A Zapatista Reading List A Zapatista Reading List
The following remarks are excerpted from a longer interview between Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, representing the Mexican magazine Cambio, and the Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos. The full text appeared in Cambio earlier this year. García Márquez/ Cambio : Do you still have time to read in the middle of all this mess? Marcos: Yes, because if not...what would we do? In the armies that came before us, soldiers took the time to clean their weapons and rally themselves. In this case, our weapons are our words, so we have to depend on our arsenal all the time. García Márquez/ Cambio : Everything you say--in terms of form and content--demonstrates a serious literary background on your part. Where does this come from and how did you achieve it? Marcos: It has to do with my childhood. In my family, words had a very special value. The way we went out into the world was through language. We didn't learn to read in school but by reading newspapers. My mother and father made us read books that rapidly permitted us to approach new things. Some way or another, we acquired a consciousness of language not as a way of communicating with each other but as a way of building something. As if it were more of a pleasure than a duty or assignment. When the age of catacombs arrives, the word is not highly valued for the intellectual bourgeoisie. It is relegated to a secondary level. It's when we are in the indigenous communities that language is like a catapult. You realize that words fail you to express certain things, and this obliges you to work on your language skills, to go over and over words to arm and disarm them. García Márquez/ Cambio : Couldn't it be the other way around? Couldn't it be this control over language that permits this new era? Marcos: It's like a blender. You don't know what is thrown in first, and what you end up with is a cocktail. García Márquez/ Cambio : Can we talk about this family? Marcos: It was a middle-class family. My father, the head of the family, was a rural teacher in the days of [Lázaro] Cárdenas when, according to him, they cut off teachers' ears for being communists. My mother, also a rural teacher, finally moved, and we became a middle-class family, I mean, a family without any real difficulties. All of this in the provinces, where the cultural horizon is the society pages of the local newspaper. The world outside, or the great city, Mexico City, was the great attraction because of its bookstores. Finally, there were book fairs out in the provinces, and there we could get some books. García Márquez, Fuentes, Monsiváis, Vargas Llosa--independently of how he thinks--just to mention a few, they all came through my parents. They made us read them. One Hundred Years of Solitude was meant to explain what the province was in those days, and The Death of Artemio Cruz was to explain what had happened to the Revolution. [Carlos Monsiváis's] Dias de Guardar to explain what was happening to the middle class. To some extent, although naked, our portrait was The City and the Dogs. All those things were there. We were coming out into the world in the same way we were coming to know literature. And this shaped us, I believe. We didn't get to know the world through a newswire but through a novel, an essay or a poem. And this made us very different. This was the looking glass that our parents gave us, as others might use the mass media as a looking glass or just an opaque glass so that no one can see what is going on. García Márquez/ Cambio : Where was Don Quixote in the middle of all these readings? Marcos: They gave me a beautiful book when I was 12--a hardcover. It was Don Quixote de la Mancha. I had already read it but in these juvenile editions. It was an expensive book, a very special present that I was waiting for. Shakespeare arrived after that. But if I could say the order in which the books arrived, it would first be the "boom" literature of Latin America, then Cervantes, then García Lorca, then there was a time of all poetry. Thus, you [pointing to García Márquez] are partly responsible for this. García Márquez/ Cambio : Did the existen-tialists and Sartre come into all this? Marcos: No. We arrived late to that. Explicitly existentialist and, before that, revolutionary literature we arrived at already very "molded"--as the orthodox would say. So that by the time we got to Marx and Engels, we were already very contaminated by the sarcasm and humor of literature. García Márquez/ Cambio : There were no readings of political theory? Marcos: In the first stage, no. From our ABCs we went on to literature and then on to theoretical and political texts about the time we got to high school. García Márquez/ Cambio : Did your schoolmates think you were, or could be, a communist? Marcos: No, I don't think so. The most they ever said to me was that I was a radish--red on the outside and white on the inside. García Márquez/ Cambio : What are you reading now? Marcos: I have Don Quixote by the bedside, and I regularly carry around Romancero gitano, by García Lorca. Don Quixote is the best book out there on political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth. There is no better way to understand the tragedy and the comedy of the Mexican political system than Hamlet, Macbeth and Don Quixote. They're much better than any column of political analysis. García Márquez/ Cambio : Do you write by hand or on the computer? Marcos: On computer. Only on the march I had to write by hand because I had no time to work. I write a rough draft, then another and another. You think I'm joking, but it's like the seventh draft by the time I'm done. García Márquez/ Cambio : What book are you working on? Marcos: What I was trying to write about was absurd, it was an attempt to explain ourselves to ourselves, which is almost impossible. We have to realize that we are a paradox, because a revolutionary army doesn't propose to seize power... All the paradoxes we have encountered: that we have grown and become strong in a sector completely alienated from cultural channels. García Márquez/ Cambio : If everyone knows who you are, why the ski mask? Marcos: A bit of leftover coquetry. They don't know who I am, and they don't care. What's in play here is what Subcomandante Marcos is, and not what he was.
