Love for Life: Giannina Braschi

Love for Life: Notes on Giannina Braschi and United States of Banana

LATIN AMERICAN LITERATURE TODAY

December 2023

DOSSIER: GIANNINA BRASCHI

Love for Life: Notes on Giannina Braschi and United States of Banana

• by Nuria Morgado

Where is Giannina Braschi’s philosophical fiction taking us? And I say philosophical fiction in a gentle attempt to define the vast Braschian horizon. When analyzing any text by Giannina Braschi, if there is anything that critics agree on, it is in the fact that is extremely difficult to delineate her kaleidoscopic gaze on humanity, her theatrical performance, since it sustains a constant movement through which the characters, actions, and languages are transformed. In her epic poem Empire of Dreams, Braschi says that we depend “on the movement of the waves of the sea. We imitate the nature of the sea.” And it might very well be precisely this flow what makes her work timeless. Palabra en el tiempo. She flows to love and loves to flow. Motion to continue. To continue creating the “hard-hitting, no-holds-barred, mind-expanding story-worlds” that Frederick Luis Aldama describes in Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi. No strings attached. No hidden agendas. There is a poetic logic that encompasses the flow of her work. What is it and where is it taking us?

First, it takes us to a liberation. In her allegorical postcolonial novel United States of Banana, the autobiographical character Giannina, along with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, go on a mission to liberate Segismundo, who is imprisoned in a dungeon beneath the skirt of the Statue of Liberty. Remember Segismundo, from the seventeenth century masterpiece Life Is a Dream by Pedro Calderón de la Barca? He is the Prince of Poland who is imprisoned in a tower by his father, King Basilio. As a metaphor, we know that liberating Segismundo means not only political freedom—Puerto Rico free from the US—but also ontological liberation, freeing oneself from all those strings attached and hidden agendas, something higher than “material dispossession.” Even the Statue of Liberty needs to liberate herself from her condition as a commodity: “they bottled your essence so they could sell you […] But once your genie is out of the bottle, you will become a creative process again. Your genie wants to be liberated.” Giannina points to a saturation of modernity and a possible horizon or new reality beyond late capitalism that is “free from freedom.” Free from the imperial aspirations of the USA and from their hypocritical notion of freedom at the service of capital, always sniffing around some kind of economic profit. Free from ignorance. No more colonial structures. We need to tear down walls and engage in constant dialogue. We need new forms of interaction and communication. We need a new reality. Therefore, we need to create it.

Creation as Revelation

In “Declaration of Independence,” while the characters are sailing to the Isle of the Blessed in the Statue’s crown, Segismundo, Zarathustra, and Giannina start a dialogue on existential and ontological questions related to being and art. Giannina calls on philosophers, poets, and lovers and declares that languages are alive and nations are dead, and that the “powers of the world are shifting,” that “creation is taking over representation” and that “creation means discovery of a new reality that exists but that has not yet been noticed.” This discovery is only possible when “the words are alive again” and “the verbs are in revolt.” In this multifaceted entity called United States of Banana, a mirror with a hundred eyes, the readers are confronted with the creation of alive and revolted words, worlds, and underworlds that the characters of this novel experiment in their quest for liberation, precisely, from the mentality of domination that shamelessly breaks the creativity that is needed to discover new realities. Can we notice a latent new reality in Giannina’s creation? But what could be new? 

The essence that seems to be constant in the flow of her work is love. Giannina declares, “Love is what is new—so old and necessary—[…] the missing link in this culture of destruction and death.” The culture of the present “as here and now—is dying—is already dead.” She loves what is alive. It’s all about creating ourselves and about finding ways “to communicate with what is not isolated and confined to a product dated by the market of isolation and death.” It’s all about love and emotions. “Emotions are back. And emotions are talking.” Giannina confesses that she has “high expectations of love—when I love I really love—” but admits that she can’t love what wants to destroy her, what leaves her in the margins. She cannot love what doesn’t let her create herself.

On Love and Eros

When Giannina, Zarathustra, and Hamlet approach the Statue of Liberty, the Statue appeals to the notion of flow and movement when she explains that something is changing. And at one point of their politically and philosophically rich conversation, with the liberation of Puerto Rico always in mind, Giannina tells the Statue that what she desires most of all is to love. And confesses that she tried to love the Statue, but “to love you”—says Giannina—“was against my better self because you never wanted the best for me.” Quite the opposite, the Statue always wanted less of her, to the extent that it thwarted spiritual progress. And how did it thwart spiritual progress? By making her crave what she does not want or need, by making her forget who she is and who she was and, therefore, debilitating her intuition. For Giannina, spiritual progress comes out of creative energy or intuition. Its debilitation would take her prisoner, in the dungeon of liberty, of what is denying her becoming. 

