabi tants. Most of the casualties have been Indians, but many ladino literacy teachers, clergy, lay catechists, and laborers have also vanished or been killed. Since 1960, when an opposition movement began, four constitutions have been abolished, six coup d'etats have occurred, three military juntas have been established, and seven military presidents have been imposed.

The families of the victims of the civil war, victims almost entirely of ei ther military or government-supported groups, are now seeking the com

pensation that has been proposed by the Truth Commission (the CEH, or

Historical Clarification Commission). The CEH also recommends that the 400 mass graves identified by the United Nations be exhumed. Recent news suggests some hope: for the first time in Guatemala's history, the gov ernment, under President Portillo, acknowledged responsibility in three of the atrocities committed during the past two decades, the Interameri can Human Rights Commission announced in March 2000.9 Still more




recently, at the time of this writing, Rigoberta Menchii has secured an in dictment from Spain against Rfos Montt, a former president and now pres ident of the Congress, and several other former presidents and generals.10

This troubled history helps explain the small space allotted to literature,

oppositional, multicultural, or not, at Guatemalan universities. In Guate

mala, there is little future for a graduate in literature, letters, or philosophy. The University of San Carlos, the public university where most college bound Guatemalans go, has 150 students of literature out of the 65,000 students on the main campus. The private and much better-off University Rafael Landivar has, out of a total of 10,000 students, about 30 undergrad uates and about 40 graduates in the department of letters and philosophy. The already fragile existence of humanities programs is threatened by an

administration with its eye on classrooms built for 50 students that serve

just 10 or 15 in literature classes. The Indian component of the university student population, out of a

national population of 60%, is under 1%, a situation exacerbated by the fact that illiteracy runs at about 50% in Guatemala.11 Moreover, young

people in Indian communities are needed at home, and the tuition, while

minimal, has to be paid at once ($10 in the Indian economy can be a large

outlay), not to mention the cost of books and, most of all, the outlay of

time, the hours spent in class or studying when one could be helping the

family or community. Add to all this that most Indian communities are in

the hills, far from Guatemala City or other urban centers where the Uni

versity of San Carlos has classes. Only the most well-off Indian families send sons and daughters to college, and, even then, the value of that educa

tion is not self-evidently high. Finally, if an Indian goes to college, a hu

manities major would be an unlikely choice, given the negligible return on

the investment.

The pay for a beginning professor at the University of San Carlos is

about Q4,000 a month ($500). An apartment in Guatemala City can easily cost all of that, though a single person can find cheaper lodgings. At the

University Rafael Landivar, a professor earns Q63 (about $7.50) per class

taught. Guatemalan professors are hourly workers who do not get paid for

doing research or writing. In short, there is little incentive to study litera

ture beyond the love of reading. As regards class content, the canon now includes many more Guatema

lan writers than were taught before, but testimonio, which originated in

Guatemala, is a genre around which people tread with care. /, Rigoberta Menchii might come up in a sociology class but would not ordinarily be dis

cussed in a literature class. One has to compare this with the popularity of

Menchu's testimonio in stateside programs, particularly at elite schools such



JEFFREY GRAY ||| 57

as Stanford, where it was included as part of the new core curriculum, fol

lowing the much-publicized demonstrations in the late 1980s.

North American intellectuals may think of the Third World perspective on literature as favoring texts that are comprometidos?engaged or commit

ted. The awards given by the Cuban publishing house Casa de las Ameri cas are indeed prestigious: Mario Payeras, Victor Montejo, and Rigoberta

Menchu are among the Guatemalan recipients. But literature classes and

literature professors in Guatemala do not usually take up this subject of en

gaged writing, at least not as a preferred or separate realm. The absence or

omission of testimonial texts from syllabi in Guatemala could be seen in

part as repression, the memories of war and atrocity being still too fresh; as

racism, though I am reluctant to label all ladino literature professors racist; as owing to the conservatism of Guatemalan universities, less quick than

those in the United States to assimilate new genres into the mainstream; or

as not an omission at all, as simply an absence from the point of view of the

American observer, who has expectations regarding the canon and the pur pose of a literature class, as well as expectations regarding Latin America.12