Jun 14, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Gabriel García Márquez and Subcomandante Marcos
Notes From a Latin Lover Notes From a Latin Lover
Civil wars do not start overnight. You do not simply wake up one morning in what has been a peaceful country only to discover organized armed forces trying to destroy each other. ...
Jun 14, 2001 / Books & the Arts / James North
The Dogmeteers The Dogmeteers
It's been six years since Dogme 95 nailed its ten-point "Vow of Chastity" to the door of world cinema. Lars von Trier's gang of four Danish film rebels flung an inkwell at the fat...
Jun 7, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Tim Appelo
Timbertown in the Pink Timbertown in the Pink
Gay rights are a fact of life in urban America, where nondiscrimination measures and domestic partnership ordinances have proliferated, corporations like Coors Brewing Company seek to shed their bad-for-business, homophobic reputations by supporting gay causes, and politicians troll for votes at gay freedom day parades. But "gay rights" are fighting words in places where the big city is as unloved as Sodom. Within nanoseconds after the first gay rights laws were adopted a quarter-century ago, the opposition mobilized. The threat of a perverse and dangerous way of life turned Anita Bryant, the songbird of the Florida orange industry, into an antigay crusader. The fear that gay teachers would convert their students to deviance motivated a California legislator named John Briggs to campaign for a state constitutional amendment barring homosexuals from the classroom. The rhetoric has changed since then, as overt appeals to prejudice have largely been replaced by opposition to supposed special rights and fretfulness about affirmative action for gays. Yet behind this facade of principle, the intention is the same--to keep gays in their place, to define homosexuals as less than full citizens, as inferiors who cannot turn to the law for protection against discrimination or for legal recognition of committed relationships. So, while gays and lesbians have become staples of the popular culture, Will and Grace is one thing, reality programming something else. Antigay antagonism remains widespread and passions run deep. In Vermont, no hotbed of reactionary politics, the passage of a state law authorizing civil unions for gay couples in the spring of 2000 sparked a campaign to take back Vermont--take it back, that is, from homosexuals and other strangers. Eleven lawmakers who, out of principle, voted for the statute were defeated by the voters. In the early 1990s antigay groups in Colorado and Oregon launched state ballot measures intended to deny civil rights protection to gay men and lesbians. Those initiatives lost in the cities, Denver and Portland, and the college towns, Boulder and Eugene, but they won healthy majorities in the rural counties. After the 1992 statewide defeat in Oregon, the campaign shifted tactics. It targeted towns that had voted for the initiative, drafting amendments to local ordinances that would prevent city councils from passing gay rights measures. Though this drive was largely symbolic--these towns had neither the authority nor the will to enact special rights measures--that didn't dampen the passions. Arlene Stein's The Stranger Next Door recounts how this war was waged in one such community, a place she calls "Timbertown," an easy commute but a psychological light-year from Eugene. Why should civil war over gay rights erupt in a place where gays and lesbians were essentially invisible? The simple explanations aren't entirely satisfactory. The media and national gay groups emphasize the power of the religious right: Fundamentalist crazies--a redundancy in liberal circles--seized the day. Timbertown did in fact find itself in the throes of a culture war, beset by moral panic, and many residents came to believe that homosexuality was a threat to the moral order. But while religious fundamentalists are an increasingly important presence in Timbertown, as they are across the country, they still represent a minority; in order to prevail, they had to conscript the unchurched to their cause. Tarring all fundamentalist churches as havens of bigotry also misses the mark. Fundamentalism takes many forms, from bonhomie to brimstone, and in Timbertown the churches in question differed on the wisdom of preaching the gospel in the political arena. The other common explanation is materialist: Religion was really a stalking horse for economics. In a community like Timbertown, where the fortunes of the work force were declining as lumber mills started shutting down, an outlet for resentment--a scapegoat--was needed. Someone had to be blamed, and gays made an easy target. But this too is just part of the answer. It ignores ideological divisions among those suffering from economic hard times, and it dismisses the genuine anger evoked by the specter of homosexuality--not the good gays of Timbertown (most of whom, as it happens, were lesbian) but the encroaching evil, San Francisco come to Arcadia. By combining the meticulousness of an ethnographer with a writer's commitment