Cañón, James (1968- ) Colombian-American novelist and short-story writer. Third son of José Cañón and Blanca Vergara, he was born on June 19, 1968 in Ibagué. Cañón’s father was from a native Indian/peasant extraction in rural Colombia, an almost illiterate man who only attended two years of elementary school. However, he was a successful businessman. His mother was from working-class stock and never finished high school. She was his father’s secretary before they fell in love and moved in together. His father continuously traveled; he grew up mostly in the company of his mother and his paternal grandmother, both of whom had a major influence on his early life and, later, on his writing. He moved to Bogotá in 1987 to go to college and graduated with honors in 1990 with a B.A. in advertising. After working for four years as a copywriter, he decided to move to New York City in 1994 to work and to study English for a year, but he decided to stay. With neither English nor a resident card, his first job was cleaning the bathrooms and floors of a fast-food court in Manhattan. He moved from school to school and from job to job until the Spanish department of an advertising agency hired him in 1996. The following year, he decided to take an expository writing class at N.Y.U. Every week he was asked to write three to five pages on any subject; he wrote short stories. Even though they showed glaring mistakes, his teacher loved them for his narrative voice and a style all his own. By the end of the quarter, he had already made up his mind: he wanted to be a writer. He quit advertising and started making a living as a part-time waiter, which allowed him time to write. He’s been writing ever since.

His first short stories were autobiographical to some extent; two were published in anthologies of gay Latinos: “The Two Miracles of The Gringos’ Virgin” in Bésame Mucho ( NY: Painted Leaf Press, 1999), and “My Lessons with Felipe” in Virgins, Guerrillas, and Locas (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1999). In 1999, he enrolled in the graduate program on creative writing at Columbia University, where he started working on his first novel, Tales from the Town of Widows & Chronicles from the Land of Men (New York: Harper Collins, 2007), which has been translated into seven languages and published in more than twenty countries. It was originally inspired on an article he had read in a Colombian newspaper about a mountain village where Communist guerrillas had taken most of the men away. “What happens to the women who are left behind?” he thought. “They would be virtual widows, made to fend for themselves for the first time in their lives.” Although he knew they could survive without men, what he wondered was how they would go about it, and how this process would transform them as individuals and as a society. His novel is his answer to that question. “Writing my first novel in my second language was not a choice,” he said. “I conceived the idea originally in Spanish., wrote a few pages, but it didn’t feel right. Then I wrote a chapter in English and, though it was clumsily worded, I felt good about it. I realized that English offered me an original, unbiased perspective on the Colombian conflict.”

Articulate, funny, imaginative, sarcastic, sweet, and direct, Mr. Cañón’s sweeping novel grabs you by the throat on a rollercoaster of pyrotechnic verve and panache, where homosexuals and heterosexuals, pagans and believers concoct a better society where everyone is respected as equals. If Che spoke of the “new man,” James leads you by the hand to a new Utopia where women teach men how to become compassionate human beings.

Tales . . . is currently nominated to the 2008 Lamda Literary Award, as well as to the 2008 Edmund White Debut Fiction Award.

He lives in New York City where he is working on his second novel. “All I can tell you is that it will be about religion, tolerance, and displacement,” he says. “It will have a strong heroine who makes a perilous and life-changing journey. It will be poignant, funny, subversive, and unlike anything you’ve ever read before.”

―Miguel Falquez-Certain

Encyclopedia of Contemporary LGBTQ Literature of the United States, vol. 1, edited by Emmanuel S. Nelson (Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood Press, 2009).

FURTHER READING
Kirsch, Jonathan, “The Feminine Mystique,” The Washington Post, February 18, 2007
“Books Briefly Noted,” The New Yorker, March 19, 2007.

For further information, visit www.jamescanon.com

COMEDY: ARRABAL VIEW OF LEFT-WING DICTATORS

By MEL GUSSOW

Published: April 8, 1982

FROM his position as a Spanish exile living in Paris, Fernando Arrabal has raised world consciousness about the evils of autocracy, reserving his most invidious antipathy for Franco, as in his devastating play ''And They Put Handcuffs on the Flowers.'' Arrabal is both a satirist and a theater poet, and it is his playfully polemical side that is in evidence in his new work, ''The Extravagant Triumph of Jesus Christ, Karl Marx and William Shakespeare,'' which is in its American premiere engagement at the Intar. Any play by Arrabal is an event, but ''The Extravagant Triumph'' is less than a total success.

In this comedy, as translated by Miguel Falquez-Certain, the author's uncharacteristic target is left-wing totalitarianism. He correlates Castro with Franco (an equation that Castrophiles would certainly question), viewing them as pupil and mentor, dictatorial brothers who share more than a common language. Just as it was safe for Arrabal to return to Spain, he may be persona non grata in Cuba.

Arrabal is, first of all, an anarchist, believing that all government is bad government, and, in demonstration of his thesis, the administration under scrutiny is a ridiculous blend of the quixotic and the chaotic. As played by Ron Faber, Tallarin, the president of an unnamed but instantly identifiable banana republic, has Marxian attributes closer to Groucho's than to Karl's. In fatigues and usually a false beard, with a big cigar affixed in his face, he is a Castro lookalike.

The regime is repressive and self-aggrandizing. The leader's whims come first. Casually he stuffs the ballot box and reneges on campaign promises, while leaning back on his Barcalounger with two red hotline phones, one on each arm. As personal dalliance, he keeps a transvestite in his closet, Naseer El-Kadi, who slides out at the push of a button and poses as an odalisque. Sexually and otherwise, no one is exactly what he seems to be. Even Tallarin is eventually revealed as his own double.

As the story moves afield from its comic-book dictator into a romance between Mr. El-Kadi and a mannish lady spy, it becomes increasingly confused and sacrifices humor. Finally, when a visitor arrives from outer space, the evening ebbs. It is Mr. Faber's portrait of a dictator in disarray that is the comic focus. With his dot-like eyes and dizzy manner, the actor acts if he were drawn by a caricaturist's pen. Physically and verbally, he is an impish clown. However, in the supporting cast, only Thomas Kopache, as the president's double-dealing and masochistic minister of interior, operates on a comparable comic plateau.

The director, Eduardo Manet, makes ingenious use of Randy Barcelo's jack-in-the-box stage design, complete with cubbyholes and crannies and backed with a luxuriant jungle garden populated by reptilian puppets.

''The Extravagant Triumph'' is lower-case Arrabal - it is not in a class with such works as ''Handcuffs'' and ''The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria'' - but it has more than a measure of prankish wit and it whets our appetite for other works by the author. Along with another adopted Parisian, Eugene Ionesco, Arrabal is a major international playwright too infrequently represented on the New York stage. Comic Dictatorship THE EXTRAVAGANT TRIUMPH OF JESUS CHRIST, KARL MARX, AND WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, by Fernando Arrabal; trans- lated by Miguel Falquez-Certain; directed by Eduardo Manet; set and costume designer, Randy Barcelo; light designer, Cheryl Thacker; sound designer, Paul Garrity; production stage manager, Gail A. Burns; casting, David Rubin. Presented by Intar, Max Ferra, artistic director, and Dennis Ferguson, managing director. At 420 West 42d Street.

Noemi ..............................Betty La Roe Garapito and Accos ..........Naseer el-Kadi Tallarin and Samir ...............................Ron Faber Elisee .................................Cecilia Flores Ioga ...................................Thomas Kopache Ziza .....................................Madeleine Le Roux Cis ........................................Brian Rose

http://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/08/theater/comedy-arrabal-view-of-left-wing-dictators.html

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