THOMAS LARSON

(Another Chicago Magazine August 1, 2024)

Every once in a while, a memoir can seem like a strange beast, stepping away from the usual show-and-tell drama. Such is the case with Tomás Q. Morín’s tricky new book in which the narrator’s id claws its way through and out of the wilds of identity, the simple title notwithstanding. This skinny-spined outlier is partly about where the Hispanic author finds himself—living temporarily in an unwelcoming Northern town. But the person(s) to whom the tale mostly happens is multifocal—Morín, his son, a few bigots he encounters, or any you who carries the cross of his origin. Of those foci, the son’s presence seems the least revealed. “Jack” is an addressee, a longed-for object, a boy of many ages; he’s in the womb, a newborn, a kid, an adult who lives in Texas with “your Marxist mother” while his vexed father is alone up north, teaching composition. Morín’s four letters feel emotionally ordered; the writing is often Janus-faced, at once insistently admonishing for the son, at once cunningly creative for the reader.

Morín, a Mexican American poet of renown and the descendant of generations of farmworkers, is teaching composition at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, where he lives in a “sub-sub-basement” and feels “unwanted,” targeted in the community as a racial outcast. Once underway, the book depicts young kids in a store who surprise Morín with “hostile stares.” The town typifies an ethnic disparity, where Hispanics are twelve percent and whites around eighty, and where, we’re told, the sentiment is anti-Mexican, though Morín gives us neither scene nor evidence of the prejudice. We hear instead a lecturing animus: Father tells his son, we are “brown people” who must decide to “stay safe” and not confront the “enemy,” who are known to categorize us, and who go rogue and punch us in the face.

Reacting to these charges of discrimination is a different writer, a poet-quoting poet who illustrates his deeper sensibility by citing T. S. Eliot, Maxine Kumin, Philip Levine, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and his own work. Their sophisticated poems, which Morín says he’s read to his son, capture Dad’s quizzical nature. His white poetic forebears have permission to lyricize their inner torments, pose elegant questions different from the identity rhetoric the contemporary multiethnic scribe must engage. Of mixed identities himself, Morín is also of mixed literary influences; the spirit of the book embodies the poetic legacy of English, which draws Morín toward its literary circle but on whose periphery he seems stuck.

Indeed, it’s in his incantational fits and leaping style where Morín shines. He describes himself as a “tangent machine” who goes mapless so he can “come around.” The wandering devolves to his son’s inheritance, namely, their second-class standing in America. But this is strikingly cut by Morín’s talent, his associational alacrity that bridges some of the brokenness he writes well about. As for the son “getting it,” well, not as a babe in the woods, but someday, yes, when he reads this very book.

In the long playful chapter, “I Am What I Yam,” Morín follows an Ariadne thread from an animal folktale to codependent psychology. One day, reclusive in his New Jersey discomfort, he sees a deer out the window, and quickly he reimagines it as a red fox, a burrowing rodent, then the ferocious groundhog. The latter sports many names: woodchuck, whistle-pig, marmot, badger, and red monk. Morín has a vision: The red monk leads him, like Virgil in Dante’s comedy, to the underworld, there to meet his father who has recently died and won’t stop nagging Morín. The father states that the reason his son feels “‘disappointed and crying cause the world is mean to you” is because “sin was in your skin.” Morín explodes. More racism, now intra-species. Blaming his father for not raising him better, for “not giving a shit”—the allusion to his own removal from parenting is obvious—he tells his Papa to go to hell. Who replies: “I already did. No work there, so I left.”

Ascending from the burrow, Morín’s clawing through the soil leads to (yet another) insight about where he is from—the cave of his own judgments: “Why couldn’t I just notice the racism less? And when I did notice it, just not care . . . ?” He goes on, “No . . . I wouldn’t turn myself into a callus. Before the callus the skin blisters and fills with anger. Then comes the pop, the drying and hardening, and then the blister again until the skin your parents gave you is misshapen and old. I wouldn’t make a shield out of not giving a shit.” Shades of James Baldwin, whose father destroyed himself by raging at whites.

Where Are You From is as clever as it is convoluted, bogged down with explanations of how bigotry is baked into the American cake, literature a soulful exception. By transforming folktales into literary turns all his own, I felt Morín gaining control of and guiding the text toward an individual self-identity, one that contains as well as transcends his legacy and isolation.

In “A Wall Is Indeed a Wall,” Morín is driven late at night to a college for a teaching gig. The driver looks like the wizard guy in the Oak Ridge Boys, “the white supremacist that I imagined he was.” Shocking Morín, his chauffeur says how much he hates Austin, Texas, overrun as it is with liberal biracial people, the caste of Morín’s son. How to deal with an ignoramus? He enacts their conversation via seven scenarios—from conciliation to violence, from rage to love. Here’s another lesson for the boy: You must decide how best to react, but there’s nothing wrong, as you plot your comeuppance, with being a “double agent.” By which he means, however you duel with the enemy, it’ll come back on you: “I was afraid,” he writes, “to choose a path that would lead to a place where I wouldn’t be able to see you anymore.”

In a final chapter, Morín has reached a rambler’s stride, sword-fighting words he wants to “dismantle”: “male,” “weary,” and “mixed.” The latter brings back the putative biracial fix his son is in. There are flare-ups of the sentimental, the hopeless, and the inevitable path to “a land where they share my distrust of language.” He quotes the entirety of a story by Henri Michaux, “In the Land of the Hacs,” which replays Morín’s theme that “words can’t be trusted.” He’s like Wittgenstein, befouling his own pool. Finally, there’s an extended soliloquy on the word, “woodchuck,” and its multiple references, especially in New England, where one of its connotations is “a person of limited means; often on public assistance. The woodchuck is usually very crass and does not adhere to social norms.” Well, couldn’t some of that refer to Morín himself?

In this epistolary memoir, one that challenges the colonizing force of words with words, I detect a hard-won lesson: “Knowing a thing would be more important than naming it,” Morín concludes. I think he’s saying that the language a father uses to raise his uninitiated son is embedded in us much like racial inequality and must be faced or tested by an author’s mischievous honesty. Morín is laying waste to the “pat answers” that constrict our thinking. The woodchuck is more than “a country person whose main job in life is to cut firewood . . . and ‘chuck’ it into the back of [his] truck.” That more is describable only in a language that’s inherently untrustworthy (very Derrida). Morín is part of a vanguard of writers who are “chucking” it all, loading up in order to, by turns, unload our culture’s historic and mythic projections, no matter where they’re from.