Later in this fantastical odyssey, when Giannina sends Hamlet to Hotel San Juan to “study with Socrates how to become a good man,” the two characters engage in a fluid dialogue about how to achieve happiness during adversarial times. Hamlet tells Socrates that Giannina sent him to Hotel San Juan to study “how to become a happy man.” From “good man” to “happy man.” Plato’s Symposium is present: Aristophanes, in his speech on the power of Eros, calls him a helper of humans and a “physician for those ills whose cure would be the greatest happiness for the human race.” But the Socrates of United States of Banana can only take Hamlet as a disciple after he consults with his creative daemon and with Diotima of Mantineia, who “stopped the plague from entering the city for more than ten years […]—a visionary—a wisdom seeker—a seer—a prophet—a midwife—a philosopher—my teacher of love.” Giannina acknowledges Diotima as the one who taught Socrates that “love is not a God—because it is a desire—never full, always needy—an intermediary residing between heaven and earth—between plenty and necessity.” 

In the final section, “Declaration of Love,” Giannina petitions Diotima to open the doors of the Republic to poets, philosophers, and lovers. Diotima provokes the mood for love: “I only provoke good things.” But she needs to be created first in order to be discovered and give herself to us: “I’ll give myself to you, after you create me—create me first, then you can discover me […] I am inclusive—I don’t exclude possibilities […] And to be wise is to allow all the possibilities to exist—and to exist in all the possibilities that you can imagine—and then you create those imaginations—and after you create them you watch them exist in reality.” Here’s creation as discovery of new realities that exist but need to be noticed.

United States of Banana ends with the “Eradication of Envy: Gratitude,” a dialogue between Giannina and Hasib, a taxi driver. When he asks her what she learned from Socrates, she says she understood that she had to follow her creative daemon. She highlights the fact that Socrates was also a poet against envy, and he would negate it by following “the line of thought of the intuition.” Intuition is the negation of envy, the positive energy that “envy kills when it refuses to see the rainbow in the sky.” And a rainbow is the installation of an intuition. She asks herself what it is that philosophers envy about poets.  She answers that what they envy is that “we are capable of love” and that we have the power inside us to do it. They envy the poet’s intuition, but envy will be canceled by the triumph of intuition against it. Love and the capacity to love will prevail.

Taking a cue from the ending of Plato’s Symposium, United States of Banana ends with the doors open to a crowd of revelers “marching in—knocking on the door—from the beginning of The Symposium to the end––all those people entering the same house of wisdom and wine––all drunk on life––no doors closed––all in different degrees of light and life––in layers of colors and depths of soul––in progression into the limelight––all moving––knocking—and entering––all talking––drinking––sleeping––dancing––and leaving––entering and leaving––the passing of energy from the individual to the multitudes––from the multiples to the single-handed.” We envision the proposal of an attainable utopian world where love is not possession or domination of the other but acceptance of their otherness and a possibility of good. The doors of the house of wisdom and wine opened to the masses “all drunk on life.” One can also think of Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Be Drunk.” It’s an invitation to get drunk on life to escape the pressure of time, to connect to our surroundings and experience everything everywhere, loving life, loving love, loving everything and everyone. “Be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue, as you wish.” Be drunk on love. Drunk on Giannina.

UNITED STATES OF BANANA – A GRAPHIC NOVEL: A BOOK OF LIBERATION AND BECOMINGS

Latinx Politics, Music, Film, Literature, and Art.

UNITED STATES OF BANANA – A GRAPHIC NOVEL: A BOOK OF LIBERATION AND BECOMINGS

by Rolando Pérez

REDEFINING LATINX MEDIA

United States of Banana: A Graphic Novel is an artistic event, the result of a collaboration between Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi and Swedish cartoonist Joakim Lindengren. In effect, it is the graphic novel version of Braschi’s 2011 eponymous genre-bending book. In part prose poem, narrative, and play, United States of Banana is the performance of something completely new: a language of indistinctions and liberation from binarism that recalls Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. “I was born after the distinctions were made, so I don’t distinguish between la chicha y la limonada, el merengue, y el coquí,” says the character of Giannina in United States of Banana (135). And thus, to that end, the graphic novel masterfully captures Giannina Braschi’s deconstructive ontology, epistemology, politics, and ethics.

