Literary Critics

"[T]he Times chief daily book critic announced that she would be leaving her regular reviewing post after thirty-eight years at the paper, marking the end of a literary era. Her assessments of novels and memoirs, works of history, biography, politics, and poetry have guided generations of American readers, and the prospect of getting a Kakutani review has been the hope and fear of more writers than could possibly be counted... What made her scary to writers made her reliable to readers... Her name long ago entered the lexicon as a verb (“to be Kakutanied”), a signifier of the ultimate cultural prestige."

"This is not to draw a direct analogy [to] the overwhelming horrors of the World War II era but to look at some of the conditions and attitudes... that make a people susceptible to demagoguery and political manipulation, and nations easy prey for would-be autocrats. To examine how a disregard for facts, the displacement of reason by emotion, and the corrosion of language are diminishing the very value of truth, and what that means for America and the world."

"[I]n many aspects [Trump] is... an extreme, bizarro-world apotheosis of many of the broader, intertwined attitudes undermining truth today, from the merging of news and politics with entertainment, to the toxic polarization... to the growing populist contempt for expertise. ...creating the perfect ecosystem in which ... could fall mortally ill."

"Alongside [the] optimistic vision of America as a nation that could become a shining "city upon a hill," there's also been a dark, irrational counter-theme in U.S. history, which has now reasserted itself with a vengeance—to the point where reason not only is being undermined but seems to have been tossed out of the window, along with facts, informed debate, and deliberative policy making. Science is under attack, and so is expertise of every sort—be it expertise in foreign policy, national security, economics, or education."

"Nationalism, tribalism, dislocation, fears of social change, and the hatred of outsiders are on the rise again as people, locked in their partisan silos and filter bubbles, are losing sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian lines."

"[[Relativism|[R]elativism]] has been ascendant since the s began in the 1960s. Back then, it was embraced by the , eager to expose the biases of Western, bourgeois, male dominated thinking; and by academics promoting the gospel of postmodernism... Since then, relativistic arguments have been hijacked by the populist Right, including creationists and climate change deniers who insist that their views be taught alongside "science-based" theories."

"Truth is a cornerstone of our democracy. ...[T]ruth is one of the things that separates us from an ...."

"For decades now, objectivity—or even the idea that people can aspire toward ascertaining the best available truth—has been falling out of favor. ...This has been going on since a solar system of right-wing news sites orbiting around Fox News and consolidated its gravitational hold over the Republican base, and it's been exponentially accelerated by social media, which connects users with like-minded members and supplies them with customized news feeds that reinforce their preconceptions, allowing them to live in ever narrower, windowless silos."

"Writing was my way to make sense of the world outside and inside my home. Despite the recollections of the adults in my life, I don't think I was a terribly articulate child. Writing was a way to give wings to the inchoate emotions and feelings inside of me."

"We often hear all this rhetoric of “spare the rod and spoil the child,” discipline and punishment, and I just don’t believe in that. In all my years I haven’t come across an adult who, because they got an excess of love as a child, grew up to be a not-so-nice person. In fact, I believe exactly the opposite is true. And this isn’t rocket science, but I think that parents for understandable reasons sometimes forget that…"

"I always share this advice with my writing students: Tell the story of one person so deeply and completely, that in the act of going deep into that one person, something magical happens, and it becomes a universal story."

"I think I was politicized at age five, once I started noticing the beggars on the streets, and children my age who had to rummage through dumpsters looking for food. But since I grew up in a middle-class milieu where we were always told that "that's just how things are," it never occurred to me that the social order could be changed, much less that I could play a role in changing it. It was only in my teenage years that I understood things about class and inequity and how there was nothing inevitable about it. **On when she became politicized in "AN INTERVIEW WITH THRITY UMRIGAR" in BookSlut (January 2012)"

"I feel it is something that I have to do for my children, to be able to give them a book that has kids like them in it, just incidentally. They are not the side character, they are not there as a novelty, they are just the characters. It shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is. People need to see themselves reflected in the culture around them."

"There are so many expectations placed upon us, so many restricting places in which we are supposed to place ourselves in order to function in the world. There is often a struggle to hold on to who we are through all of this; either we lose the struggle and we are lost, almost deadened, or we simply don't survive at all…"

"Suicide is generally seen in a very negative way and, though it is tragic and devastating, I've learnt from losing my own twin that there's a positive and magical side to it as well. It's about a person freeing themselves. It is actually a very courageous thing to do. To leave can be braver than to just stay here and struggle on, never knowing whether you'll ever be happy."

