I used to hear the voice of the people in taxi drivers—but now their voices are hooked up to cell phones, iPods, or BlackBerries. If you talk to them—they disconnect only for a second—and return to their gadgets. Human beings can’t bear very much reality. They need a prop in their hands. It used to be the cigarette. Everybody was smoking in the streets. And now they use electronics to formalize the fact that they’re busy with the dread of daily living that produces nothing creative but the monotony that they call pragmatism. They’re busy producing dust, frenemies, intrigue. They’re fire-breathing dragons foaming at the office of their mouths. What would happen if we snipped the wires of their busyness. Progress would happen—as it did to us on September 11. Inspiration made an installation that day.
Banks are the temples of America. This is a holy war. Our economy is our religion.
Giannina Braschi
September 11th United States States of BananA
“Giannina Braschi’s The United States of Banana (2011) takes off from her groundbreaking quasi-novel Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), and culminates a trilogy that began with El emperio de los sueños (1994), to mark a paradigmatic shift in the millennial poetics of witness of Martí’s and Whitman’s New York with a trans-canonical and trans-American postmodern performance that envisions the end of the American Century vis-à-vis Puerto Rico’s liberation from US colonialism. The timing couldn’t be more propitious, as the relationship between the US “colossus of the north” and Latin America plays out with an aborted rapprochement to Cuba and the economic collapse of Braschi’s homeland of Puerto Rico. Banana enacts simultaneously postmodern and protest poetics in dizzying global/local contexts, as US global hegemony declines post-9/11, as the United States becomes the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, and as Puerto Rico drowns in debt crisis – worsened by hurricane and earthquake disasters. Her trilogy’s avant-garde Spanish–English bilingualism wrestles staggering legacies of both these colonial languages of the Americas to forge parity between them, exposing officializing discourses of national literary canons and imperial powers on a global stage. From the perspective of immigrant New York, Braschi witnesses the “death of the salesman” in the apocalyptic ash of 9/11, with a rhetorically super-charged romp through genres, registers, canons, popular cultures, and dramatis personae, to imagine a carnivalesque end to US colonialism, forging what critic Madelena Gonzalez calls a “rogue aesthetic” that seeks to “rewrite radical politics as high art.” Maritza Stanchich, The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction
Giannina Braschi 