Michel Foucault in his essay "The Repressive Hypothesis" argued that, far from being repressed, the discussion of sexuality in our time is virtually

compulsive, demanded by institutions. Sexuality must be discussed, con

fessed, narrated, opened up. A similar condition has come to characterize

the discussion of ethnicity at American universities, where in classes from

freshman English onward students are frequently if not routinely drawn out to discuss their ancestry, traditions, or

experiences with racism. Per

haps difference advocacy as public policy arises only in a nation that can af ford such a policy, the same society that can afford individualism and, in the past fifty years, self-esteem, a peculiarly American concept that has had to wait until the last two years for its deconstruction.13 With difference, in other words, we find ourselves in the familiar competitive mode of classic

capitalism. Is it a coincidence that this paradigm thrives institutionally in the United States and virtually nowhere else? I do not mean that in other nations there is no racial or ethnic discussion at exacerbated moments, es

pecially before or during incidents of ethnic cleansing, whether in Bosnia or Africa. I mean that race and ethnicity are not an institutionalized and or

ganized discourse as they are in the United States, visible in titles of gov ernment agencies, policies, and edicts; in the publishing industry; and in

university departments, classes, and syllabi. Despite the differences I have mentioned in Guatemala?chiefly that

between ladino and Indian?there is no official language of difference, as a

discourse disseminated by government agencies or universities. One does



58 III LITERATURE, DIFFERENCE, AND THE LAND OF WITNESS

see it in some left publications such as those of the Ejercito Guerillero de los Pobres (Guerrilla Army of the Poor), which has tended to emphasize ethnic identity and separatism. The California-based Guatemalan writer

Arturo Arias has argued the dangers of that emphasis, pointing out the uses

to which it can be put by agencies and programs linked to American coun

terinsurgency policies and citing the instance of the CLVs manipulation of

the Misquito Indian autonomy movement in Nicaragua during the Sandi

nista government (cited in Beverley and Zimmerman 170). Guatemalan

criticisms of Rigoberta Menchii suggest that essentializing continues

among the general public also. She has been criticized for traveling around

the world; for trying to represent Indians other than those in Guatemala; for not always wearing traje\ and, most of all, for speaking Spanish.14 Thus

there are some among Guatemalans who, for good or ill, would insist on

and wish to preserve what they see as essential difference.

While Otilia Cotij downplayed ladino-Maya difference, Indian identity,

despite centuries of ladinization, is so obvious to Indians and ladinos that it

does not usually need declaring. Linguistic difference alone?there are

twenty-three distinct Mayan languages, and many Indians speak no Span ish?is profound. These differences might ironically explain why a univer

salizing, progressivist agenda has not vanished in Guatemala, as it has in

the United States, where the celebration of roots, as Kwame Anthony Ap

piah argues, occurs precisely in the context of their erosion.

My class began with Emerson, Marti, Whitman, and Neruda; passed

through Infante, Hemingway, Guillen, and Hughes; considered the Nobel

triumvirate of Faulkner, Marquez, and Morrison; and ended with Alejo

Carpentier's The Lost Steps (Lospasosperdidos). That novel, reflecting Car

pentier's travels to the Amazon in 1947 and 1948, is narrated by a burned out New York composer (Cuban by birth) who discovers a lost world in the

jungle, a world that offers him fulfillment previously undreamt of, and then

proceeds to lose it all, through his desire to express it in musical composi tion. But like Carpentier's nonfiction book The Fall of Europe, The Lost Steps is much more a critique of Europe and North America than a description of

a land that time forgot. After attacking modern music, modern dance, mod

ern religion, modern sexual relations, and modern professions, the narrator

finally realizes that there is nothing more European than this contempt for

and flight from Europe in search of an uncorrupted world. Similarly, there

is nothing more (North) American than anti-Americanism, as I have tried

lucklessly to explain to Americans even more critical than I am.151 offer this

last note as the grain of salt necessary to take with these comments. I am

certainly not preferring "authentic" Guatemala to "inauthentic" America. I



JEFFREY GRAY ||| 59

am saying that the concern with difference that characterizes discussions of

culture in American universities today needs the historicizing that academ

ics have brought to bear on other trends in American society. The concern

is particularly striking and ironic when viewed from another country's per

spective. Its official versions, used for export, could benefit from the kind of

examination being done by the best of antiessentialist cultural critics.

