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Comparison Between Life On The Hyphen And Next Year In Cuba by Gustavo Perez Firmat The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don't belong to English though I belong nowhere else, if not here in English. Gustavo Perez Firmat, The Pulitzer Prize nominee was born in Havana, Cuba, and raised in Miami, Florida. A poet, fiction writer, and scholar is the author of ten books and over seventy essays and reviews.
The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Perez Firmat earned his Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. His books of literary and cultural criticism include Idle Fictions (1982), Literature and Liminality (1986), The Cuban Condition (1989), Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? (1990), Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (1994), which was awarded the Eugene M. Kayden University Press National Book Award for 1994, and My Own Private Cuba (1999). The English-language edition of his novel, El ano que viene estamos en Cuba (Next Year in Cuba: A Cubano's Coming of Age in America), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction in 1995.
Life on the Hyphen was awarded the Eugene M. Kayden University Press National Book Award for 1994, received Honorable Mention in the Modern Language Association's Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize, and the Latin American Studies Association's Bryce Wood Book Award. In 1995, Prof. Perez Firmat was named Duke University Scholar/Teacher of the Year, Duke University's highest award for teaching excellence.
In 1997, Newsweek included him among " 100 Americans to watch for the next century" and Hispanic Business Magazine selected him as one of the " 100 Most Influential Hispanics. " He is currently the David Feinson Professor of Humanities at Columbia University. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way is a veritable verbal mambo delightfully and convincingly executed. And the mambo is no mere figure of speech, for the author uses it throughout his study to suggest the tricky rhythms of Cuban-American life and its expression in popular culture. The mambo also serves as a structural device in a book divided into six chapters and six mambos, the latter insightful, personal glimpses into this culture that seems to draw attention simultaneously to what it is and is not. Cuban-American culture is a relatively recent phenomenon, a fact that limits the scope of this study to the last fifty years, and that makes one realize while reading this book that we are dealing with something almost evanescent. After all, what becomes of the exiles once Castro is gone?
What of their children who are raised bi culturally and bilingually but who have no or few first-hand experiences of Cuba itself? Cuban sociologist Ruben Rumbaut has labeled the immigrant generation of those born in Cuba who came to the U. S. as children or young adults the " 1. 5 " or "one-and-a-half" generation. Perez Firmat draws on this definition and announces that "Cuban-American culture has been to a considerable extent an achievement of the 1. 5 generation. " His study bears this out. Perez Firmat identifies the dominant forces shaping Cuban-American culture as tradition and translation, with the former creating continuity and the latter introducing distance; tradition binds while translation transmutes.
It is significant that the hyphen is understood here as a link, a plus rather than a minus, for Cuban-American culture has not developed as the result of conquest, as in the case of the Mexican-American and the Native American. It is, rather, a culture of accommodation, what the author terms "appositional" rather than "oppositional" in nature. The first chapter discusses the founding father of Cuban-American accommodation, Desi Arnaz, the singer-actor-bandleader-husband of the Lucy of I Love Lucy. Perez Firmat appropriately gives Arnaz credit, not only for his contributions to one of the most popular television shows in the history of the medium, but also for his skillful negotiation of the space of being Cuban in America. While expressing his Cubanness in multiple ways, particularly linguistic and musical, Arnaz also makes it clear that he chooses to be in the United States and that he married Lucy because she was American, not in spite of it. The discussion of the I Love Lucy show is the best one yet done, in part because of its skillful exploration of the relationship between the I and the Lucy of the title in all its social, sexual, and cultural ramifications.
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