Braschi's Empire of Dreams

Empire of Dreams (El imperio de los sueños, 1988) is a postmodern book of poetry by Giannina Braschi, who is widely considered "one of the most revolutionary voices in Latin American literature today". Empire of Dreams debuted in Spain to acclaim as "El imperio de los sueños" in 1988, with an English translation by Tess O'Dwyer later inaugurating the Yale Library of World Literature in Translation (1994). Composed from 1980 to 1986, this series represents the first major phase of Braschi's oeuvre: poetry written entirely in classical and modern Spanish.

Forming a hybrid of prose poetry, drama, musical theater, manifesto, gossip, autobiography, diary, literary theory, and antinovel, Empire of Dreams is a mixed genre trilogy on the culture of excess. The central axis of this epic poem is the Latin American immigrant's optimistic new life in the "Big Apple", which is dramatized by Braschi as the epicenter of the American Dream. However, social and linguistic references to other Latin cities and neighborhoods abound, such as "the Latin American Quarter in Paris, the barrio chino barcelonés, the zaguanes of Borges's Buenos Aires, and the colonial houses in Old San Juan".

The author later writes the first full-length Spanglish novel Yo-Yo Boing! and a controversial work of political fiction in English, United States of Banana, which provides a scathing critique of the false promise of meritocracy within the American Dream.

Subject, Structure, and Themes

Empire of Dreams deals with issues of artistic creation, immigration, commercialism, capitalism, identity crisis, sexual and gender ambiguity, and revolution. The narrator journeys through a "phantasmagoria of internal and external trials in order to experience the center—of political power, of meaning, of feeling, and of personal identity".

The work has been compared structurally to the Chinese box and the Matryoshka doll, given that the book has six books inside.

Part one, "Assault on Time," is a sequence of meditative prose poems on the subject of love lost and the ineptitude of language and grammar to communicate emotions. It is Braschi’s first book of poetry and it begins with the breaking of silence: "Behind the word is silence./Behind what sounds is the door." Letters take on a life of their own, roaming the streets of New York, and punctuation marks, such as colons and semicolons denote pivotal points in a relationship.

Part two, "Profane Comedy," turns loud as the poet pays homage to the evolution of poetry and performance, especially comedia dell'arte. "Profane Comedy" is composed of four books of poetry, each with humorous gusto and a flair for the grotesque: 1. "Book of Clowns and Buffoons", 2. "Poems of the World; or The Book of Wisdom", 3. "Pastoral; or, The Inquisition of Memories", and 4. "Song of Nothingness". Throughout, Braschi intermingles television jingles and pop songs by the likes of The Beatles and Madonna with poems of the Spanish Golden Age. References include Luis de León, Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Luis de Góngora, Garcilaso de la Vega , and Francisco Quevedo, while cameo appearances are made by poets, painters, philosophers, and composers, such as: César Vallejo, Rimbaud, Goethe, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Breughal, Beethoven, Van Gogh, and Picasso, among others. Quotations of classical poets abound, transformed by the appropriating hand of a joyful poet who uses the "sampling technique of rap music" and hip hop. Though Braschi writes with a strong literary tradition behind her and from an erudite standpoint, "she imbues her text with jollity and a brilliant energy." The text unfolds through a series of violent and surreal theatrical scenes performed by clowns, buffoons, shepherds, lead soldiers, magicians, madmen, witches, and fortune tellers. These gender-bending migrant characters attack and occupy the American mainstream, including business centers and tourist attractions. In a climatic episode of "Pastoral ; or, the Inquisition of Memories", shepherds cause traffic jams on 5th Avenue during the Puerto Rican Day Parade, ring the bells of St. Patrick's Cathedral and take over the observation deck of the Empire State Building where they dance and sing, "Now we do whatever we please, whatever we please, whatever we damn well please."

Part three, "Intimate Diary of Solitude," is a lighthearted antinovel that mocks the Latin American Boom and dictator novels. The composition is a mix-mash of flash fiction, pop songs, tabloid, commercials, diary excerpts, political and literary manifestos, performance art, ending with a philosophical treatise on the writer’s role in the modern age. The heroine Mariquita Samper, a Macy's make-up artist who dreams of being a star, calls for a revolution of "poetic eggs" and shoots the narrator of Latin American Boom novels (such as One Hundred Years of Solitude) who keeps rewriting her own diary in order to turn it into a bestseller. The debate between quality and originality versus fame and fortune is a constant theme in Empire of Dreams. The work closes with a quotation from an anonymous poem of Medieval Spanish literature, a line from "El Conde Arnaldos": "I only sing my song/to whomever follows me."

