Autobiographical Acts and the Symbolic Acting-Out of the Marginalized Self in Cuban Exile Literature of the Mariel Generation
Cuban exile literature lends itself to an analysis of the hybrid fusion between autobiography and fiction because intrinsic to many narratives is the historical presence of Cuba and the exilic context and experience undergone by all the writers, a context and experience carried over into the literary selves constructed by these authors in their texts. Departing from James Olney’s perspective that the authorial “I” prompts the autobiographical act and is central to its being carried out, I will explore how these first person fictional texts, written from an exilic present by an authorial “I”, create a character “I” that in narrating its experience becomes intrinsically linked to and reflexive of the exilic condition of its creator and the community of readers who interpret it, embody it and transform it into yet another self: a communal, exilic self. In this way, autobiography, in its hybrid condition, mirrors the society and the culture that consumes it.
For this analysis I will focus on the work of a group of writers who arrived in the United States via the maritime Mariel exodus of 1980, paying particular attention to two novels: Miguel Correa’s Al norte del infierno and Guillermo Rosales’s La casa de los náufragos (originally published in Spanish as Boarding Home). (I will also use Reinaldo Arenas’s autobiography Before Night Falls as a comparative backdrop). I will explore how the autobiographical act manifests itself in these texts in terms of the author as a self-witness, all within the framework of apologetic discourse. The individual and often time polyphonic selves of these texts narrate their alienated lives in Cuba as a means of justifying their escape via Mariel. As marielitos, they confront a new form of alienation and a new sense of distance in exile. They are outcasts and find themselves in a sort of limbo as victims of marginalization, hostility and incomprehension before and after their maritime experience. This prompts, in turn, a symbolic acting-out of their condition that is present in the fictional text; the autobiographical act can thus be interpreted as a symbolic manifestation of exilic/diasporic identity which can take on varying, even polarizing forms, from the strong will for self-affirmation in Al norte del infierno to the hopelessness and surrender evident in La casa de los náufragos.
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