AMERICAN DIVA

A poet’s tribute to divas.

Combining memoir and cultural criticism, Paredez, chair of the writing program at Columbia and author of two poetry collections, creates a lively examination of the phenomenon of the diva: “strong, complicated, virtuosic, larger-than-life, unruly women.” From her own feisty aunt to opera star Nadine Sierra, divas, Paredez maintains, have shaped her as a “brown feminist writer, artist, and mother of a certain age.” Growing up in San Antonio, hearing the sound of Mexican American vocalist and diva Vikki Carr was how she came to know she was Mexican. Carr’s voice, she writes, was “irrefutable proof and proclamation of our Mexicanness” and her relationship “to others like me who are rarely invited to join the choruses of America’s anthems.” Latina divas are prominent among the many other women whom the author profiles, including Grace Jones, Tina Turner, Aretha Franklin, Selena, Celia Cruz, Venus and Serena Williams, Diana Ross, Lena Horne, and Patti LaBelle. Paredez reveals the diva quality of Rita Moreno’s performance as Anita in West Side Story; the “trauma and triumph” of Tina Turner’s voice in “Proud Mary”; and the power of Divine, drag alter-ego of Harris Glenn Milstead, who showed her that divas “live out loud what our true selves are like on the inside.” A diva, Paredez writes, “teaches us how to indulge our wildest appetites.” In a seminar on divas that she has taught since 2009, she and her students have found that talking about these women has brought up issues that transcend their stature as entertainers. Issues of “difference and artistry and belonging and power and style and race and girlhood and discipline and gender and fantasy and survival and capitalism and sexuality and freedom” recur throughout Paredez’s spirited celebration of divas.

A close, personal, well-informed examination of powerful women and their artistic work.