Influences

Giannina Braschi credits T.S. Eliot’s "The Waste Land" as the single most impactful English language poem to inform the rhythmic shifts and the inspiration from which she creates a chorus of anonymous voices to capture the collective conscience of the masses. Feminist scholar and poet Alicia Ostriker notes in the introduction to Empire of Dreams that the poet’s voice sounds decidedly "macho" and yet it can be theoretically "paired with Luisa Valenzuela, Clarice Lispector, Luce Irigaray, Helene Cixous, and Marguerite Duras, and obviously she owes a great deal to Gertrude Stein." Braschi has published scholarly works on titans of Spanish language poetry by Cervantes, Garcilaso, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Antonio Machado, Federico Garcia Lorca, and César Vallejo, from whose work she quotes throughout Empire of Dreams. In an interview with NBC Latino, Braschi identified her favorite poet as César Vallejo: "Vallejo is a jack-in-the-box who performs the movement of my spirit. No matter how much you push him down into the box, the poet always bounces back to affirm his love for life."

Giannina Braschi

Main article: Giannina Braschi

Giannina Braschi, a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, is considered an influential and revolutionary voice in contemporary Latin American literature. She is the author of the postmodern poetry classic "El imperio de los sueños/Empire of Dreams" (1988), the Spanglish dramatic novel Yo-Yo Boing!, and the postcolonial dramatic novel "United States of Banana (2011). Her collective work explores the politics of empire and independence, while capturing the trials and tribulations of the Latin American immigrant in the United States. She has won awards and grants from National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, PEN American Center, Ford Foundation, InterAmericas, Danforth Scholarship, Reed Foundation, El Diario, Rutgers University, and Puerto Rican Institute for Culture. With the publication of "United States of Banana," CARAS Magazine named Braschi one of the most influential Puerto Ricans in 2012.

See also

• Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
• Yo-Yo Boing!
• United States of Banana
• Experimental theater
• Postmodern
• Pastoral
• Nuyorican Movement
• McOndo
• Spanglish
• Puerto Rican literature
• Epic Poetry

