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No Furniture So CharmingRolando Hinojosa-smithPublished online: 24 Mar 2010.

To cite this article: Rolando Hinojosa-smith (1997) No Furniture So Charming,ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, 10:2, 42-45, DOI:10.1080/08957699709602280

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course. Read books that are not about you and yours. Wasn’t Dostoevsky the ultimate Russian writer because Russia was the unavoidable backdrop and setting and scene and circumstance and not theme of his fiction? Write stories as though it is over and we have won. Unless it’s a story about the fight. Like Zeta Acosta’s. Unless I’m wrong about all the above.

DAGOBERTO GILB United States

No Furniture So Charming

It’s not inappropriate, I think, to label my being a writer (to use Marx’s term) “an historical inevitability.”

I come from a family of readers; my parents, when not engaged in read- ing individually, took turns reading to each other. And, you could always find my brothers and sisters with their noses in some book or other. Growing up, I supposed that everyone in the world loved reading as much as we did.

It happened that my hometown, Mercedes, Texas, pop. 6,900, had a well-stocked public library, and its collections were rounded off by the high school’s library. Added to which, classmates with more money than I would pass on to me their discarded books, and thus, in time, I accumulat- ed my own library.

Languages and the putting together of words fascinated me then, and the fascination continues, whether the words are put together by other writers or by what I have come up with, from time to time.

My first schooling was that taught by exiled Mexican men and women who earned their living teaching in my hometown during one phase or another of the Mexican Revolution. Too, during my teens, I spent my sum- mers in Arteaga, Coahuila, and was bused daily to the Ateneo Fuente prep school in Saltillo.

In passing, Mercedes stands in the middle of the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, some forty miles west of where the river empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The Texas-Tamaulipas border, to us borderers, was and remains a jurisdictional barrier although not a cultural one; needless to say, the border is a porous one and has been since the founding of the region by the Spanish Crown in 1749 under the leadership of Jost de Escandh, later the Conde de Sierra Gorda. The first five wagon trains of settlers had set out from Mexico City, Tampico, Querktaro, Saltillo, and Monterrey during 174743.

The first census was taken in 1750, and various Hinojosas appear on the rolls. As for the Smiths, my grandfather, Abraham Newmann Smith, was

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Spring 1997, Vol. 10, No. 2 43

enticed to the Valley by lawyer Jim Wells, who brought some of the first permanent Anglo settlers to that part of Texas. My grandfather had served as a Union soldier, and I guess that he owed his job as postmaster in Pro- greso, Texas, to being on the winning side.

To point to one difference between Valley folk and those from upriver, Octaviano Zapata, a Valleyite, had fought as a Union guemlla leader, where- as the Confederates produced Captain Santos Benavides, a Laredo native.

My mother, Carrie Effie Smith, was the youngest of nine Anglo Roman Catholics. She arrived in the Valley in 1887, at age six months and grew up speaking both languages. She was equally adept in both, when it came to reading and writing. My father was also bilingual and, as my mother, bicultural.

All five of us children were raised in the same manner. My lives as a student, soldier, teacher, parent, laborer, office and sales

manager, and as a bureaucrat (along with other very odd jobs) have helped and influenced my writing. Subsequent life experiences and continued reading have added to my writing arsenal.

I’ve also been blessed with rude health. Such, though, was not the case as a child-I was sickly, although this too was a boon: I missed many school days, and my parents kept me supplied with reading material in both English and Spanish.

Readers often ask which language I prefer; the answer is always the same: “My worry is not which language I prefer or use, my worry is if I have anything to write about or not.”

With this bit of archeology, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that my first two novels (Estampas del Valle, 1973; Klail City y sus alrededores, 1976) were written in Spanish. I waited ten years to render each in English-The Valley, 1983, and Klail City, 1976. The third work, Korean Love Songs, 1978, was the first work I wrote in English. I’ve made desultory attempts to recast it in Spanish, but to no avail. It could be that my army service was lived, for the most part, in English and that this presents some sort of stum- bling block, though not, I daresay, a writer’s block. Still, who’s to say I won’t wake up some day and begin to set it down in Spanish.

The fourth part of the Klail City Death Trip Series is Mi Querido Rafa, 1981, with its English rendition, Dear Rafe, 1983. The next work, Rites and Witnesses, 1982, was also in English.

A word on form. When Estampas was first published (1973, Quinto Sol Press Prize), the critics did not know what to call the work. I said it was a novel and let it go at that. That it was carnivalesque, in the Bakhtinian sense, was not mentioned at the time. The term heteroglossia, however, was used years later. Klail City y sus alrededores (Casa de las AmCricas Prize, 1976) was much like Estampas in form, in that I again eschewed the single-protagonist bent of the nineteenth century and allowed multiple voices and points of view to be presented without authorial privilege.

