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I Write My Self: The Female Body as a Site of Transculturation in the Short Stories of Carmen Rodríguez
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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carol stos I Write My Self: The Female Body as a Site of Transculturation in the Short Stories of Carmen Rodríguez When she realized that she was surrounded by nothingness, she wanted to hug her own body, only now she realized that her body was the hole and the hole was her. The only clear thing in the midst of total darkness was her voice, trapped in her throat, trying to remember how to cry out for help … but, in what language ? (Rodríguez 35) In his work Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar (1947) ethnographer Fernando Ortiz coined the technical term “transculturation”to describe more accurately, as he perceived it, the processes that had led to new cultural realities in Cuba. Previous expressions in use such as “cultural exchange,”“acculturation,”“diffusion,”“migration or osmosis of culture,”and other similar ones he deemed inadequate to the task of explaining the rich and vital complexity of contemporary Cuban culture (Malinowski vii). Transculturation does imply an active, reciprocal, mutual exchange between cultures, a process of integration and give and take that generates yet another process that Ortiz calls“neoculturation.”Nevertheless, he clearly recognizes the darker elements in what he acknowledges as the “painful process of transculturation.” I am of the opinion that the word transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily 141 08_cheadle_stos.qxd 2007/06/21 13:30 PM Page 141 involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as deculturation. (Ortiz 102) Ortiz introduces and explains his neologism in the section of Cuban Counterpoint in which he briefly describes the historical trajectory of the intricacies of Cuban culture. It is the description of a cruel and violent process: one indigenous group suffered the destruction of its way of life and disappeared because of an inability to acculturate, Spaniards“torn loose”from the Peninsula collided with a new cultural situation,Africans brought as slaves saw their “own cultures destroyed and crushed”(98). The layering of so many different peoples and cultures on the island “at times [gave] rise to the most terrible clashes” (99) and resulted in all those arriving on Cuban soil, by design or against their will, experiencing and living “in the same state of dissociation” (102). It is in this state of dissociation, which both defines and is defined by transculturation ,that the exile,the refugee,the immigrant inevitably finds herself— if she can be said to find herself at all.As the result of the union of two cultures, she is, as Ortiz says, the offspring that “always has something of both parents but is always different from each of them” (103). Dissociation and difference: these are the conditions and results of a never-ending process of transculturation , the lived reality of many of the protagonists in Carmen Rodríguez’s short stories. Carmen Rodríguez describes herself as a Chilean-Canadian writer.A political and social activist in Chile, forced to flee after the 11 September 1973 coup, she has intimately experienced the painful process of transculturation, first as an exile, then as an immigrant. A Canadian citizen since 1979, her short fiction is informed by a wealth of personal experience. Memory, often seduced by nostalgia or sharpened by the need to bear witness and testify, is a constant and often implacable companion. Physical, emotional, and linguistic estrangement, distance, and struggle are the tensions that resonate in her narrative as they resonate for every displaced, deracinated person. They define the existence of everyone in that state of dissociation of being in and between two cultures, acted upon by the persistence of the past within the hegemony of the present. The fact that Rodríguez has transformed her private narrative into the public narrative of her collection of short stories is the act that both grounds her and gives her agency. Through the process of writing her stories (her story) she has, indeed, as Hélène Cixous exhorted, written her self and, in so doing, become subject as well as object, writing herself into the fabric of each of her cultures as both thread and weaver, putting herself “into the text— as into the world and into history—by her own movement” (196). 142 The Transcultural Body / Le corps transculturel 08_cheadle_stos.qxd 2007/06/21 13:30 PM...