Dreaming as Cultural Work in Donald Duk and Dreaming in Cuban

Abstract

I must trust my own recollections. I must also depend on the recollections of others. Thus memory weighs heavily in what I write, in how I begin and what I find to be significant [...] But memories and recollections won't give me total access to the unwritten interior life of these people. Only the act of the imagination can help me. --Toni Morrison, The Site of Memory (302) In recent studies of ethnic literature, much discussion has surrounded the subject of ghosts, whose spectral or literal presence in contemporary works of fiction is thought to evidence a renewed interest in historical detail. One might begin by citing Kathleen Brogan's influential text, Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature (1998), in which she locates in ethnic narrative a process of mourning, so that haunting becomes a metaphor for the act of inventing and recovering one's cultural heritage. Brogan figures this trope as central to texts of ethnic origin, for haunted tales ... bear witness to some sense of breach with the past (164). Frequently underpinning discussions like that of Brogan is the suggestion that forgotten pasts (and the stories, moments, and peoples which accompany them) may be accessed through acts of the imagination, and that such interventions may help to reconstitute cultural histories which might be otherwise erased. Using the founding premise that the recuperation of such pasts is in part the objective of ethnic fiction, this analysis will proceed by identifying dreaming, as it appears in Frank Chin's Donald Duk (1991) and Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban (1992), as a motif that does cultural work similar to that of haunting. Specifically, since dreaming allows characters to relate both emotionally and corporeally to their cultural heritages, dreaming can be conceived of as a mode of historiography that reshapes what counts as history and knowledge. In this sense, dreaming has a manifold application: although it acts as a literary motif that advances the narrative of a fictional text, it also signifies a mode of history-making by which characters are invited to make imaginative interventions into their own cultural pasts. This investigation will commence with a discussion of Donald Duk, the twelve-year-old boy featured in Frank Chin's eponymous novel who, during the fifteen-day period of the Chinese New Year, begins dreaming that he is his great-great-grandfather, working alongside other Chinese laborers in 1869 on the Central Pacific Railroad. As Donald gets more interested in his dream, he develops an increasingly politicized awareness of the inaccuracies surrounding historical accounts of Chinese contributions to the railroad. Similarly, in Dreaming in Cuban, Pilar Puente is beckoned by her Cuban grandmother, through dreams and telepathy, to carry on the legacy of her family heritage. Pilar, too, is asked to become an arbiter of the who will negotiate its translation into the future. I would like to invite comparison between Donald and Pilar, in part because the texts in which they appear both suggest an appreciation of the fact that the construction of a modern day ethnic identity relies on the act of making imaginative connections with one's cultural heritage; additionally, each text reaffirms the idea that previous generations can help to mediate this process. I will argue, however, that the texts differ in some significant respects. Although Chin suggestively interrogates the relationship between dreaming and cultural identity, his text at times overestimates the ease with which knowledges gained from dreams might be called upon to advance revisionary histories. This move, I suggest, reduces the generative power of Donald's imaginative intervention into the project of creating a politics of memory. Conversely, Garcia's text demonstrates a more complicated awareness that the knowledge provided by dreams is, in fact, fragmentary and provisional. …