El Exilio Español Ante Los Programas De Identidad Cultural En El Caribe Insular (1934-1956)
2011; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-9648
Autores Tópico(s)Spanish History and Politics
ResumoCarmen Canete Quesada. El exilio espanol ante los programas de identidad cultural en el Caribe insular (1934-1956). Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2011. 267 pp.Exile is about names: lists without order or categorical distinction of people who left a certain place against their will. Exile is the unknown quantity of X. I asserted this in my book about Spanish Civil War exile (Shifting Ground, 1997) as I referred to the difficulty of dealing with the issue in a systematic fashion given the arbitrariness of the concerns, styles, and obsessions of the human beings who go into exile. Indeed, academics in literature or history who begin to make sense out of the phenomenon according to historical or geographical specificities have their work cut out for them. One such academic-there have been lots of them-is Carmen Canete. Hers is a fascinating study of three specific Spanish Civil War exile writers who at one point in their exilic journeys lived in one or two of the following Caribbean islands: Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic. These three figures are canonical in the corpus of Hispanic literature-Juan Ramon Jimenez, Maria Zambrano, and Eugenio Granell-and one of these (Jimenez) is canonical in world literature.At the same time, we need more of a justification for the choice of the figures to study among a plethora of poets, novelists, essayists, and dramatists who went into exile as a result of the Spanish Civil War than simply that their writings were extremely influential and lasting. But, as Canete declares in the introduction of her well structured work, all three (a perfect number-three writers, three islands) of these figures manifest the specific subthemes of exile she wants to explore: cultural insularity, race, nationality, the politics of the islands in conjunction with the fraught politics of Spain in the aftermath of a devastating war, geography (a lost geography and a found one) as a motivation for writing. Still, as one who has dealt with the lists of Spaniards who left Spain during or immediately after the war-I note, for example, Jose Luis Abellan's by no means exhaustive five volume study (or catalogue) of Spanish Civil War exile, (El exilio espanol de 1939, 1976-78)-one comes away from a book such as Canete's wondering if we understand exile any better than we did before we read it. And my answer is perhaps not, but I want to emphasize something else: readers have certainly gained an appreciation of those subthemes which, within the specificity of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, surround exile as a result of the Spanish conflict.While it seems that this study's chapters might have been logically organized around the triumvirate of Spanish exile writers who lived in the Caribbean, Canete smartly chooses themes as her connective tissue rather than names of writers. Following a well-outlined introduction, not without penetrating comments about the nature of her study, as in Aunque todos proyectamos en nuestro discurso un programa de autodefinicion, la manera en que nos percibimos y la que nos perciben no siempre coinciden con nuestra historia, nuestras raices, nuestras culturas (13), Canete initiates the body of her text with an exploration of Juan Ramon Jimenez's and Maria Zambrano's lives, writings, and impressions of Puerto Rico in the former's Isla de simpatia and the latter's Isla de Puerto Rico. One of the major concerns in this chapter, as in others, is the notion of insularity: the tensions between the geographical isolation and distance that can accrue in island cultures and the desire for universality; in this case that universality is incarnated in Europe, particularly Spain, and the United States. In both cases, it seems, the loss of Spain is replaced by the gain of an island, in Zambrano's case something of a mythical island. Indeed both writers are constantly comparing a lost land to a new one in a way reminiscent of all exiles, no matter the circumstance, and in the case of Zambrano, philosopher that she was, her writing of Isla de Puerto Rico is penned from exile but with a thought process firmly anchored in Europe. …
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