LATINX SPACES COMICS: Giannina Braschi’s United States of Banana

This geopolitical tragicomedy is part of the Latinographix series at Ohio State University Press, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama (a.k.a. Professor Latinx), who has who has done more to advance Latinx superhero comics and Latinx graphic novels than anybody else—through his scholarly optics as well as through his Latinx Pop Lab at the UT-Austin. Masterful titles in the graphic novel genre-at-large include Angelitos: A Graphic Novel by Ilan Stavans (author) and Santiago Cohen (illustrator) (2018); The Trial: A Graphic Novel by Franz Kafka and Chantal Montellier (illustrator) and David Zane Mairowitz (adapter) (2008); Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel (2007); The Witch Owl Parliament (Clockwork Curandera) by David Bowles and Raúl the Third (authors) and Stacey Robinson and Damian Duffy (illustrators) (2021); and, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman (1986). 

Now, in comparison with some of the above-mentioned texts, the last two, Maus and The Witch Owl Parliament stand out as novels of becomings. In Maus Jews become mice, and thereby overturn Hitler’s statement at the beginning of the book that Jews are not human, and in The Witch Owl Parliament (which takes place in the Texas-Mexico border), the main characters of this children’s graphic novel (Cristina, Enrique, and Mateo) possess transformative, indigenous superhero powers. In such becomings, the ontological categories of what is and what is not human are deconstructed and withdrawn from the traditional Aristotelian hierarchy. Thus, in this sense, Maus, The Witch Owl Parliament, and United States of Banana, can be seen as works of becoming, independence, and freedom that challenge the violence of stasis, borderlands, Sameness, and the imposed categories of race, gender, and nationality kept in placed by the forces of colonization and empire.

Please visit new website: GianninaBraschi.com

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As such, Joakim Lindengren who has profoundly understood the original text, doesn’t miss the opportunity to parody Guy Peellaert’s brain-twisting cover illustration of David Bowie’s 1974 album Diamond Dogs. With Lindengren the becoming-dog of Bowie (with genitals) is replaced with the becoming-dog of an androgynous Hamlet, except that instead of two women in the background we now see Segismundo peering from behind (66). “The best of both worlds” reads the caption that exemplifies Braschi’s mestizaje, where one does not have to choose between a false A and B, and so incipit the comedy where Giannina, Hamlet, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra come together, first in the 2011 novel and then in Lindengren visual’s rendition of their encounter. 

Latinx graphic novel, opening scene of United States of Banana

Here we see Hamlet and Zarathustra carrying dead bodies on their backs into the Fulton Street Market (Braschi’s allusion to the “Flies at the Market-Place” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra), and Giannina carrying a coffin-shaped backpack-sardine can with a cross on it where the dead sardine lies. Hamlet appears in the garb of seventeenth century prince; Zarathustra, as a bearded, decrepit old man, donning a Superman outfit (an allusion to Nietzsche’s ubermensch, sometimes translated as “Superman”), and Giannina in contemporary attire (below). 

This opening scene of the graphic novel (which is not the start of the original) bears the title “Burial of the Sardine”. And the choice of beginning the graphic novel with it is significant because there is no moving forward, no ferry trip to Liberty Island, until the smelly sardine that is “the 20th century” with all its horrors has been buried, for though Giannina says otherwise, it was a century of mass genocides. “When I said I will bury the 20th century—everybody—not just me—went looking for a dead body,” says Giannina (5). “Burying” the twentieth century much like the announcement of the “death of God” is interpreted literally, and yet, there is something quite literal about it, like Lindengren’s realistic depiction of the Fulton Market in New York City, where not too far from it the Twin Towers fell on 9/11. For after all, United States of Banana is a post-9/11 text, fragmented, as all the fragments (glass, paper, torsos, body parts) that came down that day.

