The Angrily Bored Condition of Exile in Caribbean Literature at the Turn of the Millennium

Abstract

This essay discusses the relationship between anger, boredom, and exile in Caribbean literature published in the wake of the nineties, a decade profoundly marked by a change in sensibility, by analyzing Ena Lucía Portela's El pájaro: pincel y tinta china (1999) and Rafael Franco Steeves's El peor de mis amigos (2007). Specifically, in both texts, I detect a fluidity between the concepts of time, water, and a need to disappear. Disappearance as a heterotopic state seems to be connected to a need to destabilize single-authored discourses, functioning as mandates on how to live. This essay, then, argues that disappearance is the most radical effect of subjectivities that operate as, what I call, "angrily bored exiles," a political imagination that challenges the boundaries between subject and object as well as between body, space, and time. If neoliberalism imposes an anxiety about being bored, the exiled position inhabits boredom angrily to enunciate alternate ways of existing. The essay turns this literature into an evaluation of this emotional literary position within a broader context. I propose that the angrily bored mood from the nineties tempered the blind fervor of the sixties and has given contemporary Caribbean subjects a more complicated perspective on their options when imagining utopic representations.