From The Tropic of L.A.

By CRISTINA GARCIA Kate Braverman

Q. The American literary scene is populated by many regional writers like yourself, but few enjoy national audiences. Why?

A. Who was it that said, "The region is everything, the nation is a fiction" ? New York writers are really regional writers. It's just that one region purports to be the sensibility of the nation.

Q. Is geography destiny in writing?

A. Yes.

Q. How is that so in your case?

^ A. I am a native daughter of Los Angeles. I remember when it was like a tropical fishing village. There is so little tradition here that it lends itself to experimentation. No one's been watching for so long that you don't have to worry about taboos. Los Angeles is a new cosmopolitan refugee city for the world. It's a city of confluences. I'm addicted to the metallic, postapocalyptic sunsets, the tropical identity, the Santa Ana blowing through its hot Spanish mouth.

Q. As we've seen in the recent earthquake, nature here is unruly, unpredictable. How does this affect your writing?

A. Living the threat of arbitrary destruction keeps us on the cutting edge.

Q. Has being a Los Angeles writer worked against you?

A. Yes, in certain ways. There's a bizarre prejudice that exists in the New York publishing establishment that any work outside the tri-state area is being done by trained chimpanzees, that geography screens out sensibility. There's an idea that all Los Angeles writing is about the movie industry, that it's vulgar, shallow and banal.

California is looked at the way Italy used to be viewed in England. It's sexual and dangerous. Something could happen. A person could change. There is an element of hostility to Los Angeles that has a racist undertone. The fact that this is a Latin region, with its patios of bougainvillaea and its streets named for Spanish saints and psychotics. When you breathe the air, you become infiltrated with the idea that you are in another region entirely.

Q. In your recent book Palm Latitudes, you portray a world of poor Latin women. Why did you choose to write about them?

A. I lived in the barrio for ten years. I spoke the language. The Los Angeles novel, in a purely abstract sense, would not be about Anglo people. Palm Latitudes is a book that wrote itself out of the aesthetics of the region. My feeling when I came to the end of it was "Yes, I see that. The 20th century is increasingly to live in the palm latitudes."

Q. Your work is replete with apocalyptic visions: drug addiction, cancer, death, sexism, cultural brutalities. Do you consider these to be the major concerns of the age?

A. I've always been fascinated by the concept of the untouchable caste, whether it's cancer victims, drug addicts, Latin women, homosexuals. An overriding concern of mine is to touch the untouchables and to show their humanity. Unfortunately, the more chaotic the society, the greater is the desire for conservative, nonconfrontational art.

Q. You've said that the cutting edge beyond postmodernism in contemporary fiction is "feminine and tropical." What do you mean?

A. There is a sense of the old great colonial powers being colonized by the satellite populations from the south. It also has something to do with a more anthropological vision of the universe rather than a strictly European philosophical framework. It is an ease with nature, a sense of cycles, of roots, of the earth, of things that have been thought of as being traditionally feminine. There's an element of fever and heat and intensity, emotions and contradictions, a deliberate rejection of decorum.

Q. You are a feminist. Do you consider your books feminist works?

A. Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives. I'm interested in presenting characters that are more challenging, threatening, complicated and unpredictable.

I believe a great feminist achievement is to experiment with the language. It was my revolutionary intention in Palm Latitudes to rearrange the language, to tropicalize and feminize it. My second goal was to create a world in which there were only women, and only non-Anglo women, and to give these women a mythology, to have the city understood through them.

I find women as writers and as characters are operating within narrow confines. They inherit a kind of ghetto of the soul. I'm trying to enlarge the spectrum.

I'm influenced by something that I heard said about Israel, about how you would know that there was a Jewish state when you arrived and your luggage was picked up by Jewish bag handlers and there were Jewish prostitutes in the streets. I'm trying to come up with a world of women inhabited by women.

Q. Didn't feminists criticize your book for a scene where one woman kills another?

A. Yes, but it's vitally important that women have the authority to murder as well as to create on the page. There's a real danger in women being relegated to only nurturing roles. Women must be able to give death as well as birth, to have the full alphabet of human possibility when they write.

Q. What does living the literary life mean for you?

A. I write. I rewrite. I lecture. I teach. I review. I edit. I perform. I don't watch television. I don't read a newspaper. I don't read magazines. I have few conventional pastimes. I have to protect myself from the toxicity of this culture. I read poetry out loud every day. I read my work out loud. I meditate.

It appears that writing is a sedentary form, but in fact it requires incredible physical, emotional and spiritual stamina. When I finish writing at the end of a serious day of work, I feel like I've been mountain climbing. I remember A. Alvarez said about Sylvia Plath, "Poetry of this order is a murderous art."

I was in Bulgaria recently, and I was being shown so many statues of executed poets that I finally said, "You know, in Communist countries, you execute your poets. In the free world, the poets execute themselves."

Q. In a world where poetry is considered nonessential to even many cultured persons, what do you see as its role? Does the world need more poets?

A. I think the world has the right amount of poets. More people would turn to poetry if the poetry that was available were more exciting and spoke more to their lives rather than the anemic, base, listless, redundant poetry that apologizes and hates itself. People do read poetry in times of crises. Writing has a healing power. But in all times, there are few real poets.

Q. You talk about giving your women characters a mythology of their own. What is yours?

A. One of my characters says, "To be one woman, truly, wholly, is to be all women. Tend one garden and you will birth worlds." A garden requires discipline to tend it. It needs flexibility, stamina. I think I was also talking about the garden as being a metaphor for art, a life well lived.

I try to do that, to dare to be an individual, an eccentric. In America we don't have a tradition of eccentricity. In this society we're just supposed to go until we drop. We don't even have nervous breakdowns anymore. We have episodes, and then we're expected to be back at work on Monday.

Q. Is the American novel healthy?

A. It is evolving as it recognizes other accents, other rhythms, other struggles. There was a moment when certain East Coast urban men told us everything about the universe that we could know. Then the trade routes shifted. I think that the great mesa to stand on now is on the Pacific Coast. Not a mountain, but a mesa.