Fictional First-Person Discourses in Cuban Diaspora Novels: The Author Within and Beyond Textual Boundaries by Raúl Rosales Herrera (review)

Abstract

Rosales Herrera, Raul. Fictional First-Person Discourses in Cuban Diaspora Novels: The Author Within and Beyond Textual Boundaries. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen P, 2011. 284 pp. Raul Rosales Herrera's Fictional First-Person Discourses delves into the dynamic representations of self and the blurred distinctions between autobiographical texts and first-person narratives. Focusing on post-1959 Cuban exile first-person texts, Rosales Herrera deconstructs the clear autobiographical pledge between author and fictional narrator by examining how five authors writing in Spanish incorporate self and their surrounding community into their works. The critic suggests that the exile condition for Cubans writing off the island has yielded a distinctive literary expression, blending the personal and the collective. Rosales Herrera effectively argues that the diasporic writer who through the imaginative and creative process narrates himself or herself, embedding his or her into the fictional fabric of a literary text (231). Rosales Herrera divides his manuscript into three parts that pertain to time periods or events in post-Cuban Revolution history. In the forward, Cuban-American scholar Gustavo Perez Firmat gives a brief but relevant synopsis that summarizes topics such as the other and the authorial I found in diasporic Caribbean literature. Rosales Herrera then lays out his theoretic framework in his introduction, harnessing the likes of James Clifford, Edward Said, and Ricardo Ortiz to address autobiographical performance and first-person texts within a diasporic Cuban context. Offering a general overview of the literary waves of Cuban exile writing, he accurately recounts significant and influential phases, such as the Mariel generation and The Special Period, during the second half of the twentieth century in Cuba. In the first part of his book, Rosales Herrera dedicates the first two chapters to literary texts of Mariel writers, Guillermo Rosales's Boarding Home (1987) and Miguel Correa's Al norte del infierno (1983). He highlights the unique situation of Mariel writers in the 1980s, explaining that they were excluded from a national space and the Cuban literary canon both on and off the island: They [marielitos] were outcasts and found themselves in a seemingly perpetual state of limbo, as victims of marginalization, incomprehension and hostility before and after their maritime experience (23). As the critic successfully posits, both Rosales and Correra write from an ambiguous space and as the other within the Cuban exile community. Moreover, Rosales Herrera's reading emphasizes the subtle bond between autobiographical acts and fictional accounts in the interpretation of these two novels as testimonies of multiple selves of both an author and his primary protagonist. …