Unfortunately, however, the 20th century is not dead. When Giannina opens the sardine-coffin she finds that the “ugly” sardine is still moving (3) and begs not to be buried alive (4).  Later in a parodic panel of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, Giannina sits on one side of the table with Hamlet, while Zarathustra sits on the other side. But significantly no one occupies the center position as the redeemer has died. “We are gathered here to break bread with our dead bodies,” declares Zarathustra (6).  And when Zarathustra asks Giannina, “do you believe in liberty?” she answers: “As much as I believe in God, in Santa Claus” (7). Not Zarathustra, not even Hamlet can be of any assistance; obsessed with ghosts, he looks only to the past. Full of the heaviness of “ressentiment,” he is not a bridge to anything; and as they leave to embark on the ferry, they go past a bar, full of people, with a large bay window, that is a parody of Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942). Here Lindengren has replaced the original name of the bar (“Phillies”) with the word “Philistines.” The alienation and isolation in the crowded bar are complete.

Artefacto by Nicanor Parra

In the section that follows, we encounter the Statue of Liberty tired of being a statue. “I have inspired empires. I have destroyed empires,” she says (8), with an air of boredom. “They turned me into the mausoleum of liberty,” complains the statue, bringing to mind the Nicanor Parra’s artefact, where beneath a drawing of the Statue of Liberty appear the words: “USA, where freedom is a statue” (below). 

The Statue’s social security number is 009-11-2001, “the day the towers fell” and she began to shrink (10). And the panels that follow make impactful allusions through both photography and the history of art to some of the horrors of the twentieth century. In one panel Lindengren foregrounds the famous Nick Ut photograph (The Napalm Girl, 1972) of a girl running naked after being burned in Napalm attack in Vietnam, and in the background smoke billowing from the Twin Towers.

Latinx tragicomedy on September 11th

In another Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory (1931) is parodied with the words “We were set to take the ferry to Liberty Island when the Twin Towers melted down” (13, below), and in various panels disintegration, sadomasochism, and the exploitation of bodies are depicted through references to Francis Bacon (14), Hans Bellmer bound dolls, and Bettie Page photographs (24). 

Joakim Lindengren on Dali and Braschi

Now, when Giannina asks the Statue, who has become a piggybank and a cash machine (below: because in “the United States of Banana everything is for sale,” 16) what her expiration date is, the Statue responds: “The day Segismundo takes the crown’ (10). 

For Zarathustra Segismundo “is the overman,” for Giannina, “a poet,” and for Hamlet “a conqueror” (10). Regardless, this takes us to “Under the Skirt of Liberty,” one of the most satirically profound sections of United States of Banana: (33-56), for here we encounter a glimmer of hope offered by decolonization in all its forms.

Segismundo, the protagonist of Pedro de Calderón de la Barca’s play, Life is a Dream, has been “living in the dungeon of Liberty” (34) for more than one hundred years. In this Spanish Golden Age play, King Basilio of Poland locks away his son, prince Segismundo, at birth, because the boy has been prophesied to destroy the kingdom someday in the future. It is in this sense that Segismundo and Hamlet are “brothers” for Braschi, and that their literary parents, Basilio (Segismundo’s father) and Gertrude (Hamlet’s mother) later marry in the “Wedding of the Century” (57-68). And, if in the first iteration of Da Vinci’s Last Supper, there was no one at the center of the table, this time Segismundo takes center stage (34). For more than a personage, Segismundo is a force, a world, a country. Segismundo is a Puerto Rico that for more than a century has been under the sandals of the Statue of Liberty (96), but which at last wishes to be independent and free in a Latin American sense. Braschi writes: 

“Segismundo thinks that he depends on liberty, but the truth be said—liberty has more need of him than he of the of the statue…The people want to liberate him. Especially his own people—immigrants and prisoners from around the world. So in order to prevent the coming insurrection, a voting system is created to give the people the impression that Segismundo’s destiny is in their hands.” (7)

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This is how the United States of Banana’s theater of freedom and democracy functions: a traffic light with a button that says: “press to cross,” but nothing happens. The light changes when it is programmed to do so.  But the people are “given” three options, writes Braschi: Wishy, Wishy-Washy, Washy. She continues:

“If they vote for Wishy [independence]—Segismundo will be liberated from the dungeon. If they vote for Wishy-Washy [commonwealth], the status quo will prevail. If they vote for Washy [statehood], he will be sentenced to death, and nobody will have the honor of hearing his songs rise from the gutters of the dungeon liberty. Every four years the citizens of Liberty Island vote for Wishy-Washy. They can choose between between mashed potato, French fries, or baked potato. But any way you serve it, it’s all the same potato.” (7).

