The Sounds of Silence: Remembering and Creating in Margarita Engle's Singing to Cuba

Abstract

Nobody knows you. No. But I sing to you. --Federico Garcia Lorca, rebellious Spaniard who'd visited Cuba many decades ago. (84) While discussing her inspiration by poets and singers, narrator in Margarita Engle's Singing to Cuba quotes above words from Garcia Lorca's poem Absent Soul--words which capture novel's themes by articulating narrator's mission not only to remember her relatives but also to tell their story. In this novel, which vacillates between first person account of a Cuban-American woman in United States and third person story of her uncle Gabriel in Cuba soon after revolution, remembering signifies more than keeping people and events alive in memories. Remembering means creating a life for these memories by making them come alive on paper, and through this task of remembering and creating, narrator comes to embrace her identity as a writer--a role concurrently appointed by relatives and self-imposed. By writing her family history and uttering words her relatives and most Cubans in Cuba are forbidden to speak, narrator succeeds in singing not only to Cuba, but for Cuba--an achievement Engle simultaneously accomplishes with this novel. Through fictional, personal story of her nameless U.S.-born narrator, Engle tackles controversial issues of Cubanness and exile consciousness(1) and creates a story which embraces general Cuban-American experience of disillusionment, loss, and oppression. Stressing remembering and creating, Engle and narrator break through silence of alligator-shaped isle (15) and create sound and song with power of written word. Before discussing Engle's work in detail, it is important to place Singing to Cuba in context of emerging body of Cuban-American literature. Focusing on one-and-a-half generation--those born in Cuba but raised in United States--Carolina Hospital and Gustavo Perez Firmat, prominent Cuban-American writers and critics, have tackled issue of exile consciousness--a consciousness which emerges in Cuban-American literature as a nostalgia not for what was but for what could have been.(2) This consciousness is most evident in Cuban-American poetry, such as in works of Lourdes Gil, Hospital, Iraida Iturralde, Elias Miguel Munoz, and Ricardo Pau-Llosa, primarily in their most autobiographical writings. Engle joins ranks of such Cuban-American writers who use personal narrative voices, for the autobiographical model employed by Cuban-American writers exhibits a desire to connect with a larger community of Cubans as well as Cuban-Americans in process of telling their life stories (Alvarez-Borland 43). However, while most Cuban-American novels, like poetry, focus on loss, they do so in a broader manner, often employing techniques of magical realism to express effects of revolution and need to find a home. Therefore, use of double narratives is crucial, as Cuban-American writers express displacement of exile/ethnic through multiple voices which reflect divided self, such as Engle's use of narrator and Gabriel, and Cristina Garcia's focus on Pilar and her grandmother in Dreaming in Cuban. In fact, as Alvarez-Borland notes of Engle's contemporaries, narratives of Pablo Medina, Omar Torres, and Cristina Garcia are representative of a pivotal movement in contemporary Cuban-American writing. Medina, Torres, and Garcia belong to a generation of younger writers of Cuban heritage who, in words of Eliana Rivero, `are in midst of effecting transition from emigre/exile categories to that of ethnic minority members' (191). (43)(3) Focusing on identity, loss, and remembering, Engle is such a writer whose work entails never-ending quest to reconcile homeland and self. In Singing to Cuba, Engle creates a truly unforgettable story, using a pattern Tomas Rivera stresses in Chicano literature: Remembering, retelling, reliving (340). …