"Racial history lays so heavily on black people – slavery, migration, racism. But I don’t want my characters to be hidden by that…"

"…Drift is the tension and play between spirit and matter. Spirit wants to be unbound. It’s the tension between spirit and letter as well, the play between spirit and letter, the tangential way of knowing that the expression “you get my drift” gets at, not to mention the turns spirit and letter take toward each other and away from each other. Language, especially poetic language, replicates or is infused with the relationship between spirit and matter, the traffic between spirit and letter, its analogue…"

"…to the extent that categories and the way things are defined -- the boundaries between things, people, areas of experience, areas of endeavor -- to the extent that those categories and definitions are rooted in social and political realities, anything one does that challenges them, that transgresses those boundaries and offers new definitions, is to some extent contributing to social change…"

"…I think figures accrue to and build on feeling, and it’s no doubt the case that orphaning speaks of and from an emotional disposition I’m both inclined toward and see applying beyond myself. The orphan is such an archetypal figure, recurrent not only in my work but in world culture, because it tugs at the roots of our sense of belonging and the mix of anxiety and solace that goes with that sense…"

"I think that the audience for poetry has widened in recent years and maybe it's continuing to widen—I hope so. The whole poetry slam phenomenon has created an interest and widened the audience for poetry in significant ways. There's a lot that needs to be done, obviously. But poetry is one of those things that just won't go away, and people keep rediscovering it. I think every generation has a poetry boom, or gives a boom to poetry, gives itself to poetry. There is also a growing sense that poetry has great variety to it, that there are many ways of going about it. I think with the recognition of that variousness, there's been a growth in the audience."

"…The song does remember the deceased, and it’s the song that helps the deceased move on—to ascend, in the words of the poem, to the next life. I wanted to take that and apply it to senses of transition and, hopefully, ascendance within life, moments where one feels one has to move on and move up. I didn’t know it would become an ongoing, theoretically endless series—"

"I was born with a particular sensitivity to words. Some people are very good with math and sports… I wasn’t but I could feel words."

"People believe that black people live the same way everywhere and that is not true. White people don’t live the same way everywhere, even if you have the same cultural references. Take music. Rap, of course, black rappers don’t live the same way everywhere. There are black rappers in Africa, black rappers in France, black rappers in the U.S. and there are black rappers in the Caribbean. I wanted people to see the way in which that music became a means of expression of a reality, which is at the same time both global and local."

"I'm as American as apple pie…And yet when Chinese New Year comes along I still have to be very careful about not saying anything wrong, because that sets the mood for the whole year. All these Chinese traditions from my mother's family are with me, and they all come out in my books. But sometimes you have to step away from them."

"It came mainly from my desire to learn more about the Japanese culture. I've also always been fascinated by social groups who live and work outside the mainstream. So the world of sumo wrestling within the Japanese culture had been an ongoing interest, something I've always wanted to write about. It covered such enticing material and I've always had so many questions I wanted answered…"

"A story's narrative demands ebb and flow when so much time is covered. There has to be change in order to create movement in a story. And then again, the time period and the culture had a lot to do with their staying power. Today, the world is much more fast paced, and hitting a stagnation point might mean the end of a relationship."

"I have NEVER seen so many Afro-Latinxs at universities, holding Ph.Ds, and participating in public discourses about race in my life. Whenever I go, Colombia, Perú, Guatemala, México, Cuba, or Spain, France, etc., I have never in my life seen so many people of African descent sitting where decisions and discourses are being produced. I think this is a major change in the game."

"Like many Puerto Rican scholars of my generation, I am a huge admirer of Mayra Santos-Febres. She is one of the most prolific and influential writers, critics, and teachers on the archipelago"

"Our stand as an island/nation/U.S. "territory"/colony is asking for a revision. Personally, I believe that we live in global times. New identities need to participate in the dialogue about civil rights, sovereignty, the need to look past nationalisms and their monolithic discourses on what constitutes citizenship."

"Afro-descendants in Puerto Rico fall between the gaps of two converging definitions of Blackness and Latinx-ness and therefore, remain invisible to both U.S. and colonial Puerto Rico's public policies. I have to say that Puerto Rican government administrations have used the U.S. current definition of "Latinx identity to further marginalize Afro-Puerto Ricans. For instance, administrations of all political denominations use the Latinx minority status to ask for aid for the whole Puerto Rican population, without precise statistical information that includes race. On the island, they use the overrated and old discourse of "mestizaje to further marginalize blackness. Most public departments refuse to use the category of "Afro-Latino or "Afro-Hispanic in their census. They do use the category "African American," which is not the identity with which many Afro-Latinxs, or Latin people of African descent identify themselves. Up to this point, we don't know, for instance, how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected people of African descent on the island. This racist policy does not provide us as Afro-Puerto Ricans with the necessary tools to demand government action nor changes in public policy to benefit our population."

"(What about the work of younger writers?) RF: I have not seen much. I’ve only read Mayra Santos Febres’s books, which I think are very good, but there is not enough work to judge yet. Although I think that she is the most promising of all."