Short articles for Profession should not require an afterword, but an

anonymous reader of an earlier draft of this essay advised that I make clear

my own subject position, which I take to mean my ethnicity. While I un

derstand the reader's desire, which is the desire of our time, I offer a reflec

tion rather than a category. In the 1970s, I lived in Guatemala for five years, followed by another five

married to a Guatemalan, living in Samoa and the United States. While in

Guatemala, I met and translated some well-known Guatemalan writers?

Rafael Arevalo Martinez, Cesar Branas, Julio Fausto Aguilera, and Mar

garita Carrera, among others. Returning more than twenty years later, I

discovered that the most important Guatemalan writers were no longer liv

ing in Guatemala. Augusto Monterroso, possibly the greatest contempo

rary writer of Guatemala, lives in Mexico City, as does Otto Raul Gonzalez; Dante Liano lives in Milan; Arturo Arias in San Francisco; Mario Roberto

Morales, Iowa; Franz Galich, Managua; Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Tangier (and, at

this writing, India).16 No doubt a similar list can be compiled for any nation at the turn of the twenty-first century, especially any Third World nation.

Are these writers any less Guatemalan than those who live in Guate

mala? If so, what might "Guatemalan" mean? The novelist Rodrigo Rey Rosa says that his being Guatemalan is simply an accident of birth. But

questions of authenticity become even more paramount where indigenous writers are concerned, as we have seen in the case of Rigoberta Menchii. The best-known indigenous writer of Guatemala?apart from Menchii, who does not consider herself a writer?is Sam Colop, who spends much

of his time at the State University of New York, Buffalo, where he has

completed a doctorate. The author of one of the most famous testimonios, Victor Montejo, lives and teaches in Davis, California.

Thus any project involving a literary explorer striking out into the mountains to find the writers of Guatemala is doomed at the outset. It is much more a question of the kind of venture described in the writings of

James Clifford. His essay "Traveling Cultures" concludes:

[0]nce the representational challenge is seen to be the portrayal and

understanding of local/global historical encounters, co-productions,



60 III LITERATURE, DIFFERENCE, AND THE LAND OF WITNESS

dominations, and resistances, one needs to focus on hybrid cosmopolitan

experiences as much as on rooted, native ones. (24)

In other words, one needs to focus on routes as much as on roots, to use the terms of one of Clifford's titles.

In writing about travel and poetry during the past few years, I have

sometimes reflected that perhaps expectations of rootedness have disap

peared, that no one really expects writers to be native informants, that even

nationalities like Mexican or Canadian or regional indicators like Carib

bean can be seen as what they have always been: partial and conflicted ac

knowledgments of birthplace and language, disguising greater ranges of

variety within the categories than between them. In the academic world,

however, roots are still valorized over routes, sometimes out of a sense of

commitment to community, sometimes out of nostalgia for a real or imag ined lost ethnicity. Because of this, the negative version of travel, not just as

transience, escape, or tourism, but more seriously as dilution, inauthentic

ity, or betrayal, retains its currency.171 can only see in this view an at

tempt?in whose interest??to contain what can never be contained, the

limitless process of becoming.

NOTES =^

I am grateful to Arturo Arias, Julia Fiedorczuk, Michael Franklin, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Francisco Solares, and Maria Duarte Quiroga for observations and insights used in

writing this article.

JIn Spanish it reads "los ruidos y las miradas vagas / que los latinos saben pertenecen / al tedio y las largas torridas horas" (50).

2Since "United States" makes an awkward adjective, I use "American" to refer to the

United States.

3The Organization of Africans in the Americas (OAA) is a private organization funded in part by the International Development Bank and the World Bank. Franklin

gave the same talk the following night in Honduras. 4 Walcott told this story during a talk at City College in Manhattan, in November 1999. 5African slaves were never brought to Central America. If neighboring Belize were

found to belong to Guatemala, which Guatemala has claimed and Belize has denied for

over a century, then Guatemala's black population would grow by several thousand per cent. This is unlikely to happen.