No wonder, then, that Giannina repeatedly says that she does not believe in freedom, in a country where, as Parra would say, liberty is nothing more than a statue. “Freedom is a demagogue, I am a warrior,” says Giannina to Zarathustra in the graphic adaptation (22). She doubtlessly says this in response to the Statue’s earlier statement that as a trophy and the spirit of the French medieval warrior, Joan of Arc, she “liberated France from Anglo-Saxon freedom,” the very notion of freedom that Giannina refuses to believe in. This individualistic concept of liberty is what has kept Puerto Rico (Segismundo) imprisoned in the dungeon beneath the skirt of the Statue of Liberty. In a monologue in United States of Banana Segismundo declares: “I have to separate myself from your expectations, so that I can claim the liberty to be free from an associated state. The freedom I will claim is an interior freedom, but that freedom which I have inhabited for a long time, will blow Puerto Rico’s mind out of the association that has harmed its sovereignty” (178).  And in the graphic novel, the Statue’s own desire to become “free from freedom. Free,” is succinctly captured in a parody of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912, below). 

Latinx philosophy and comics

Here at last, the emperor has no clothes, and the only way for Puerto Rico (like Hamlet) to gain its independence is by sending the United States of Banana, “to the nunnery.” In one of the many renderings of Escher’s Relativity (1953), Zarathustra and Hamlet are shown ascending a staircase while Giannina descends it upside, and the caption reads: “To liberate Segismundo, to declare independence of Puerto Rico, to become happy—to become Hamlet (without Ophelia)” (29, below), that is what is necessary for new beginnings. 

In the end, the liberation from the United States of Banana where Giannina, Zarathustra, Hamlet, and Segismundo float away on the crown the Statue has hurled into the river, can only take place because Segismundo is able to put himself “in the shoes of the other” (40) and dance (the Nietzschean dance) wearing stockings and high heels (49): in a new world where “genders like genres are melting like the seasons. The borders are no longer effective in underlining distinctions between melodrama and drama” (42). It is in this very sense that United States of Banana is quite literally a post-9/11 work. On that date, the melted and collapsed Twin Towers, symbols of capitalism and the old empire, made way for new values, and to that end, Giannina, who often appears to be more Nietzschean than even Zarathustra says: “The great event is the creation of a new value—a new value appears like a rainbow with many envelopes that shed mystery” (53, below).            

In summary, United States of Banana: A Graphic Novel is a work of metamorphoses and of becomings, masterfully achieved through the image inspiring words of the iconic Latinx poet and radical thinker Giannina Braschi and the artwork of Joakim Lindengren, whose illustrations give them a bizarre and beautiful twist. Where Braschi parodies—always with utmost respect—the history of literature, Lindengren does the same with the history of art (classical and contemporary), and together they have created a book of words and images, an artefact, an event. 

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Rolando Pérez is a contributor to Latin American Studies encyclopedias and anthologies (including the Oxford Handbooks) to which contributed sections, such as “The Bilingualisms of Latino/a Literatures” and Spanish-English Code-switching in Nuyorican and Caribbean literature. Pérez’s research pairs philosophers and writers on subjects or concepts in common. He publishes on the intersections of Latin American and Latinx literature and philosophy, including essays on José Martí, Alejandra Pizarnik, Gloria Anzaldúa, Giannina Braschi, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, and Severo Sarduy. He is collaborator with scholars in distinct research fields, including Ilan Stavans (Spanglish), Linda Martín Alcoff (feminist and Latin American/Latinx philosophy). His creative writing in Spanish and English consists of theater and prose poetry, including Tea Ceremonies in Winter, La comedia eléctrica, The Lining of Our Souls: Excursion into Selected Paintings by Edward Hopper, The Electric Comedy, and The Divine Duty of Servants. His stories and poems have been anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature edited by Ilan Stavans and in The Hispanic Literary Companion edited by Nicolás Kanellos. He was a contributor to Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer (Pittsburgh, 2020). In past lives he has also been an actor and a pilot. 

Please visit the new website: GianninaBraschi.com

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Kinetic Furniture Designer Ian Stell creates “The Giannina Chair” that Functions as a Lamp

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Kinetic furniture by Ian Stell inspired by Latinx philosopher Giannina Braschi

A New Chair Inspired by a Philosophical Concept: “Things are beautiful when they work. Art is function.”

