Daily Fare: Essays from the Multicultural Experience

Daily Fare presents seventeen artfully crafted essays in which writers representing a broad spectrum of the American experience ponder the meaning of living in a nation of diverse and competing cultures. Consistently thought-provoking and often intensely personal, these pieces confront such themes as the question of identity, the individual's relation to culture, problems of communication, and the need to strike a balance between preserving traditions and merging them.
Memories both tender and painful fill these pages. Toi Derricotte, recalling her experiences as the only black person at an artist colony, often found her sense of isolation almost unbearable: "No one can help. Only I, myself. But how can I let go? My face is a mask, like Uncle Tom's, my heart twisted in rage and fear." In "The Death of Fred Astaire," Leslie Lawrence reflects on the difficult decisions that led to her becoming a lesbian mother and the mix of emotions - apprehension, maternal longing, and, finally, joyous fulfillment - that accompanied her choices. In "Kubota," Garrett Hongo describes how his grandfather enjoined him to learn and to give witness to the injustices committed against Japanese Americans by their own government during World War II; Hongo accepts this responsibility as "a ritual payment the young owe their elders who have survived."
Several bilingual essayists contemplate their relationship to the English language - a language that can empower its users or deny them access to the dominant culture. For Judith Ortiz Cofer, reading books from the public library as a child gave her a sense of freedom as well as her first intimations of the writing career she would later pursue. Alberto Alvaro Rios, however, reminds us that learning English in the first grade also meant being punished for using Spanish: "Spanish was bad. Okay. We, then, must be bad kids." Still other essays explore what it means to confront the confusions of a plural family heritage or to be a black artist from a Catholic background when so much of black culture is tied to the Protestant tradition.
"Despite the current interest in multiculturalism," Kathleen Aguero observes, "the notion of culture in the United States today is too often synonymous with predominantly white, male, heterosexual, upper-class, Eurocentric interests." In bringing together writers from beyond this tradition, Daily Fare provides a valuable perspective on our current moment in history. As Jack Agueros, summing up both the dilemma and the pleasure of our society's diversity, writes, "It's hard and wasteful to be purely ethnic in America - definitely wasteful to be totally assimilated."

In 17 personal essays, writers from outside the white male tradition offer varying perspectives on their place in society. Though some essays devolve into breast-beating or celebrate minor epiphanies, most are more engaging. Toi Derricotte's episodic memoir of her stint as the only African American at an artist's colony recounts some condescending white behavior: "Now that I am the 'known' black here, everything with a tinge of blackness on it is delivered to me." Kiana Davenport, half Hawaiian and half Caucasian, warmly remembers finding her identity at a New York City YWCA, in the company of a woman from South Africa and another from India. Leslie Lawrence, a lesbian and feminist, offers an amusing and sunny story of how she conceived a child through alternative ("there's nothing artificial about it") insemination. Jack Agueros, reflecting on the diverse foods of multicultural New York, concludes, "Ah, Bread, you make me realize that it is hard and wasteful to be purely ethnic in America--definitely wasteful to be totally assimilated." Aguero, a poet, is the author of Thirsty Day .
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Seventeen autobiographical essays of varying quality that address the authors' experiences ``outside''--as editor Aguero (Humanities/Pine Manor College) puts it--the ``dominant tradition'' of ``white, male, heterosexual, upper-class, Eurocentric'' culture. A number of the contributors fall prey to banality by perpetrating stereotypes they eagerly purport to examine or overturn. Toi Derricotte, a black poet, insists that her light skin ``keeps things, literally, from being either black or white,'' but quickly retreats into a stance of victimhood when she recounts the racial insensitivities of fellow writers at a writers' colony. Far from exploring a unique or multilayered cultural heritage, the mainstream language of self-assertion and self-absorption too often employed here translates into a claim for literary attention: Several authors quote from their own work and relate the progress of their careers. The most successful pieces often approach the question of cultural authority obliquely or not at all. Gary Soto's stark evocation of working at a tire factory with illegal Mexican immigrants is spare, unsentimental, and authentic. Jack Ageros's cosmopolitan paean to different breads he has encountered while growing up in N.Y.C. includes a description of one bakery whose ethnic provenance he can't recall. Though the ethnic grandparent unfamiliar with American customs and wisdom is a fixture in several essays, Suzanne Odette Khuri in ``Jiddo: A Portrait'' evokes a much more complex view of the Lebanese grandfather she barely remembers by dovetailing his last years with the descent of Beirut into chaos. There are other accomplished essays here by Norman Paul Hyett, Kiana Davenport, Judith Oritz Cofer, and Garrett Hongo. A mixed bag, assembled under the "common theme" of the "relationship between culture and the problem of identity." -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.