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PARTISAN REVIEW
plication I hadn't practiced since the first time I read Brooks
&
War–
ren's
Understanding Poetry.
Who but a determined exegetical Talmud–
ist could explain the reasoning that stood behind the separation of
Puerto Rican from Hispanic-slash-Latin? Were the writers among
Poets
&
Writers hinting that Puerto Ricans were not Hispanics?
Or were the poets in that organization trying to tell me that Puerto
Ricans were Latin in language and religion but Anglo-Saxon in all
else?
Even if Poets
&
Writers did not intend
Other
to be an outlaw or
a misfit, the ramifications of the list for American culture are consid–
erable. But what exactly is the purpose of this list? Was it being of–
fered merely to satisfy some state or federal funding regulation? Was
it a Swiftian commentary on the Lilliputian vision which has, oflate,
become incorporated in our idea of book reviewing and literary criti–
cism? Will the day soon come when only black women critics will re–
view books by black women writers and New York Irish writers will
insist that New York Irish critics are the only reviewers capable of
"understanding" their work? (A friend recently suggested that the
day had already arrived. More and more, we see books by black
writers being reviewed by blacks, books by feminists being reviewed
by feminists, etcetera. As a result, an already fragmented culture be–
comes increasingly fragmented, and one is not forced to confront
challenges to the dominant culture. Few white critics today write
about black writers, and many of them are all-too-willing to hide
behind the argument that only blacks can understand blacks. Some–
times, nonsense is convenient.) Maybe Poets
&
Writers had created
the list as a sly and deliberately comic move in the latest American
cultural shell game. Perhaps the list was simply a way of telling the
world that the erocess of division and subdivision - this potpourri of
racial, sexual, ethnic, and political endorsements - was potentially
as infinite as it was meaningless.
And perhaps it was shortsighted on my part to allow the list to
irritate me. After all, I had no quarrel with writers for whom gender
was the chief source of the imagination. And I knew enough about
the workings of race in America not to question those of my fellow
writers for whom it was the most pressing of realities . A good deal of
my own writing had been about people now lumped together, no
doubt as a subcategory of Poets
&
Writers's
Other,
as "white ethnics"
(although I had written about them, I reminded myself, for the same
reasons a writer born in a small town in Georgia is likely to write
about small-town Southerners: they were the people I knew who had
lived the stories I knew well enough to tell).