to storytelling, Stein has written a book that's surprisingly compelling--or, better, compelling because it's surprising. A great many social science luminaries--everyone from Michel Foucault to Pierre Bourdieu, George Lakoff to Georg Simmel--make cameo appearances, but this isn't academic name-dropping. What's extracted from these intellectual heavyweights gives this story a significance that carries beyond its particulars. The Stranger Next Door looks not only at economics and religion, and the ways these forces--these powerful feelings--become intertwined. It also delves into the somewhat trickier realm of psychology. At a time when gender roles are at play, Stein argues, a perceived threat to masculinity may underlie the antipathy to gay rights, not just for men leading lives of quiet dislocation but also for stand-by-your-man women. Though this makes intuitive sense, there's a risk of substituting psychological name-calling, intellectual ad hominem, for analysis, dismissing repellent behavior by defining it as pathological. Not so long ago, psychologists spoke of homosexuality as a mental illness; here fundamentalist faith is so cast, which Stein links to deeply held feelings of shame. "While Christian right activists speak about their efforts as a quest to repair the world...it is also an effort to repair themselves," Stein writes. The left, of which Stein is a card-carrying member, would dearly love to believe this--but is shame really a special, defining trait of fundamentalists? The roots of homophobia lie far deeper than rationality can reach. Sometimes, as with Matthew Shepard in Wyoming or Brandon Teena (whose life was dramatized in Boys Don't Cry) in Texas, the rage is literally murderous. But what happened in Timbertown--mobilization in defense of a perceived assault on morality--is more typical. The antigay campaign reveals democracy in America in its most worrying form. So many sins have been committed in the name of democracy, so much misery has been inflicted in the name of community. The term itself has been abased by overuse. Now it's a rhetorical trope--the summoning of a nostalgic fantasy, a Fourth of July that means more than big sales at K-Mart--and a political weapon. In Timbertown, both sides in the gay rights war draped themselves in the flag of community and demonized their opponents as proto-Nazis, the shock troops of the intolerant or the vanguard of the politically correct. But the idea of community acquires real bite when people are obliged to decide who's in and who's out, who's a member and who's a stranger: who, in the terms of the initiative, deserves to be protected against discrimination and who doesn't. This is what the conflict in Timbertown was really about. In part, it's a unique tale--to paraphrase Tolstoy, all unhappy communities are different from one another. But it's also a familiar story, with only the identity of the out group changed: Latino migrant workers, Vietnamese boat people, schoolchildren with AIDS. For many Americans, Timbertown is Grovers Corners, a veritable Our Town for these deceptively peaceful times. Until the 1980s the mills meant prosperity for Timbertown, providing good jobs for the men, many of whom dropped out of high school to become breadwinners. But gradually the lumber industry declined, the mills shut down and unemployment skyrocketed. In the new economy, good jobs went to those with high-tech skills. If the laid-off workers could find any employment, it was in low-paying service jobs; in order to make ends meet, women who'd made raising a family their vocation had to find work. Meanwhile, waves of newcomers arrived, drawn by the beauty and affordability (to them) of the place--hippie communes and feminist enclaves in the 1970s, later the "equity migrants" from California, who sold their homes at enormous profits and moved north in search of a simpler life. But for many of these new settlers, simplicity turned out to be unlivable without a good cappuccino. As the trappings of cosmopolitanism began appearing, with smart cafes and trendy bookstores down the road from rusting cars in front yards, resentment mounted. The right-wing Christian churches capitalized on this resentment. In Timbertown, as across the nation, membership in mainstream Protestant congregations has been stagnant or has declined while evangelicals have been thriving. The latter version of Christianity promises nothing less than to set the world aright. Religious fervor and bred-in-the-bone social conservatism, economic insecurity and the need to restore men to their rightful place: These make for a volatile and potent combination. Casting the antigay position as opposition to special rights misrepresents what laws against discrimination actually accomplish, but it's a brilliant tactic. It draws on all the deep-rooted angers without leaving its adherents directly vulnerable to the charge of bigotry. "Protecting gay rights is analogous to protecting the spotted owl," one Timbertown activist said, piling one resentment on top of another, despised environmentalists fused with gays and lesbians, deepening the sense of victimization at the