The Wedding of the Century: Review of ‘United States of Banana’
Courtesy of Mad Creek
What happens when Puerto Rican author Giannina Braschi and Rubén Darío meet at the Wedding of the Century? They drink champagne and knock over a can of black bean soup onto Andy Warhol’s lap. They also recite, in unison, a verse from one of the Nicaraguan modernist’s poems, written in 1899 and dedicated to Oscar II, King of Sweden and Norway: “If Segismundo grieves, Hamlet feels it.”¹
But in this psychedelic soiree, Segismundo is a Puerto Rican held captive in the Statue of Liberty and Hamlet bears a striking resemblance to Antonin Artaud. All the characters, including Braschi, are caricatures of themselves or carnivalesque personifications poking dimples into the balloon of plausibility. And every scene uses humor to thrust forward astute ideas on political sovereignty and cultural resistance.
United States of Banana, Braschi’s epic postmodern tragicomedy, has undergone several intermedia adaptations since its publication in 2011, including a play, short films, drawings, wood carvings, and chamber music. In 2017, Swedish illustrator Joakim Lindengren transformed the book into a graphic novel, translated into Swedish by poet Helena Eriksson. It was only in 2021, however, that this comic book version became available in English, the text penned by Braschi herself, following excerpts from the original novel.
Just as Braschi introduces uncanny dialogues between the most diverse literary, historical, and political figures, Lindengren draws on variegated references from Western art and pop culture, reworking them into unique frames that make their own social statements. We find The Last Supper staged in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks diner, M.C. Escher’s infinite staircases in the Statue of Liberty, Edvard Münch’s screaming man in a bottle of Liberty Cola, Braschi as Sir John Everett Millais’s Ophelia floating next to a sleeping frog, Barack Obama at the piano in Rick’s Café Americain, and Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith as the Men in Black flanking a Segismundo-as-illegal alien, with tentacle arms and antennae. These drawings magnify the symbolic implications of Braschi’s commentary and offer her work to a wider audience.
Described by Frederick Luis Aldama as “one of today’s most experimental Latinx authors,”² Braschi, known for her radical genre-crossing work, explores complex notions of colonialism, immigration, and language—and their interconnections. Her language manipulation especially stands out, moving back and forth between Spanish and English, unabashedly making few concessions to the dominant monolingual U.S. reading public.
Using Spanglish or inglañol, code-switching, and bilingual textualities, Latinx literature in general pushes the boundaries of English in print, bringing it closer to the linguistic realities of Latinx people throughout the U.S. and various Latin American and Caribbean diasporas. In this sense, we can associate Braschi’s work to now classic Puerto Rican authors like Ana Lydia Vega and Pedro Pietri, as well as contemporary poets Urayoán Noel, Nicole Cecilia Delgado, and Roque Salas Rivera. From the larger Latinx context, these linguistic strategies are also present in the works of authors as distinct as Francisco Alarcón, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Alan Pelaez Lopez. Even literature solely written in English often carves out spaces to legitimize the use and existence of different Englishes, as seen in a novel like United States of Banana, doused with Spanish-language cadences and frequent idiomatic sayings that offer no translation.
Where does Darío stand in all of this? His poem, more than an anecdotal ode to a European monarch, spoke to the concerns of Latin American intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century, right after Spain had lost its last two colonies in the Americas (Puerto Rico and Cuba) and the U.S. emerged as an imperial presence throughout the region. This historic memory is revived in United States of Banana, especially at the novel’s climax, when Giannina, accompanied by Hamlet, Zarathustra, and Segismundo, advocates for Puerto Rican independence and, in the process, envisions opening U.S. borders to all Latin Americans. We could say that Darío, Braschi’s “soulmate” and “the originator of this renaissance in America,” is the intellectual author of this fantasy insurrection. In fact, Darío’s verse, “If Segismundo grieves, Hamlet feels it,” frames our reading of the novel from the opening pages as an epigraph.
While Braschi’s fictional complot with Darío helped her design the allegory of a wedding between Hispanic and Anglo worlds, by teaming up with Lindengren, she carries her critique beyond words. The collaboration with a Swedish artist also brings the novel’s epigraph full circle, establishing transatlantic connections that hint at parallels between enduring monarchies and colonialism in the 21st century. United States of Banana: A Graphic Novel combines artwork and narrative to dissect the hypocrisy of the American Dream, all the while exploring major issues such as racism and xenophobia, as well as political and artistic freedom. At its core, this humorous yet persuasive book is a love song (or a canto de vida y esperanza) to immigration, to freely moving across borders and languages, to say and depict our wildest fantasies, even when walls try to lock us in or keep us out.
¹ Braschi’s translation of “Si Segismundo siente pesar, Hamlet se inquieta,” from “Al Rey Óscar,” included in Cantos de vida y esperanza (1904).
² Poets, Philosophers, Lovers. On the Writings of Giannina Braschi, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020, p. 3.
Thomas Rothe is a translator and scholar of Latin American and Caribbean literatures. His research focuses on the history of translation, print and popular culture, and critical discourses. He has translated the poetry of Jaime Huenún, Rodrigo Lira, Emma Villazón, and Julieta Marchant, and co-translated into Spanish Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously and Claire of the Sea Light. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow (Fondecyt/ANID) at the Universidad Católica de Temuco, and lectures at several universities in Chile.