Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Becoming Reinaldo Arenas: Family, Sexuality, and the Cuban Revolution by Jorge Olivares

2014; Washington University in St. Louis; Volume: 48; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/rvs.2014.0068

2164-9308

Eduardo González,

Cuban History and Society

Reviewed by: Becoming Reinaldo Arenas: Family, Sexuality, and the Cuban Revolution by Jorge Olivares Eduardo González Olivares, Jorge. Becoming Reinaldo Arenas: Family, Sexuality, and the Cuban Revolution. Durham: Duke UP, 2013. 241 pp. The political reality of a national literature has endured in Cuba, at home and abroad, past the point where in other nations it has entered a pampered cultural limbo. In Poland, for instance, after two centuries of internal ethnic fragmentation and alien partitions, the nation found its poet, nationalist playwright, and myth-making inventor in Adam Michiewicz (1798-1855). In order for him to imperiously invent a post-imperial nation, Michiewicz skipped the disintegration that ended the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the seventeenth century. Instead, he gave the unstable “Polish nation” her linguistic soul origins in medieval Lithuania—with its legions of shining warriors. This Polish medieval nationalist construct persists to this day latent in postmodern styles of cynicism. On his part, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811-88) imagined cosmopolitan and civil-democratic Argentina imperiled by the rural charismatic barbarism described in his Facundo, a retro-medieval romantic book that argues for progress, crafted into a binary myth of urbane culture feasting on the sweat and blood of regional nationalisms. The experience of internal and external exile in Michiewicz and Sarmiento becomes distinctive of the political founder of national literatures since European romanticism. [End Page 660] In a queer and inverse way such is the character of Reinaldo Arenas—examined by Jorge Olivares at the vanishing point of postmodern styles of subjective nationalism camouflaged in identity politics. Olivares helps us gain our own perspectives on the existential issues raised by the scholarly task he names becoming Reinaldo Arenas. He has written a naively generous book, open-handed, wisely assured in the originality of its searching intertextual readings, and grounded upon wisdom and subtle irony and in full command of the artist-writer’s work and the chaotic energies that traverse it. These energies are ironically grounded on home soil as seen from exile: “I realize that an exile has no place where he can live, because he is nowhere, because the place where we started to dream, where we discovered the natural world around us, read our first book, loved for the first time, is always the world of our dreams. In exile one is nothing but a ghost, the shadow of someone who never achieves full reality. I ceased to exist when I went into exile” (26). Upon reflection, this passage from Antes que anochezca (1993) is misunderstood if not set against the grain of the author’s previous fiction in order to attest to how intensely his novels—from Celestino antes del alba (1967) to Otra vez el mar (1982)—offer sublime and grotesque proof of their characters being sundered from their Cuban surroundings in nature and from their own brood. Certainly, exiled Arenas will miss his unquestioned existence back in Cuba’s neighborly homeland, once that existence is uprooted by some form or another of identity questioning in his new alien US home. Olivares rightly observes how, “in the end, exile was for Arenas nothing more than a journey from one form of nonexistence to another” (26). Yet, what official harassment and imprisonment spoiled in the Cuban homeland was not any sense of nestled social belonging on the writer’s part, but the reverse. Political oppression and persecution further exiled from home soil the native childhood sense of forlornness already grounded at the core of the Arenas character as he translated his extravagant personhood into troubled and deliriously exultant literary fictions. The often overwhelming force of the Arenas polyphonous voice is itself alienative. The way in which Olivares translates romantic imprisonment in the Arenas authorship is to beautifully arrest the fictions it contains within the prison house of someone else’s literary fictions. This set of wizardly acts on Olivares’s part is best understood as uncannily interactive rather than routinely intertextual. It is at this point that literariness sets in: as the about-ness of literary acts, in their pointing at themselves, at their various fictional habitats, acting up from anywhere as well as from deeply within their unconscious core. Characters in Gald...