Some (undesirable) kinds of fame
What is amazing about the novel is the “Chicano” narrative voice. The way Danny Santiago (real name Daniel Lewis James) narrated this story from inside another person’s skin (given that Santiago is not Mexican-American) calls for art.
ONE day, while reading a collection of poems about death, my friend complained, “Why is it that most poems about death tend to go downhill?” While his comments peeved a couple of poets who had written on the subject, I identified with his sentiments. We have enough poems about death, poems whose chief aim is to conjure a funereal atmosphere. It is rare to ask students in a creative writing class to write about death and get something that makes you laugh.
Most of the time, the poems are concerned with piling the weight of death on you until you feel like something is pushing you down to some Sheolic neighbourhood where the first fellow you meet is wearing some hooded jacket made from the bones of Satan, like those kinds you see in movies about the undead.
I love it when someone takes all the filth of this world, the venereal disease, the vomit, and turns all of that into very beautiful art. I have even seen a couple of graves whose epitaphs demonstrate the need to salvage some humour even in the midst of sorrow. For instance, on one grave, the epitaph read: “Here lies an Atheist. All dressed up and no place to go!” Hilarious, isn’t it?
When it comes to this ability to turn the most ignoble of conditions into art of the noblest order, Danny Santiago is a master. His novel, “Famous all over Town” (1983), is one of the few novels whose narrative voices leave an indelible mark in your mind. I last read this novel, for the third time, five years ago. The chap who lent me the novel is one of the most jealous fellows I have ever seen. To him, life is divided into two things: a good novel and the rest.
“Famous All Over Town” is an extended flashback which is occasioned when the narrator, because of some crossroads crisis in his life, performs a pilgrimage back to his old neighbourhood which is now an asphalted railroad yard.
Like a magician in the presence of curious voyeurists, he summons his past for us to read, and to see, and this is how that past comes into being: “trailers and chainlink went up in flames. In their place a certain saggy picket fence sprouted from the ground, a certain squeaky front porch rose up behind, and the skinny little house where I lived half my life. . . . Old Shamrock lived again and I was home.”
So it is at this home that Chato recounts his life, the schizophrenias that afflict those who are caught between two cultures (both of which are not very welcoming!).
“Famous All Over Town” alchemises the ignoble in two ways. First is the raw material that the author uses to create such a beautiful story. His raw material consists of pain, poverty and violence, but the end product is a novel distinctly delivered by Danny Santiago.
“Second is the existence of Chato, the Mexican-American narrator, an existence which he manages to transform from the realms of ignominy to eminence by populating the town with raw graffiti in what he sees as the beginning of his writing career. This writing career begins at the bank of America and Chato gets arrested for his troubles.
What is amazing about the novel is the “Chicano” narrative voice. The way Danny Santiago (real name Daniel Lewis James) narrated this story from inside another person’s skin (given that Santiago is not Mexican-American) calls for art. In fact, when he wrote the novel, he was already an old man but used the voice of a boy growing up in a Chicano barrio.
He was educated at Yale and came from a well-to-do white American family but wrote from the perspective of someone who grew up in the ghetto. How did an elderly, well-to-do white American appropriate the voice of a young boy from a minority ghetto population? That’s no mean feat!
When the real identity of Danny Santiago came out, critics questioned the authenticity of his depiction of Chicano life. In his defence of Santiago, McPherson stresses that: “A writer is a chameleon, among other things, and literature is above all else the record of a voyage, the voyage into the imagination … Any other considerations are peripheral to the work —interesting, perhaps, curious or surprising, but still peripheral.”
Right from the start, Chato’s story is violence-ridden. To celebrate his 14th birthday, his father initiates him into the art of chicken-killing using a knife, because “fourteen makes a man”. The knife, however, does not yield the desired perfection so Chato decides to use a .45 instead. Thereafter, violence is what defines Chato’s life: the violence takes both overt and covert forms.
When he tries to perform like any smart student in class, after encouragement from a Jewish counsellor, he gets into trouble for his efforts. A joy-ride attempt with his friends ends in tragedy when one of his friends is shot by a trigger-happy cop.
His parents’ marriage is on the rocks. His first stirrings of manhood are provoked by grown-up women of the neighbourhood. The one who takes his fancy happens to be his father’s mistress. As the story ends, his parents have divorced and his neighbourhood is about to be razed to the ground. That’s how violent Chato’s life is.
But at least there is hope because his writing career in the “Jury” kicks off at exactly that time. It is a writing career that is based on colonising whole buildings and writing on their walls for any passer-by to know that Chato was here. This looks like his own dogged way of beating the odds.
As a parting shot, here is how Chato beats the odds and envisages his popularity: “I don’t need to be a movie star or boxing champ to make my name in the world. All I need is plenty of chalk and crayons. And that’s easy. L.A. is a big city, man, but give me a couple of months and I’ll be famous all over town. Of course, they’ll try to stop me — The Sierra, the police, and everybody. But I’ll be like a ghost, man. I’ll be real mysterious, and then all they’ll know is just my name, signed like I always sign it, CHATO DE SHAMROCK with rays shooting out like from the Holy Cross.”