When industrial designer Ian Stell announced his plans to design a chair that resembled a lamp, poet Giannina Braschi encouraged her friend to take his concept further. She said, “Make the chair function as a lamp.” This challenge was born of her philosophy that “things are beautiful when they work. Art is function.”

Stell rose to the challenge and built a kinetic device that morphs from a chair into a lamp and named it “Giannina.” He explained how the invention transforms from one functional object into another: “When in its chair mode, a wheel that’s shaped and positioned like a soup bowl rolling on its edge acts as a backrest. Out of the center of this wheel—at a perpendicular angle—an oversized saddle is mounted. The wheel spins around the central axis until the occupant leans back in the chair, acting as its brake. When the chair is unoccupied, the wheel can be flipped over to be a lampshade over the LEDs mounted beneath the saddle.”

In the spirit of Braschi’s literary hybrids, the designer explained that this namesake chair is also “attempting to exist between typologies, resistant to being categorized, but striving to have purpose.” Its purpose is beauty.

Excerpted from World Literature Today (O’Dwyer, Tess. “Popping Up in Pop Culture and Other Unlikely Spaces: Latinx Author Giannina Braschi Crosses Over.” World Literature Today 95.2 (2021): 19-21.)

Drawings of the Prototype of the Giannina Chair: a spinning seat and a standing lamp.

The Giannina Chair, a drawing by Ian Stell

The Giannina Chair in upright position as a chair

Giannina Chair by Ian Stell in lamp mode

In the spirit of Braschi’s literary hybrids, the designer explained that this namesake chair is also “attempting to exist between typologies, resistant to being categorized, but striving to have purpose.” Its purpose is beauty.

World Literature Today

About the Designer Ian Stell

For Ian Stell, material choice and fabrication process follow the conceptual intention. This tactic has led Stell to work with a broad array of media, at scales that range from miniature to monumental. His projects span furniture, lighting, accessories, interiors, sculpture, installation, and beyond. Stell continues to cultivate fluencies in both digital and handcraft techniques, celebrating the rich cross-pollination that results from a broad approach. The objects he makes are often kinetic or reconfigurable and require a high level of precision in their manufacture.

Stell’s work has been presented in a number of New York venues, including solo shows at Matter and group shows during New York’s Design Week. He has also exhibited at Triode³ in Paris and Salone del Mobile in Milan. Stell’s first in a series of functional, intersecting staircases was installed in July 2015 on the banks of the Spree River in Berlin. This staircase, called Diagint, was fabricated near Torino by a factory that provides prototyping and limited production to some of Italy’s premier automotive companies. As of this writing, he is preparing work to be shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Swiss Institute.

Giannina Braschi in the World of Contemporary Latinx Literature

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Literary Ladies Guide

Inspiration for Readers and Writers from Classic Women Authors

Scholar, playwright, spoken-word performer, award-winning poet, and avant-garde fiction author, since the 1980s Giannina Braschi has been creating up a storm in and around a panoply of Latinx hemispheric spaces.

Her creative corpus reaches across different genres, regions, and historical epochs. Her critical works cover a wide range of subjects and authors, including Miguel de Cervantes, Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Antonio Machado, César Vallejo, and García Lorca.

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Giannina Braschi
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Braschi’s dramatic poetry titles in Spanish include Asalto al tiempo (1981) and La comedia profana (1985). Her radically experimental genre-bending titles include El imperio de los sueños (1988), the bilingual Yo-Yo Boing! (1998), and the English-penned United States of Banana (2011). With national and international awards and works appearing in Swedish, Slovenian, Russian, and Italian, she is recognized as one of today’s foremost experimental Latinx authors.

Her vibrant bilingually shaped creative expressions and innovation spring from her Latinidad, her Puerto Rican-ness that weaves in and through a planetary aesthetic sensibility. We discover as much in her work about US/Puerto Rico sociopolitical histories as we encounter the metaphysical and existential explorations of a Cervantes, Rabelais, Diderot, Artaud, Joyce, Beckett, Stein, Borges, Cortázar, and Rosario Castellanos, for instance.

With every flourish of her pen Braschi reminds us that in the distillation and reconstruction of the building blocks of the universe there are no limits to what fiction can do. And, here too, the black scratches that form words and carefully composed blank spaces shape an absent world; her strict selection out of words and syntax is as important as the precise insertion of words and syntax to put us into the shoes of the “complicit reader” (Julio Cortázar’s term) to most productively interface, invest, and fill in the gaps of her storyworlds.

