Still Life on Brown Tablecloth

El Andar magazine, Summer 2002.

Brown By Richard Rodriguez
Publisher, Viking, 230pp., $25.00

Richard Rodriguez asked a painter what were the brownest paintings he could think of. The Cubists, said his friend. In Rodriguez's new book, BROWN, he suggests that the 21st century person should deconstruct the old black and white racial categories, then recreate their identity in radically fragmented Cubist fashion. Maybe it is art, not politics, that will reconcile us to our multiple subsidiary selves.

I was serving an eight-year prison sentence for bank robbery when I first saw Mr. Rodriguez's face on TV. He was an essayist for the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on PBS. Onscreen, his face was dark brown, Indio , like mine. But no matter the tribal resemblance, I felt more kinship with the ambition of his sentences, the virtuosity of his language. So I wrote him a letter, and we became friends.

In our letters he described how Mexican-American students at Harvard or Berkeley would interrupt his lectures to tell him that he was screwed up, not representative of the Mexican-American experience at all. (They did not notice the irony of their ivory tower castigations.) Mexican-American students in Eugene, Oregon booed him and raised their placards that read, RICHARD RODRIGUEZ IS A DISGRACE!

Rodriguez was an early beneficiary of affirmative action, but over the years became one of its more vocal critics, fond of displaying the calamity of identity politics, of being labeled Hispanic in his case: "In the white appraisal," he submits, "brown skin became a sort of disadvantage, which was my advantage. Acknowledgement came at a price, then as now. (Three decades later, the price of being a published brown author is that one cannot be shelved near those one has loved. The price is segregation.)"

L inking affirmative action to segregation is the sort of provocative concept that turned him into what Clarence Thomas is to the African-American-Studies set, the Uncle Tom whipping boy for the New Latino Left.

But he has always been perceived incorrectly. He has simply been more radical than the perceived radicals. (Radical stems from the Latin and means, "of or having roots.") For years the orthodoxy of post-modernism has taught us that we should replace the dominant history with the history of the disadvantaged. In BROWN, Rodriguez has out-Posted Post-Modernism with the suggestion that we pursue all histories equally and let the muddiness reign. Mud is nothing if not brown.

In our letters, I tried to find the hidden likenesses between Rodriguez and me. He was a gay Catholic, he told me, but didn't know what that meant, because he only understood gay as a political word. "Clinical-homosexual" he supposed himself. All the angst about labels found resonance with me. I have sometimes responded to my ethnicity as if it were a violent accusation. And I was discouraged with myself when I imposed ethnic distinctions on others.

In our correspondence, we were more interested in the improvisation that occurs in the space between the tightly scripted, cruelly constrictive labels of class, ethnicity or race. We swore that we would never lock each other into a single identity.

To Rodriguez's mind, race has always been a word associated with the clear-cut, historical method of keeping tabs. ( "One side won: one side lost.Children closed their eyes to memorize dates.only the score is remembered.") Rodriguez chides the "orderly sensibilities" of history's recorders and their readers who never allow for the paradox of the winners sometimes being the losers and the losers sometimes being the winners.

BROWN's central thesis is that we should replace the word race with brown. ("Brown, not in the sense of pigment, necessarily, but brown because mixed, confused, lumped, impure, unpastuerized.") America has been obsessed with viewing race as a black and white issue, literally and figuratively. Rodriguez wants us now to see things more mixed, "as motives are mixed, and the fluids of generations are mixed and emotions are unclear, and the tally of human progress and failure in every generation is mixed."

To extol one's racial impurity is to be in possession of a brown faculty. "Public admissions of racial impurity are fresh and wonderful to me," he exclaims, after he tells us about meeting a young woman from San Jose who tells him that she is the daughter of a New York Jew and an Iranian Muslim. "That is what I want to know. That is what I want to hear about-children who are unnatural to any parish because they belong to no precedent."

