Hibernating in Havana: Paradoxical Memory in Todos se van and Nunca fui primera dama by Wendy Guerra

Abstract

Hibernating in Havana: Paradoxical Memory in Todos se van and Nunca fui primera dama by Wendy Guerra Juli A. Kroll Far from being traditional Bildungsromane, the novels Todos se van (2006) and Nunca fui primera dama (2008) by Cuban author Wendy Guerra contribute to the late twentieth-/early twenty-first-century literature in which a dystopian Cuba seeks to combat historical amnesia and anchor a drifting national imagination. Participants in this wave of dystopian fiction, novels like La nada cotidiana by Zoé Valdés (1995), La novela de mi vida by Leonardo Padura (2002), Otras plegarias atendidas by Mylene Fernández Pintado (2003) and Muerte de Nadie by Arturo Arango (2004) express “la indigencia y la indignidad” (Sklodowska 33) of the Special Period and/or the disenchantment that many of the grandchildren of the Revolution felt toward Cuba’s socialist project.1 In the case of Todos se van, protagonist Nieve Guerra intuits the creeping paralysis that awaits her when she comments, “A la deriva viajo poco a poco hasta la inmovilidad total” (285). Nadia Guerra, the main character from Nunca fui primera dama, for her part, affims that: “El día en que perdemos la memoria viajamos a la deriva” (130).2 Both novels recreate Havana’s stultifying atmosphere in which female characters subsist, trapped between “lo obligatorio y lo prohibido” (Todos se van 137) in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Like insects trapped in tree resin, they inhabit decades in which gestures of memory constitute Parkinsonian movement—vibrations that mimic progress. Influenced by the instability of personal and historical memory, as well as by state prohibitions against acts of dissident memory, the autobiographical element of the [End Page 65] Alzheimer’s diagnosis that Guerra’s mother receives and the dissolution of the memory of female collaborators in national history, Guerra’s novels show that the would-be subject’s struggles congeal, eventually, into nearly complete hibernation and immobility. Guerra demonstrates paradoxical attempts to consecrate historical and personal events to memory in both novels; Todos se van employs elements of the anti-Künstlerroman, in which the narrator’s artistic development is incomplete, and she fails to find a readership for her work within the narrative diegesis. With Nunca fui primera dama, the powerful metaphor of Havana as a museum and mausoleum provides the basis for examining a necrotic national memory and for exploring the city as a democratized, heterotopic feminist palimpsest. Guerra’s first two novels, the award-winning Todos se van (Premio de Novela Bruguera) and Nunca fui primera dama established the author’s international credentials as a novelist who critiques authoritarian Cuba from within. Both novels’ diegetic worlds revolve around women’s experiences in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century in Cuba. Through the childhood and adolescent diaries of an abused girl (Todos se van) and radio transmissions and personal stories from three marginalized women (Nunca fui primera dama), the novels give voice to national amnesia and hibernating historical memory from key eras of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in Cuba. The works depict a nation frozen by fear and involuntary consensus during decisive moments of the post-Revolutionary period and of the author’s childhood. The result is that these novels, the anti-Künstlerroman Todos se van, and the ambulatory, necropolis-based Nunca fui primera dama, ask: how does voluntary forgetting constitute a response to unfulfilled utopias, and how do we address the gaps in national memory? They make us complicit in the comforting act of constructing the novel’s readership as an exegetic activity. The study at hand argues that Guerra’s novels are significant expressions of the current generation’s need to interact with groundbreaking, feminist, post-Revolutionary, literary perspectives on Cuban identity. Responding to this need, Todos se van and Nunca fui primera dama dissect and partially re-assemble elements of Cuban identity from the perspective of feminist and resident exiles. The novels are grounded in Cuba’s literary history, as they converse with the literature of Cuban insularity and the heritage of testimonial literature by women. By dismantling insularity and patriarchal, Revolutionary discourse, I demonstrate that Todos se van uses...