The Island and the Madhouse: Rethinking the Subject and the Archipelago in Recent Cuban Literature

Aunque estoy a punto de renacer,no lo proclamaré a los cuatro vientosni me sentiré un elegido:sólo me tocó en suerte,y lo acepto porque no está en mi manonegarme, y sería por otra parte una descortesíaque un hombre distinguido jamás haría.Se me ha anunciado que mañana,a las siete y seis minutos de la tarde,me convertiré en una isla,isla como suelen ser las islas.Mis piernas se irán haciendo tierra y mar,y poco a poco, igual que un andante chopiniano,empezarán a salirme árboles en los brazos,rosas en los ojos y arena en el pecho.En la boca las palabras morirán para que el viento a su deseo pueda ulular.Después, tendido como suelen hacer las islas,miraré fijamente al horizonte,veré salir el sol. la luna,y lejos ya de la inquietud,diré muy bajito:¿así que era verdad?

—Virgilio Piñera, “Isla,” 1979

Although I am about to be reborn,I will not proclaim it to the four windsnor feel myself a chosen one:it was just my luck,and I accept it because it is not in my handsto refuse, and it would, moreover, be a discourtesywhich a distinguished man should never commit.It’s been announced to me that tomorrow,at six past seven in the evening,I will become an island,an island as islands usually are.My legs will make land and sea,and slowly, like a Chopin andante,trees will begin to come from my arms,roses from my eyes and sand from my chest.In my mouth the words will dieso that the wind can howl at its pleasure.After, lying as islands usually do,I will look fixedly at the horizon,I will see the sun rise, the moon,and far now from any anxiety,I will say very softly:so it was true?

Contemporary Cuban literature has mostly been read in relation to the political and socioeconomic context of the Cuban Revolution’s post-Soviet period, which obviously is a singular condition of the writing of the island. In this essay, however, I would like to adopt a different scope and explore this literature’s Caribbean connection through Édouard Glissant’s concepts of relation, archipelago, and diversion. Cuba’s connection with Caribbean canonical writing has nevertheless quite often been problematic. On the one hand, Cuba has a very strong notion of nation and national literary canon, in which the gaze of the metropolis and of Latin American avant-gardes is rather more present than is the case for its Caribbean neighbors and in which the insular condition returns once and again as a motif. On the other hand, some Cuban writers, such as Alejo Carpentier and Antonio Benítez Rojo, could even be considered as foundational within a Caribbean context of repeating islands. I will take a point of departure from Glissant’s notion of archipelago in relation to one novel in particular, Desde Los Blancos Manicomios (2010), by Margarita Mateo. In this discussion, I will show the ambivalence and the limits of these concepts by Glissant, which deal simultaneously with the limits of belonging and detachment of a community or imaginary identity. I will discuss whether the use of archipelago stands for a deterritorialization and fragmentation in Mateo’s novel and whether it produces agency for the subject. This contemporary novel seems to deal above all with the self as such, within an archipelagic constellation of cultural identity in which foundational fictions of belonging are also quite present. This constellation serves as a commentary on those foundational texts, as an interwoven texture of poststructuralist thinking and intertextual voyage.

Not only as a scholar but also as a fictional writer, Mateo, who was born in Havana in 1950, offers a refreshing voice in Cuba’s contemporary cultural field. The hybrid character of her texts, resonant of poststructuralist influences, was already evident in her work Ella escribía poscrítica (She Wrote Postcriticism...