To do this, he illustrates, we need only understand the implication of the science of DNA testing. "We now are able to scope DNA, and we do so as if we are looking backward through a telescope. We find the course of American history muddies considerably by that reading. And this is clarifying."

The paradoxical thought that something muddy can clarify is a brown historical perspective. So he sets out for a new kind of historiography, to found a new mode of apprehending the tougher more ambiguous evidence of ourselves.

In the black and white appraisal, I am simply a Latino.

In the brown appraisal, I am a pugilistic essayist, vicious ex-bank robber, sweet husband, previous student of fundamentalist Christian theology, generous son, Cubist artist, loving brother, Quaker pacifist, raised by a Mexican mother for my first nine years, an Irish mother for the next four and half. I am a chronic sufferer of depression who never learned accurate Spanish, but was taught to read Greek and recite the Hebrew alphabet, raised in the East Los Angeles housing projects listening to Mario Lanza singing Neapolitan love songs and John Denver extolling his rocky mountain high, while Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald sang about enchanted evenings when I read Kafka and the Bronte sisters in the ninth grade. It is these unpursued scenes that Rodriguez speaks of as "constituting brown history."

If we now understand the human psyche as far from being unified-fraught with emotional contradictions-then Rodriguez insists that we think about race as utterly convoluted and foggy-bottomed. Definitely not the black and white thing Halle Berry would have us believe it is.

Her 2002 Oscar night acceptance speech exemplified the dominant black and white-anti-Brown-take on racial identity. She declared herself a descendant of the early black women in films, Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne and Diahann Carroll. The implication being that she has been at a disadvantage for being appraised as Black by a white world.

While she spoke of her black disadvantage, the screen divided in two and showed her white mother's emotional face next to hers. Rodriguez would call that a brown moment. "Brown forms at the border of contradiction (the ability of language to express two, or several things at once, the ability of bodies to experience two or several things at once.)"

She chose to only highlight her status as a race victim, when she could have equally noted the contradictory evidence that she was mostly the victim of an abusive Black father, and that the white world's appraisal of her Revlon beauty was more to her wealthy advantage. Brown history would pursue the scenes of her life as she parlayed a successful modeling career (based in white appraisal of her looks) into celebrity and connection that eventually got her off the hook for a hit and run several years ago.

Rodriguez proposes that we see ourselves like a Cubist painting where a face is depicted as a radically fragmented object, several sides seen simultaneously. Where one's racial identity is broken up, analyzed, and reassembled in an abstracted form. People as pastiche, not unified wholes.

This is how Mr. Rodriguez has chosen to survive-by turning his life and work into art. "My cubist life: My advantage.to reconstruct myself in some eccentric way-my pipe protruding from my ear, my ear where my nose should be-attempting to compose myself in a chair that slants like a dump shovel." A still life on a brown tablecloth.

The powerful colors and brushwork in Van Gogh's paintings are said to be a translation of his emotional state into visual form. In place of color or brushwork, Rodriguez translates his emotional state into a literary style by turning his idiosyncratic syntax into Cubist art, constructing sentences and chapters like the forms on a Cubist surface.

Rodriguez is a polychronic personality. And like Eco, Joyce or Updike, he'll start many ideas in one paragraph, or in one chapter, teasing them out so that the thread of thought is almost cut-pure tension in the development of an idea-only to eventually merge things together to form a continuous interconnection.

We can't possibly attend to the plethora of our discrete identities. But Rodriguez believes that the awareness that we have multiple fluid subsidiary selves should give us pause when we want to talk about our identities (race or otherwise) with any iron-firm sense.

Halle Berry was not aware of the brown (Cubist) moment the viewer was privy to on the split screen. Her white mother's face didn't overthrow Halle's assertion that she is black, but it does dispel the notion that black is only ever black, or only ever a disadvantage.

Rodriguez no longer wants to write about race, or race in black and white. That's what he means by, "I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America." He divides the world differently. Either you are brown (improvisational with your racial identity); or you are black and white (cliché). This is the only black and white he wants to write about, and that is what he would call thinking brownly.

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