Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo
August 7, 2009
I’ve yet to know a winner lose.
This memoir, by Oscar Zeta Acosta, is one of the best autobiographies/memoirs I have ever read. For too many reasons. The chapters alternate between a present-tense narrative that careens into the future and past-tense nostalgic backstory that explains how the writer got “here.”
The first few sentences explain the push-pull I’m talking about:
I stand naked before the mirror. Every morning of my life I have seen that brown belly from every angle. It has not changed since I can remember. I was always a fat kid.
Maybe I’m exaggerating, but to me this is a slick variation of the opening of The Gospel of John:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 1:2The same was in the beginning with God. 1:3All things were made through him; and without him was not anything made that hath been made. 1:4In him was life; and the life was the light of men. 1:5And the light shineth in the darkness; and the darkness apprehended it not.
What I mean here is more about storytelling/mythos, especially autobiography. When we seek to tell the story of our lives, we are talking about origins. As Acosta opens his autobiography, he seems to think his present (his belly– an incredible symbol) has always been what it is. In The Gospel of John, the past, present, and future are contained in any one moment, and in every moment. The beginning has always been as it is now. Or to understand the beginning, we merely have to look at the present.
So that’s structure. The style: amazing. Acosta’a voice is a voice that I want to call my best friend. The voice is funny, self-effacing, confident, observant, capacious, desperate, destructive: Imminently human. As I read, I was reminded of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. In many ways, the character of Oscar and the narrator Yunior in Diaz’s novel seem to be an homage to Acosta. I haven’t found any extra-textual support for this. It’s just a hunch. But Acosta and Diaz’s voices– they are definitely talking to each other, trying to understand race and history and personal memory and love and desire. I could linger over Acosta’s sentences for a good long time.
Content. Toward the end of the memoir, the story seems to grasp for the “raison d’etre” a personal life history seems to need. Acosta discusses his radicalization, his awareness of Brown Pride, and his sudden passion for the Chicano movement. I don’t imagine that this is at all sudden. But Acosta lingers over the details of his younger years, and this hard-living years, that the political years come on quite sudden. This is me being the critic I don’t want to be. The point is, the voice, the man, the story, the work is amazing– an amazing piece of American literature.