"My intention is to write things that can convey a vision of the memory lost, of a way of living in the world."

"I think that art and especially literature is really good at teaching people how to be compassionate and how to put yourself, put themselves, in other people's shoes and trying to bridge the unbridgeable, which is to live through other people's perception. It gifts the eyes of the beholder, not the eyes of the writer, and that is a wonderful gift. That is absolutely wonderful—and that books—it's okay if they entertain, it's okay if they teach—but what they teach in a very profound level is to be human."

"Writing chose me…It came out of the need to learn about my heritage."

"literature and arts are defined in our cultures as an activity that produces both, or this product, that is for leisure and luxury—leisure and luxury. And that is a very weird definition of artists for an Afrolatina. That is a Eurocentric view of what is art, because for us it's basically about recuperating memory and telling the stories and raising the voice and exploring an aesthetic that is devalued."

"that's what artists are. We are the voices, and the memory, and the explorers of an aesthetic, and a sensibility, and a philosophy that has been silenced and devalued."

"I do not see this novel as solely dealing with LGBT issues. I see Sirena as a metaphoric representation of the whole Caribbean. The fact that s/he is a transvestite is just a fact. Basically, I did what Flaubert did with Emma Bovary. He talked about his society through the character of a woman—an adulterous woman…"

"what is sold as mainstream literature, I don't like it very much—very simplified, industrialized, Dan Brown stuff. I don't want to write like that."

"I prefer novels. However, I think that the theme of the piece determines its form. Some texts work better in poetry than in essay or stories or plays. It is good though to learn as many techniques in creative writing as one can, so that, as a writer, one has the flexibility to work with the piece and its need."

"I cannot tell you what it does to me to hear pre-Stonewall. And even in our literature, even in the art, pre-Stonewall, post-Stonewall. I wrote three books pre-Stonewall and a dozen more post-Stonewall. There’s no demarcation. Gay history is centuries and centuries from the Romans to the Greeks to Oscar Wilde to all kinds of outrages. And those seem to be put back and pre-Stonewall is passive. Post-Stonewall is brave and dignified. I actually have heard things like that…"

"We confuse gay liberation with straight imitation. Straightness is our goal. This pushes us away from the uniqueness that is the gay experience."

"…Pershing Square was a gathering of denizens of every type, the gospel people would preach, hustlers would hustle, queens would camp. It was an incredible array of society. There was a cop there that ruled it, I mean as if he was the king. And he was a terror. And if he saw anybody there whom he had not seen, you went downstairs to a little place that was kind of secret. It was very, very weird downstairs, a little room where he would interview you without saying that he suspected you of anything. If it looked like you were hustling or the queens or whatever he would go there and hassle you."

"John Rechy taught me everything. He taught me the importance of structure and the importance of clarity. I see that in my own students as well, you know, confusing mystery with vagueness. He taught me the difference."

"You have to understand what the world was like back then. Being queer was very dangerous, and there was a lot of stigma about it. Even when I was hustling, it took me a long time to realise myself as a gay man. It's hard to accept that some of us, at one time or another, had heterosexual feelings. I certainly did. I emerged very slowly into homosexuality, despite the way I was living."

"It’s been more difficult for me to come out as a Mexican-American than come out as gay."

"Every character in City of Night has a strong antecedent…Miss Destiny was very real. That was the name she used, and all those stories were based on my recollections of her. We kept in touch for a few years after the book came out; she'd ring me in the middle of the night, saying she was with one of her 'husbands' who didn't believe she could be a character in a famous novel. Then some boozy voice would come on, and I'd have to say 'Yes, that really is the fabulous Miss Destiny'. After a few years the calls stopped, so I guess Miss Destiny is now rattling her beads in God's face, like she always said she would."

"I was bewildered. I did nothing at all to promote the book, even to the extent of denying that I wrote it. I felt that if I left the streets as soon as I had some success, I'd be betraying the world that I wrote about. And the truth is that I couldn't give it up. I'd been hustling for so long that it was a habit."

"I celebrate that figure as an “outlaw.” That’s someone who lives in defiance of oppressive laws, and, in doing so, thrives against those strictures."

"I would definitely like to tear down this wall I've built around myself, because I don't need it anymore. And I know that intellectually, and on good days, I know that emotionally. I don't want to be thin, I want to be smaller, because I just do. I think it makes so many things easier just on a day-to-day basis, and also I have no small amount of vanity, so I just want to be able to find cuter clothes. Sometimes it's really basic things that I would like for myself."

"It’s used like a weapon. What it means is, ‘I don’t want to think about your concerns. I don’t want to have to extend my empathy.’…We have to think with nuance, and unfortunately public discourse rarely allows for nuance. And see where that has gotten us."