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Navigate Books of the Month: Drawing
from Life Red
Lobster, White Trash and the Blue Lagoon: Joe Queenan's America A
Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency Half
and Half: Writers on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural Split:
a Countercultural Childhood Previous Books of
the Month: |
A TOPOGRAPHY OF THE SELF Half and
Half: Writers on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural
Francisco Goldman, son of a Guatemalan Spanish Catholic mother and Jewish father, experienced racism growing up in the United States but never as overtly as when he moved to Spain. On his first morning in Madrid, four policemen, thinking he was North African (the despised "moro"), assaulted him and demanded his passport. It was one of many altercations Goldman would have during his short stay in Madrid, where he was frequently refused access to stores, thrown out of bars and turned away from clubs. This constant humiliation led Goldman, author of The Long Night of White Chickens, to discern the true nature of racism: "Bigotry...feels like the opposite of life. [It is] about denying a person's humanity, his very existence, of humiliating and even castrating him every day." Goldman is one of 18 contributors, including Julia Álvarez, David Mura and Malcolm Gladwell, to Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural. Pretend political correctness never happened and understand these essays for what they are: a topography of the self as it divides among cultures, classes and countries. Although dealing with hostile police is awful, many of the authors' biggest difficulties actually lie within the sociology of their own family. "Like haunting background music that I could barely hear," writes Roxane Farmanfarmaian, daughter of a Mormon and a Muslim, "the symmetries between my parents' worlds, repeated with uncanny consistency, implied a unity I could not grasp." Eventually, family does provide some consistency for the authors, although most admit it often takes extreme circumstances to force this intimacy. Zairean-American Phillipe Wamba writes, "My brother's funeral is the only occasion on which I can remember seeing both sides of my extended family together, my father's Zairean friends and relatives alongside my African American mother's relatives in from Ohio and Michigan.... In the midst of my sadness, I felt whole in a way I never had before." Sometimes, the writing in Half and Half becomes Shogun tedious (do you really need to know the full names of a stranger's 17 aunts?), but funny facts--Johnny Depp and Kevin Bacon are black--keep things from being painfully PC. --Valarie Smith |
originally published July 29, 1998