The Island and the Madhouse: Rethinking the Subject and the Archipelago in Recent Cuban Literature

Abstract

Aunque estoy a punto de renacer,no lo proclamare a los cuatro vientosni me sentire un elegido:solo me toco en suerte,y lo acepto porque no esta en mi manonegarme, y seria por otra parte unadescortesiaque un hombre distinguido jamas haria.Se me ha anunciado que manana,a las siete y seis minutos de la tarde,me convertire en una isla,isla como suelen ser las islas.Mis piernas se iran haciendo tierra y mar,y poco a poco, igual que un andantechopiniano,empezaran a salirme arboles en losbrazos,rosas en los ojos y arena en el pecho.En la boca las palabras moriranpara que el viento a su deseo puedaulular.Despues, tendido como suelen hacer lasislas,mirare fijamente al horizonte,vere salir el sol. la luna,y lejos ya de la inquietud,dire muy bajito:?asi que era verdad?-Virgilio Pinera, Isla, 1979Although I am about to be reborn,I will not proclaim it to the four windsnor feel myself a chosen one:it was just my luck,and I accept it because it is not in myhandsto refuse, and it would, moreover, be adiscourtesywhich a distinguished man should nevercommit.It's been announced to me thattomorrow,at six past seven in the evening,I will become an island,an island as islands usually are.My legs will make land and sea,and slowly, like a Chopin andante,trees will begin to come from my arms,roses from my eyes and sand from mychest.In my mouth the words will dieso that the wind can howl at its pleasure.After, lying as islands usually do,I will look fixedly at the horizon,I will see the sun rise, the moon,and far now from any anxiety,I will say very sofdy:so it was true?Contemporary Cuban literature has mostly been read in relation to the political and socioeconomic context of the Cuban Revolution's post-Soviet period, which obviously is a singular condition of the writing of the island. In this essay, however, I would like to adopt a different scope and explore this literature's Caribbean connection through Edouard Glissant's concepts of relation, archipelago, and diversion. Cuba's connection with Caribbean canonical writing has nevertheless quite often been problematic. On the one hand, Cuba has a very strong notion of nation and national literary canon, in which the gaze of the metropolis and of Latin American avant-gardes is rather more present than is the case for its Caribbean neighbors and in which the insular condition returns once and again as a motif. On the other hand, some Cuban writers, such as Alejo Carpentier and Antonio Benitez Rojo, could even be considered as foundational within a Caribbean context of repeating islands. I will take a point of departure from Glissant's notion of archipelago in relation to one novel in particular, Desde Los Blancos Manicomios (2010), by Margarita Mateo. In this discussion, I will show the ambivalence and the limits of these concepts by Glissant, which deal simultaneously with the limits of belonging and detachment of a community or imaginary identity. I will discuss whether the use of archipelago stands for a deterritorialization and fragmentation in Mateo's novel and whether it produces agency for the subject. This contemporary novel seems to deal above all with the self as such, within an archipelagic constellation of cultural identity in which foundational fictions of belonging are also quite present. This constellation serves as a commentary on those foundational texts, as an interwoven texture of poststructuralist thinking and intertextual voyage.Not only as a scholar but also as a fictional writer, Mateo, who was born in Havana in 1950, offers a refreshing voice in Cuba's contemporary cultural field. …