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Poets Philosophers Lovers on Bookshop.org*
Poets Philosophers Lovers on Amazon*
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Braschi reminds us of the power of lexis—asking us to deep-dive into the metaphorical, subtextual, and allegorical layers of meaning. No subject remains untouched in her fiction making. She draws from Latinx realities as well as metaphysics— even historical archive, sociopolitical, and judicial discourses. Indeed, Braschi invents new forms to express polyvalent Latinx sensibilities that shape-shift across time, place, and identity categories.

In many ways, as a contemporary Latinx author Braschi stands apart. Her radically experimental works continue to grow a genealogy of Latinx letters, but they do so from the avant-garde margins. Taken as a whole her work extends and complicates a trajectory of Latinx experimental fiction that has not received the same critical attention as, perhaps, the work of a more straightforward realist writer such as an Esmeralda Santiago or a Piri Thomas.

Sidestepping the easily consumable, Braschi’s creative work puts pressure on and radically bends a Latinx literary canon, and with this she calls attention to the self-within-the-collective of nation and diasporic community. She converses with Isabel Rios (Victuum, 1976), Cecile Pineda (Face, 1985), Guillermo Gomez-Peña (Codex Espangliensis, 1998), Alejandro Morales (Waiting to Happen, 2001), Salvador Plascencia (The People of Paper, 2005), or Sesshu Foster (Atomik Aztex, 2005).

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And today we see Braschi joined by a growing number of Latinx canon-benders such as Carmen María Machado, Elizabeth Acevedo, Monica de la Torre, and Naomi Ayala. More globally, Braschi’s works extend and complicate a genealogy of avant-garde women of color authors such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Claudia Rankine, and Audre Lorde, and she joins with other planetary cutting-edge contemporaries such as Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Pamela Lu, Zinzi Clemmons, and Sumana Roy.

Although standing apart, Braschi as creator clearly doesn’t exist ex nihilo. Indeed, we see her build on and redeploy the work of feminist and queer fore-figures, including Cristina Peri Rossi, Alejandra Pizarnik, Clarice Lispector, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, Marguerite Duras, and Gertrude Stein. She does so less from an identity perspective and more from a theoretical practice perspective.

We see a similar dynamic with her Puerto Rican family friends and mentors playwright René Marqués and public intellectual Nilita Vientós-Gastón, and with her fiction-writing friends on the island, Rosario Ferré, Manuel Ramos Otero, Luis Rafael Sánchez, and Ana Lydia Vega.

I think also of her Nuyorican poet friends who are cofounders of the Nuyorican Poets Café, Pedro Pietri and Miguel Algarín, and their precursor Julia de Burgos. From Pizarnik and Duras to Marqués and Pietri, these voices, each with their own aesthetic (some more experimentational than others) and each with their uniquely expressed antiestablishment worldviews, are forerunners to Braschi.

Latinx Philosopher Giannina Braschi

Braschi smuggles into a US imagination a sensibility created in and across a hemispheric Américan history, aesthetic, and culture. And she does so to create hard-hitting, no-holds-barred, mind-expanding storyworlds. She wakes us to the world in and across languages, ontologies, metafictional epistemologies…

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Categories: Literary Analyses

Literary Ladies Guide was started in 2012 as an outgrowth of Literary Ladies Guide to the Writing Life, a book by Nava Atlas, writer, visual artist, designer — and major book nerd.

Our goal: To be the web’s most comprehensive resource on classic women’s literature, focusing mainly on women who wrote in the English language, as well as global authors who were translated extensively.

Our mission: To elevate the voices and stature of women writers, and to be inspired by those who came before us. Literary Ladies Guide honors the contributions of women to literature, literary history, and journalism.

Our hope: To inspire readers and writers from all walks of life through the lives and words of the women authors of the past, and to help readers discover or rediscover those who have been forgotten or under-appreciated.

And for fun and education: We also present articles on literary travels, the bookish life, and advice for writers, mainly from the classic women authors represented on the site.

The women authors featured on this site have already passed on. Fortunately, there are many more women writing today, so we want to focus on the achievements of classic authors who paved the way for today’s writing women.

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The Literary Ladies’ Guide to the Writing Life

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This introduction to Latinx literary figure Giannina Braschi is excerpted from Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi, edited by by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer.