Geographies of the Caribbean in Cristina Garcia’s The Agüero Sisters

Abstract

Marked by a two-fold estrangement - from her native Cuba and from the Cuban American community in Miami - Garcia’s first two novels, Dreaming in Cuban (1992) and The Agüero Sisters (1997) - mirror the vagaries of a divided Cuba, its spatial and symbolic dissemination. This article argues that grafting, whether literal (botanical, anatomic) or metaphorical (textual, cultural or linguistic) is a central trope in The Agüero Sisters, functioning as a recurrent trope in the processes of discovery, dissemination, depletion and recovery explored in the novel. The paper further argues that Cuba’s political turmoil and economic disorder are mirrored in the unleashing forces of the natural elements, in the ravaged landscape of the human body and of the island. Conversely, there reigns an opulent but sterile (dis)order on the other side of the Florida Straits. By examining the shifting perspectives, the contrapuntal narrative structure and deterritorialized (borderless) language in Garcia’s novels, the paper will probe the thematic and textual representations of a “diaspora consciousness” (James Clifford). Ultimately, Garcia’s novel seems to question the very possibility of “at-homeness” (Adorno, Minima Moralia), conceived in strictly territorial and cultural terms.