hands of powerful outsiders--them threatening us. The paranoia even had its comic aspects. There's a gay line at the bank, it was whispered, because "Gay" appeared on the name card of one of the tellers; the mundane truth was that Gay was the teller's first name. But the antigay campaign was anything but frivolous. It was irrelevant in this charged atmosphere that the organizers of the anti-gay rights campaign were themselves outsiders, and that many who opposed the measure were third- and fourth-generation natives. The language of insider and outsider had been cut loose from its literal meaning, transformed into a litmus test for one's position on the gay rights issue--indeed, for one's worldview. In Timbertown, inside versus outside became an all-encompassing state of mind: Boycotts were launched, schoolyard fights waged and intimate friendships ruined over this issue. Opponents of the antigay initiative quickly realized that general appeals to tolerance and fair play were useless in such circumstances. Even as their opponents were busily fearmongering, circulating a video that depicted the orgiastic aspects of San Francisco's Gay Pride Day, straight citizens became the spokespeople against the measure. The Great and Good of Timbertown--the newspaper editor, who wrote endless editorials, the ministers of mainstream churches--lent gravitas to the campaign, in which gays were represented as just like us. Homosexuals in Timbertown were the good gays, so very different from their outrageous brothers and sisters. On the eve of the vote, an exhibit of Anne Frank memorabilia was brought to town and high school students were asked, unsubtly, to draw parallels to examples of intolerance in their community. All to no avail: The anti-gay rights ordinance passed, with 57 percent of the vote. The rapidly changing labor market, the rise of Christian fundamentalism, the sense of threat to a way of life--these facts of life in Timbertown are American commonplaces. So too is the inversion of the civil rights struggle, the tendency for displaced white males to see themselves as the newest category of victims, worthy successors to blacks in the struggle for respect. In such circumstances, the case for gay rights isn't easily made. A recent national survey conducted for Horizons Foundation, a San Francisco-based gay organization, found that 56 percent of Americans believe that discrimination against gays is morally wrong. Horizons' executive director sees that result as encouraging, but subtract those who tend to give pollsters the "right" answer versus what they actually believe, and, at most, half the population is opposed to overt bigotry. How many Timbertowns does that add up to? When they voted against gay rights, a clear majority of Timbertown's voters symbolically banished those strangers in their midst. While life there goes on, with arguments about fixing up the high school once again the big news item, gays and lesbians know now that for all their efforts to fit in, they are unwelcome. In the 1996 case Romer v. Evans, the United States Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the Colorado law on which the Timbertown initiative was based. A state, the majority concluded, cannot deem a class of people stranger to its laws. Denver and Boulder, Portland and Eugene can have their gay nondiscrimination ordinances. But in the other Oregon--the other America--gays and lesbians remain the strangers next door.
Jun 7, 2001 / Books & the Arts / David Kirp
Japan: An Interpretation Japan: An Interpretation
Those inscrutable Japanese. They've inspired more trash between hard covers over the past century than anyone--far more than the Chinese, if that's what you're thinking. Mysteriou...
Jun 7, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Patrick Smith
Universe of Faith and Terror Universe of Faith and Terror
Let's begin with a Denis Johnson moment. One Saturday, in Los Angeles, I venture out to buy a newspaper; when I get home, I discover, wedged between its C and D sections, a grainy...
Jun 7, 2001 / Books & the Arts / David L. Ulin
Red Star Over Romania Red Star Over Romania
When, at 13, my rebellious move toward the left coincided with the emerging cold war, a teasing Bronx cousin took to calling me "Ana Pauker." Some boys in my school in the heart o...
May 31, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Susan Brownmiller
Godard and Company Godard and Company
It was the first Cannes Film Festival of the new century, but it felt more like an end than a beginning, as the past returned, in film after film, with weight and insistency. This...
May 31, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Leslie Camhi
We’re All Ears We’re All Ears
An accomplished journalist weaves a narrative about the NSA that includes sympathetic portraits of key players.
May 31, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Dusko Doder
We’re All Ears We’re All Ears
What sticks in my mind more than any particular accomplishment of the supersecret National Security Agency is its mammoth size. Only a few miles from my home, I now know, exists a...
May 31, 2001 / Books & the Arts / Dusko Doder