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What drove you to Alejandro Morales’
work?
Truth be told, I was driven to
Alejandro Morales’ artwork the way many, many individuals in academia are: By
my professor in a graduate seminar who assigned us to read him! You know, some
individuals are driven by an author’s media popularity, some by a book cover
design, or others by a relative’s or friend’s recommendation. But I was
honestly driven to Morales without choice by my professor at UCSB, Carl
Gutiérrez-Jones. Morales was on the required reading list in an exciting new graduate
seminar Carl designed entitled “The New West.” Up to that point I casually
heard of Alejandro Morales, of course, but had not personally or professionally
encountered any of his literary art. So, I can express to you with propriety that
my book was started way back in a small, pallid graduate seminar room—a very
cool thing, actually, since it proves what can happen when a graduate seminar
doesn’t theorize, pontificate, assume, or assign presentations…but inspires and
teaches.
Is there a specific way you’d say he
influenced Chican@ literature?
Well, however one wishes to define
it, Chicana/o literature as a whole
has perhaps not been so much actively or directly “influenced” by Alejandro
Morales, as it certainly has been enhanced and intensified by him—particularly
intensified. When one increases that intensity of something, in this case with
art, they increase scope, emotion, force, as well as effect, right? So as Morales’
writings range from exposé to historiography, from myth to testimony, from saga
to romance, from profane to decorous, and from Spanish to English languages (and
back again), one could argue that through his art he has single-handedly made
the Chicana/o literary realm a hell
of a lot larger or more wonderfully extensive. Speaking as a Chicano, if I were a serious creative
writer of novels, I would find Morales’ writings as guiding inspiration, or influential
example, of what is artistically possible in contemporary American ethnic
literature.
What initially got you interested
into Morales' representations of the body and his "flesh-and-blood
aesthetics"?
When something is constantly in
your face, when something is a consistent visible force, when something keeps
arising to the same degree and content while shifting its form, it is hard not to become attentive to and eventually
fascinated with that something. That “something” in Alejandro Morales’ case is
the flesh-and-blood bodily figurations operating everywhere in his literary
work—the interest of which initially began with my reading of The Rag Doll Plagues in the
aforementioned graduate seminar. In it are amazing moments of bodily
penetrations of all sorts, of bodily transgressions of various kinds, bodily
destructions of such savage and slight means, as well as suggestive and profane
bodily eroticism. And all the while, surrounding these moments in the novel,
are seminal, salivary, fecal, urinary, and bloody fluids that actually became a
bit seductive to me. I read on and read more, and found myself virtually searching
for them and mapping them out. This developed into a bona fide interest, and I so
wanted to see if it existed in Morales’ other novels…which it did.
In your introduction, I like that you
mention how the worlds in Morales' novels "reflect the fleshy, fragile,
and frightening aspects of our being". Can you briefly summarize a
way/ways in which this becomes a powerful exploration and tool for Morales'
storytelling.
Well, we are—and always shall
be—creatures of physical, spiritual, emotional and psychological being. We are human beings, and as such we are mortal,
corporal, breakable in both body and soul, and capable of such high and
startling degrees of real or imagined fears. If Morales’ novels indeed reflect
this—and they most certainly do—then focusing on this is, in effect, a tool to
remind us that his artwork is primarily about our human condition. It is in
many ways work that ultimately surpasses ancestral traditions, tribal
mentalities, or any explicit cultural ethnologies. In other words, its thematics
are focused well on the fierce and beautiful range of American ethnic experience,
no doubt, yet its broader ultimate thematics always take readers squarely to a
human place—a place extra-ethnic, existing beyond race. Morales takes us
readers to a place that all readers—younger and older, male and female, casual
or professional, Chicana/o or gabacha/o, etc.—will find clear and
compelling testaments to their aforementioned mortality, fragility, and high
proclivity for fear, violence, and self-doubt. This is not to assert that his
works are only dark, as they are also affirming, and affirm the not-so-dark
human truths of survival, family, love, courage, tradition, loyalty, just to
name a few. But to fully and honestly explore Alejandro Morales’ literature,
one cannot forsake that physical, psychological and emotional human figurations
operating at its core.
Order your copy of this fine new volume from SDSU Press today: The Flesh-and-Blood Aesthetics of Alejandro Morales: Sex, Disease, and Figuration
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