Further reading

• Augenbraum, Harold and Stavans, Ilan (eds.). Lengua Fresca: Latinos Writing on the Edge, Mariner Press, 2006.
• Barnstone, Willis. Literature of Asia, Africa, and Latin America: From Antiquity to the Present, Prentie Hall, 1999.
• Barnstone, Willis, Literatures of Latin America, Prentice Hall, p. 460, 1991.
• Bidaseca, Karina. "Written in racialized bodies. Language, memory and (Post) colonial genealogies of femicide in Latin America." Journal of Latin American Communication Research 3.2 (2014): 135-161.
• Castillo, Debra. ReDreaming America: Toward a Bilingual Culture, State University of New York, 2005.
• Carrion, Maria Mercedes. "Geography, (M)Other Tongues and the Role of Translation in Giannina Braschi’s El imperio de los sueños", Studies in 20th Century Literature, 20:1 (1996), 167-192
• Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo. "Colonial figures in motion: globalization and translocality in contemporary Puerto Rican Literature in the United States." Centro 14 (2002): 4-25.
• Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo Manuel. " Under the Skirt of Liberty": Giannina Braschi Rewrites Empire." American Quarterly 66.3 (2014): 801-818.
• Daniele, Daniela. Review of "United States of Banana", The Evergreen Review, Issue #128, New York, November 2011.
• Echeverría, Miriam Balboa. "Mirada y marejada en" El imperio de los sueños" de Giannina Braschi." Confluencia (2002): 98-103.
• Garrigos, Cristina. Review of "United States of Banana", The Evergreen Review, Issue #128, New York, November 2011.
• Gonzalez, Christopher Thomas. "Hospitable Imaginations: Contemporary Latino/a Literature and the Pursuit of a Readership", doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2012.
• Gray Díaz, N., ‘Performing Soledad: the Demythification of Identity in Giannina Braschi’s El imperio de los sueños, Romance Notes, 37:3 (1997), 331-338.
• Goldstein, David and Thacker, Audrey (eds.), Complicating Constructions, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2007.
• Gonzalez, Madelena. "United States of Banana (2011), Elizabeth Costello (2003) and Fury (2001): Portrait of the Writer as the 'Bad Subject' of Globalisation", Études britanniques contemporaines, Volume 46, July 2014.
• Gonzalez, Madelena and Laplace-Claverie, Helene. "Minority Theater on the Global Stage: Challenging Paradigms From the Margins," Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. "Puerto Rico’s premier poet and novelist."
• Haydee Rivera, Carmen. "El poder de la palabra y la experiencia transnacional: una entrevista con Giannina Braschi," Op-Cit: Revista del Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Puerto Rico, 2013.
• Haydee Rivera, Carmen. "Embracing alternate discourses on migration: Giannina Braschi's and Luisita López Torregrosa's multi-dimensional literary schemes," Umbral, University of Puerto Rico, April 2014.
• Horno-Delgado, Asunción. "Imperiosa y Anti-imperial: Giannina Braschi," Hispanic Poetry Review: HPR 4.7-10 (2002): 37.
• Gonzales, Madelena and Laplace-Claverie, Helene, "Minority Theatre on the Global Stage: Challenging Paradigms from the Margins," Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle, England, 2012.
• Kuebler, Carolyn, "Empire of Dreams Review," Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol 15, no. 1, Spring 1995.
• Loustau, Laura. "Nomadismos lingüísticos y culturales en Yo-Yo Boing! de Giannina Braschi", Revista Iberoamericana, volume 71:211, 437-448, 2005
• Loustau, Laura. Cuerpos errantes: literatura Latina y latinoamericana en Estados Unidos, Viterbo Editora, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2002.
• Loustau, Laura Rosa. Cuerpos y textos en tránsito: un acercamiento a la literatura Latina y latinoamericana en Estados Unidos. University of California, Berkeley, 2000.
• Marting, Diane E. "New/Nueva York in Giannina Braschi's 'Poetic Egg': Fragile Identity, Postmodernism, and Globalization", The Global South, volume 4:1., 2010.
• Morris, Barbara. "Paradoxes of Postmodernism in Giannina Braschi's El imperio de los sueños." Conflictos Culturales en la Literatura Contemporánea. 17 ensayos y una discusión: 44-53.
• Ostriker, Alicia. "Introduction to Empire of Dreams," Yale University Press, New Haven, 1994.
• Popovich Ljudmila, Mila. "Metafictions, Migrations, Metalives: Narrative Innovations and Migrant Women’s Aesthetics in Giannina Braschi and Etel Adnan," 'International Journal of the Humanities, 117–128, 2010.
• Sommer, Doris, Introduction to Yo-Yo Boing!, Latin American Review Press, Pittsburgh, 1998.
• Ramos, Francisco José. "Postfacio." El imperio de los sueños, Anthropos Editorial del Hombre, (1988): 233-253.
• Remeseria, Claudio. "Summer reads: brilliant takes on Nuyoricans, random murder and narco-literatura," NBC Latino, August 2013.
• Rivera Monclova, Marta S. Discrimination, evasion, and livability in four New York Puerto Rican narratives. Doctorial dissertation, Tufts University, 2010.
• Rodriguez Matos, Jaime, Unmothered Americas: Poetry and Universality, Commons Digitalis at Columbia University Dissertation, 2005.
• Waldron, John V. "Killing Colonialism’s Ghosts in McOndo: Mayra Santos Febres and Giannina Braschi,"Cuaderno Internacional de Estudios Humanísticos y Literatura, 2011.
• Zimmerman, Marc. "Defending Their Own in the Cold: The Cultural Turns of U.S. Puerto Ricans", University of Illinois, Chicago, 2011.

External links

• Under the Skirt of Liberty, http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/american_quarterly/v066/66.3.cruz-malave.pdf
• Empire of Dreams Review, Publishers Weekly, 1994.
• The Evergreen Review, featuring reviews of "United States of Banana" by Cristina Garrigos and Daniela Daniele and videos of Giannina Braschi, November 2011.
• Library of Congress Archives, Washington DC, September 24, 2012. National Book Festival (Transcript and Webcast: Giannina Braschi)