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

Abstract

Olivares, Jorge (2013) Becoming Reinaldo Arenas: Family, Sexuality, and the Cuban Revolution, Duke University Press ( Durham, NC and London), xi + 241 pp. $22.95. I remember the first and only time I watched an interview with Reinaldo Arenas's father. It was almost by chance that it came up on my computer screen. I was taken by surprise, so almost no time was available to conjure any preconceptions. There was very little to recall anyway, since Arenas himself did not know his father beyond one casual encounter in childhood; thus, as a reader, I remembered very few of the author's comments to hang on to when this topic would come up in discussion. I did not know what to expect but, although the interview was very short, throughout the encounter the camera focused only on the man, so we could see his face, his smiling expression and his body movements. There he was, the father whose absence shaped the life of one of the best-known twentieth-century Cuban writers. He was a typical Cuban peasant. Not a man of many words, he had a charming smile but was quiet and reserved, not trusting strangers. As one would expect, the interview did not reveal any secrets; he looked slightly surprised, as if he still could not understand why a son whom he had fathered so many years ago kept coming back to hound him in his old age. He did not express any personal guilt for the abandonment, and looked both charmed and bewildered by the attention that had been thrown upon him. This mysterious person that I have just described dwells at the epicentre of this book. Although some chapters were taken from previously published journal articles, Olivares's work represents the best attempt so far to give Arenas's father the place which the writer always claimed for him through his fiction. Was he a fictional character created in absentia, or a person that played a central role in his son's literary production? The latter seems to be what Olivares sets out to prove, inviting us to appreciate his personal commitment to the story behind the book, drawing parallels between himself and the writer. Both ‘lost’ their father at an early age, and then lost contact with their same country of origin to become exiles. Probably for that reason, autobiography plays a pivotal role in this book and, besides The Palace of the White Skunks, a study on irregular family patterns, the two other titles on which the book strongly relies are Before Night Falls, the writer's autobiography, and Viaje a La Habana: Novela en tres viajes (untranslated), a book written by Arenas when dying of AIDS. The latter remains a difficult book to read, full of pain but packed with the richest language and technical details from Arenas's repertoire. Both an experimental tour de force and a poetic evocation of love between father and son, it leaves a mark on its readers, as students in my courses testify. Olivares wants to demonstrate that the commanding influence behind Arenas's impulse to write and to create a fictional world was the father and not the mother, as critical opinion has tended to believe. Even when he discusses the role of the family, mostly women, in The Palace of the White Skunks, emphasis is placed on the main character's critical moments of remembrance of his absent father. Olivares's reliance on Before Night Falls allows him to interpret Viaje a La Habana in an autobiographical vein too, a mode in which it fits fairly well, except that in the last section, narrated in the first person, the story is told of an exiled father who goes back to Cuba, somewhat reluctantly, to see a son whom he left as a child. The [fictional] homoerotic encounter between father and son is interpreted as a revealing instance of the power exerted by that ‘enigmatic figure’. To strengthen his thesis, he points to the lack of communication between son and mother, commenting on the letters they exchanged when Arenas was in exile. Throughout the book, Olivares elaborates his understanding of Arenas as an author dedicated to rewriting and reinterpreting other texts, even his own life. A reader of Arenas will find the book stimulating and suggestive. We are shown how Arenas borrowed from everything he read, and how he bridged the differences between literature and life, even sometimes extrapolating from ‘how things should have been’ to make fiction reach what would stand as an impossible real-life ending. Besides the relentless analysis found in these pages, there is plenty of contextual and historical information that adds to what we know about the development of Arenas's work. This book will remain an important point of reference for future students.