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Korean Love Songs is in narrative verse, again another form, and the same with Mi querido Rafa (epistolary cum reportage with a narrator who calls himself the Wri). Rites and Witnesses is another matter: a three-parter made up mostly of dialogues in the first part and monologues in the sec- ond. The third part consists of intercalated conversations by several young artillerymen on some of the many hills in Korea.

Form interests me greatly, and I continue to explore what it is one can do with it and how far one can get with it. The same goes with genre.

The series continued with Partners in Crime (A Rafe Buenmstro Mys- tery), 1985; Claros varones de BelkedFair Gentlemen of Belken County, 1987; Becky and Her Friends, 1990, and Los amigos de Becky, 1991. Regarding Becky: I started the novel in Spanish, put a pretty decent dent into it, only to hit a stone wall; I waited to see if the novel would get going again but nothing happened. I then started it in English, and it worked. I complet- ed the Spanish version after the English version was published. There is no narrator in Becky; the work, after the briefest of introductions in dramatic form, consists of thirty or so speakers who voice their opinions for, or against, Becky, a Texas Mexican Roman Catholic. She leaves her husband and a year later marries Jehd Malacara, a recurring character in the series.

In 1989 I started on The Useless Servants, filled out some four or five large-sized binders, and dropped it in 199 1. I wasn’t happy with it. I picked it up again in 1992 and finished it that year; its publication date is 1993. The Useless Servants again differs from the others in form and genre. It focuses on the Korean War, and I decided that a log or journal would be better suited to tell as much as possible in 160 pages by using truncated phrases to describe war’s constant confusion. War is the great adventure, according to most people who’ve never been fired upon; what war pro- duces, aside from the dead on both sides, are wounds that last through gen- erations. Servants is the second full book on the Korean War, where again I decided against using the linear narrative with long expository sections and also omitting “he said,” “he thought,” and so on. The force of few words, as Emerson said, which had also served me well in the narrative verse of Korean Love Songs.

Some six years ago, a critic, for reasons of his own, poor man, wrote I had stopped writing in Spanish. The casual reader will note that this is not so; obviously, I’m not responsible for someone else’s erroneous opinions.

A few words on universality. The characters I write about are not out of the ordinary, neither royalty nor gods. They’re universal types living in what passes for them as a reasonable reality; they live and die, laugh and cry, are capable of abnegation and sacrifice but, as humans, are not above betrayal of friendships and loyalty. Thus, they live lives of contradictions, that most recognizable of human attributes.

Influences? There’s no denying them, but they’re too numerous to list here.

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One last word. At one time or another, I’ve been called a social realist, a postmodernist, and whatnot. I’m that and much more: a writer who, at pre- sent, is busy working on another segment of The Klail City Death Trip Series.

ROLAND0 HINOJOSA-SMITH United States

Early and Continuous

Most of the American literature I’ve read has been in translation. I know that in such a way I’ve lost much of the enjoyment and power of reading a writer in his own language, and it has limited me-I haven’t read poetry, for example-(the access to English books isn’t good either), but my con- tact with American literature has been early and continuous. I must say that I like it that way, as a common reader or, in any case, not in a systematic program.

As a child, I read Louisa May Alcott and Mark Twain. I reread Huckle- berry Finn as a grown-up, and I liked it as much as or even more than the first time.

As a teenager I was influenced by Howard Fast-Sacco & Vanzetti, The Winston Affail; Clarkton, and others-I read practically all his books. By 1970 I traveled to Denmark for a year. I guess I could call it a formative year. I read (all in English) Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, The Autobiography of Malcolm X , The Chil- dren of Sa‘nchez by Oscar Lewis, Teaching as a Subversive Activig by Postman and Weingartner. I read James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and all the books of Ray Bradbury (I really loved him).

Back in Ecuador and a few years later, I started literature as a career. In those years, but not all in the literature program, I read Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O’Neill, John Updike, Truman Capote, Henry Miller, Carson Mc- Cullers, Jack Kerouac, Dalton Trumbo.

With Faulkner, I understood the sense of tragedy even though I’d already read Greek tragedy. I remember I went for a short trip to the U.S. just after I read Light in August, and all the time I was willing but afraid to encounter a Faulkner character. I love Sherwood Anderson and his subtle perception of gestures, of human beings. The ridiculousness and the cruelty of Amer- ican racism I found in Sinclair Lewis’s books. I was impressed by Capote, James, and Miller, and I loved Kate Millet’s essay about Henry.

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