6A series of governments are responsible for the killings, but Rfos Montt, of the

FRG (Republican Front of Guatemala), who is now president of the Congress and who

helped bring Portillo to power, was president during the period of some of the worst atrocities in Guatemala's history (1982-83).

7The term ladino means "non-Indian." It is also applied to Indians who have aban

doned traje (native dress) and native language and are thus more or less indistinguish able from the rest of the population. Thus one speaks of the process of ladinization.



JEFFREY GRAY ||| 61

8 While I disagree with him on these important points, Franklin is unarguably a far bet ter representative of the United States than many who are sent abroad for that purpose.

9The three cases involve the death of a boy unknowingly carrying a grenade in a

food bag; the case of the anthropologist Myrna Mack, who was stabbed to death outside

her office in 1990; and the massacre of more than 200 people, including women and

children, in the village of Dos Erres in 1982 (Prensa libre 6 Mar. 2000). 10Countercharges of treason were almost immediately brought by the Guatemalan

government against Rigoberta Menchu for daring to take this action, but those charges have been dropped. The charges against Montt and the others still stand.

11 The percentage of indigenous students is difficult to verify, since, if they are not in

special programs, they often stop wearing native traje and stop speaking their native

language on campus. They enter a strange limbo, for they may not feel?and may not

want to feel?like Indians, but they are still viewed as such by the rest of the mestizos. 12 Student organizations in Mexico and Guatemala, if not throughout Latin America,

do lean strongly to the left, but it is not the same left that, in the United States, is con

cerned with revising syllabi and questioning faculty ethnicity. Protests of the kind going on currently at UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico), for example, are

huge and sometimes violent, but they concern such matters as tuition hikes. 13 See, among others, Baumeister, whose research shows that Americans turn violent

not because their self-esteem is low but because it is too high. 14The last of these criticisms is now well-known from David Stoll's book Rigoberta

Menchu and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans. The criticism is startling in its implicit de

mand for ethnic authenticity and even more in Stoll's suggestion that Menchu's speak

ing Spanish should undermine her credibility. The other criticisms I have not seen in

writing but have heard from several Guatemalans, of varying classes, in conversation.

Rigoberta Menchu jokes, which are often "Indian" jokes, proliferated quite early fol

lowing the Nobel Prize announcement and are still told with relish.

15This was written before 11 September 2001. Since that date, intellectual attacks on

the United States have been subdued but, I feel sure, only temporarily.

16Admittedly, even twenty-five years ago, Miguel Angel Asturias and Luis Cardoza Ara

gon, leading writers of Guatemala, were both living in Paris. Arturo Arias was the first to

emphasize to me that the chief contemporary writers of Guatemala are not in Guatemala. 17 Even though antiessentialism and border crossing remain popular terms in literature

departments, the insistence on texts as representative (of a group, an ethnicity, a con

stituency), perhaps most notably in African American criticism but certainly in other

fields as well, is pervasive. Where African American texts are not seen as representa tive?for example, when they are linguistically experimental or when they explore other

social realities than those of African North America?they are often left off the syllabus or out of the anthology. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has discussed the constraints and bur den of writing the "text of blackness" (Loose Canons). See also my discussion of Jay

Wright, a widely praised African American poet whose later work, because it embraces

cultures?Aztec and Maya, among others?beyond the African American experience, has been left out of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature and, I imagine, off most college syllabi ("In the Name of the Subject"). One should consider also the

prizing of representativeness on the part of university search committees. Readers will have their own

examples, but I refer them to Rey Chow's account of the Chinese job candidate who, though qualified in every other regard, was seen as insufficiently Chi nese. (He confessed to liking American malls!) With all the talk of border crossing, the




fact remains that to cross borders, linguistic or geographic, can be to seriously disqual

ify oneself.

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Ashberyjohn. "The Instruction Manual." Selected Poems. New York: Penguin, 1985. 5-8.

Baumeister, Roy. "Violent Pride." Scientific American Apr. 2001: 96-101.

Begam, Richard. "An Interview with J. M. Coetzee." Contemporary Literature 33 (1992): 419-31.

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Carpentier, Ale jo. The Lost Steps. New York: Pantheon, 1978.

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Literature, Difference, and the Land of Witness