From Alienation to Reconciliation in the Novels of Cristine Garcia

Abstract

In Life on Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (1995), Gustavo Perez Firmat speaks of 1.5 ers, that generation of Cuban-Americans who were children at time of migration, but grew into adults in United States. (1) They feel fully comfortable in neither culture but are able to circulate effectively in both. Unlike their parents, who will never be North Americans, they will never be Cubans. As Firmat says, is an enduring, perhaps an endearing fiction. Cuba is for them as ethereal as smoke and as persistent as smell of their grandfather's cigars (5). For this uprooted generation, fiction can provide home of sorts, place to explore meaning of past, and one's personal place in it and present. Cuban-American poet Ricardo Pau-Llosa has said that the exile knows his place, and that place is imagination (qtd. in Firmat 10). Though Cristina Garcia's parents left shortly after revolution, it is probably inaccurate to describe her as an exile. Born in 1958, she does not remember revolution and has lived almost all of her life as Cuban-American. Nevertheless, despite her early departure from Cuba, Garcia has described her childhood as bifurcated, sort of hyphenated existence of which Firmat speaks. Living her public life in Brooklyn neighborhood populated by white ethnics, her Cuban background did not seem that relevant to her, but at home she felt Cuban because her mother, who recognized connection between language and culture, insisted on Spanish. As Garcia matured, her sense of Cuban identity, affair, became important to her (And There Is 102). 1984 trip to island to visit her mother's family, supporters of Castro, focused her interest on her identity and larger questions of history and politics, opening up complexities of Cuban revolution. Before that visit, she had viewed Cuban situation in unambiguous black and white of many Cuban-Americans (And There Is 104; A Fish Swims 65). Paradoxically, by meeting other side of her family and immersing herself in personal, she began to see larger sociopolitical contexts of being Cuban and began thinking about how historical events affect individuals and families (And There Is 107; A Fish Swims 71). Hearing stories from her grandmother, who lived in house on beach similar to Celia del Pino's in Dreaming in Cuban, she became especially interested in how such events affected women's relationships. As many feminist writers have alleged, Garcia believes that traditional history obviates women and evolution of home, family, and society and concentrates instead on wars and doings of men (And There Is 107). Another event affecting Garcia's fiction was working for Time magazine in Miami. Here she met Cuban-American community for first time and felt very alienated from them. Accused of being communist because she was Democrat, she became convinced that others besides right-wing extremists need to speak as Cuban-Americans in order to heal profound rifts created by revolution. According to her and many other Cuban-American writers, loud voices do not necessarily represent dominant Cuban-American viewpoint. (2) For example, some would like to see blockade lifted and to see more dialogue with Castro regime and more tolerance in exile community. This call for dialogue and tolerance is reflected in work of other Cuban-American writers and scholars, such as Ruth Behar, whose recent anthology by Cuban-Americans and Cubans attempts to build bridges between extreme views of right and left. Behar believes that Cubans need a nuanced and complex view of how Cubans on island and in diaspora give meaning to their lives, their identity, and their culture in aftermath of battle that has split nation at root (2). Certainly Garcia's work gives that nuanced and complex view that could bring about reconciliation called for by Behar. …