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A wounded discourse
Shemak, April A.
Shemak, April A.
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n531-2250-1-PB.pdf
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"After the blood and salt water spurts, quickly sew up torn flesh and apply the antiseptic tinctures, the gauze and surgical plaster; then the febrile wait through the forming of a scar: suppurating, always suppurating. Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island Where illness is born, blood is bad. Santería divination proverb The title of Cristina Garcia’s widely acclaimed 1992 novel Dreaming in Cuban evokes the role of memory, dreams, and imagination as concepts that deterritorialize Cuban identity. By their very ethereal nature, these concepts have the potential to transcend the space between Cuba and the United States that separates members of the del Pino family and allow them to connect with each other despite the geographical and ideological distances between them. In addition to these metaphysical modes of connection, the material world also plays a prominent, if somewhat paradoxical, role in relaying familial and cultural ties beyond the boundaries of the nation-state in the novel. Specifically, Dreaming in Cuban reveals diseased and disabled bodies that are inextricably intertwined with the project of remembering domestic and national histories. These diseased entities enable ancestral connections to stretch beyond strained emotional and political borders by assuming the characteristics of a rhizome, which Caribbean scholar Édouard Glissant (following Deleuze and Guattari) defines as “an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently” (Poetics of Relation 11). For Glissant, the rhizome is useful for imagining the “submarine” connections linking Caribbean peoples, histories and experiences: “Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other” (11). While Glissant’s theory rests on the organic relational systems of plant life, my analysis extends his exploration of life forms to examine relational aspects of human bodies.
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2006
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With permission of the license/copyright holder