Moon, Stars and Sharing the Sky of Nationhood, or a "Bluer, Fresher Cuba," in Christina García's The Agüero Sisters

MOON, STARS AND SHARING THE SKY OF NATIONHOOD, OR A “BLUER, FRESHER CUBA,” IN CHRISTINA GARCÍA’S THE AGÜERO SISTERS by Zoya Khan University of South Alabama Long ago the sun married the moon, and they had many children. Their daughters were stars and stayed close to their mother’s side. But their sons followed their father across the morning sky. Soon the father became cross and ordered his children home. The sons, small suns themselves, fell into the ocean and drowned. That is why the sun burns alone but the moon shares the sky. (“A story of the gods,” The Agüero Sisters, 258) THIS limitless expanse of the stars is the “original geography” of the maternal nationhood that Cristina García charts in her novel The Agüero Sisters (1997). Spanning four generations of the Agüero family, the novel rewrites nationhood as a maternal bond transcending spatial as well as temporal borders. The two Agüero sisters, Constancia and Reina (the first in the US and the other in Cuba), are both haunted by the death of their mother and the subsequent suicide of their father forty years earlier. Through the uneasy relationship between the two sisters and their ambiguous ties to their shared past, ostensibly, the novel critiques the dominant construction of Cubanness as an entangled mass of phallocentric myths suppressing the intrinsically and enduringly feminine nature of the nation. At a deeper level, however, the novel deploys this overt feminist subaltern positioning to validate the location of Miami as the center of a new revitalized Cuban nationhood. 73 While the constant interlacing of love and politics in Latin American national romances is indicative of a hegemonic drive for forging new nationstates , as Doris Sommer has famously averred, the preoccupation with filial ties in Cristina García’s novel is representative of a minority resistance to precisely such nation-building intents presented in the text as essentially patriarchal tendencies (Sommer 6). Following Homi Bhabha’s lead that “differences are [. . .] the signs of the emergence of community envisaged as a project – at once a vision and a construction–that takes you ‘beyond’ yourself in order to return, in a spirit of revision and reconstruction, to the political conditions of the present,” it can be argued that the present is the text that invests meaning into all other times “beyond” it (Bhabha 3). In the process of reconstructing the past, the present constantly weaves new meanings into its fabric, even as it utilizes these interpretations to validate its own present political or cultural stances. Hence, not only does the articulation of difference signal a rupture in the homogenous fabric of the nation, it also marks the liminality of an alternate project. Besides being a minority narrative resisting the homogenizing sweep of the mainstream Anglo-American culture, the family saga of The Agüero Sisters strives to delineate a delicate female space between the equally patriarchal projects of the Cuban exiles and the communist Cuban state. García explains in her interview in the Reader’s Guide accompanying the novel, “I tried to develop a narrative where there were many conflictive realities that had to be reconciled” (Reader’s Guide 1). Yet the notion of reconciliation here already implies a specific position to be adopted in order to reach a resolution. At the same time, her admission that writing fiction is the outcome of a “resurgence” of her “Cuban identity” reveals the coincidence in her own thought between writing and cultural (re)construction (Reader’s Guide). Her approach towards writing as a vehicle for expressing cultural difference as well as a means of reconnecting with one’s silenced origins calls to mind Frederic Jameson’s observation that History is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but [. . .] an absent cause, [. . .] inaccessible to us except in textual form, and [. . .] our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious. (Jameson 35) As such, all narratives are nothing but interpretations of an “absent” history. Even as its narrativization is inevitable in order for it to be accessible, as an absent cause, it is beyond all resolutions...