Writing for Freedom: Exile, Marginalisation and Oppositional Militancy in Reinaldo Arenas’s Before Night Falls

Abstract

This paper tries to investigate the genre of the exilic autobiographical memoir as a form of liminal writing that inhabits in the interstices between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictive’. It offers a reading of Reinaldo Arenas’s autobiographical memoir Before Night Falls, written from exile in New York during the late 1980s and early 1990s, which offers a form of sustained literary resistance to the systematic discrimination against, and marginalisation of the homosexual in post-revolutionary Cuba of the Castro-regime. The paper argues that Arenas’s autobiographical memoir becomes one of the principal texts through which he advances his oppositional militancy to Cuban machismo, a patriarchal and gendered code of behaviour co-opted by the Revolution. It concludes by positing Arenas’s project as a counter-hegemonic and resistant one, which adapts certain features of the testimonio (testimonial narrative) to lay bare the state-sanctioned ostracism and penal measures adopted against the homosexual individual.