Beat Transnationalism under Gender: Brenda Frazer’s Troia: Mexican Memoirs

Abstract

Scholarship has theorized the foundational male-centeredness of the Beat Generation literary movement and its notorious obliviousness to women’s literary production and legitimacy as writing subjects, but approaches to Beat transnationalism nevertheless continue to underestimate gender as a basis of the movement’s construction and a relevant category for its analysis,¹ even when works inexorably foreground it. Just so, no text elucidates Beat transnationalism and its gendered specificity, and the condition of women Beats’ literary purdah, as comprehensively as does Brenda Frazer’s 1969 Troia: Mexican Memoirs. A lost classic of Beat experimental writing, out of print until its 2007 reissue by Dalkey Archive Press, Troia recounts the 1961 travails of Bonnie and Ray Bremser, a minor Beat poet, on the lam in Mexico with their baby Rachel, fugitives of New Jersey prison authorities pursuing Ray for parole violation. The Mexican sojourn this flight entailed, which is the manifest subject of Troia, is narrated in the daily two-page letters Bonnie wrote to Ray from March to November 1963,² during his second incarceration when she was living back in New York (Grace and Johnson 113). Frazer, then called Bonnie Bremser, retrospectively details her life of open prostitution on the road in Mexico and the couple’s desperate relinquishment of Rachel there. Recounting her often shocking and emotionally wrung-out Mexican experiences, Frazer’s letters to Ray—answering his request to titillate him and standing in lieu of sexual intimacy during their separation (77)—providentially provided the neophyte writer an indispensable literary apprenticeship (Grace and Johnson 113) that resulted in a benchmark of Beat writing: a transnational female road tale rivaling Jack Kerouac in visionary mind and hipster “kicks.”³

“To theorize about ‘women’ or ‘patriarchy’ one must stand in some experience of commonality or political alliance, looking beyond the local or experiential to wider, comparative phenomena.”

(James Clifford, “Notes on Theory and Travel”)

“No need to tell the rest of Acapulco, anyone who has ever been to Acapulco knows the rest and, if not, the travel folders on Third Avenue are adequate enough information, reckless tourism.”

(Bonnie Bremser, Troia: Mexican Memoirs)