Testimonial Literature and Conversations as Literary Discourse: Cuba and Nicaragua

Abstract

Revolutionary literatures in Spanish America have flourished in recent years, almost into a veritable avalanche of output. Not only must we bear in mind the texts of countries where successful revolutions have taken place, as Cuba or Nicaragua, but also the counterhegemonic discourses which can be seen arising and evolving in exile or in guerrilla warfare, shedding new light on an emerging reality. As a corollary to this innovative context, formal literary configurations are found which not only alter, modify, and overflow existent linguistic molds, but also break genre boundaries and even give rise to new categories of discourse which, within the limits of traditional literature, could be considered suspect, unclassifiable, or simply nonexistent. The so-called testimonial literature figures predominantly in the second category and was first observed in Cuba and Nicaragua in the form of literatura de campafia' (battlefield literature), such as diaries kept by those taking part in guerrilla warfare, and secondly through the continued proliferation of collected papers and reevaluations of past events, which attempted to recapture the everyday events of the revolution from its very beginnings. Literatura de campania has highly respectable forerunners in the writings of nineteenth-century revolutionaries, among which figure the diaries of Jose Marti. In our own times we hear voices from armed and clandestine struggles in Latin America, and, as is to be expected, first-person accounts bearing witness or interpreting events predominate, with memories and analyses