Dirty Laundry: Narratives, Secrets, and Shame in Obejas’s Memory Mambo

DIRTY LAUNDRY: NARRATIVES, SECRETS, AND SHAME IN OBEJAS’S MEMORY MAMBO Maria Celina Bortolotto In Memory Mambo (1996), first novel by Achi Obejas, a Cuban–American writer, memory appears as the arduous work of narrative reconstruction. The protagonist of the novel is Juani, a young Cuban–American lesbian woman who lives in Chicago and who insistently affirms that “what I want to know is what really happened” (14). Juani tries to put together the pieces of a chaotic family puzzle, in an attempt to configure a narrative of origin and belonging. Her efforts seem fruitless because she is unable to come to certainties: “I no longer know if I really lived through an experience or just heard it so many times, or so convincingly, that I believed it for myself –became the lens through which it was captured, retold and shaped” (9). As the novel unravels, the reader comes across various obstacles that Juani encounters. Some of these have been built by Juani herself, and most of them are constructed around family secrets that tenaciously hide realities of shame. The purpose of this work is to analyze in Obejas’s novel the pervasive presence of shame in self–narration/subjectivity formation, especially of those subjectivities that are constructed as either stigmatized or invisible in prevailing narratives (mainly patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and nationalism ).1 Shame in this study – following Silvan Tomkins, Eve Sedgwick, Elspeth Probyn, Sara Ahmed2 , and others – will be considered to be intrinsically linked to ‘good’ affects, such as joy, enthusiasm, and love. This study hopes to expose how failure to comply with a (meta/grand) narrative ’s ideal can cause shame, but also, in the same motion, affirm the affective investment in that narrative which one fails to confirm. As Sara Ahmed explains, “we feel shame because we have failed to approximate ‘an ideal’ that has been given to us through the practices of love” (106). Narratives that have been inherited by Juani’s family in Cuba from the island’s colonial past, and those that narrate them in Chicago as an ‘ethnic’ minority fail to narrate them to various degrees, prompting the family to create their own narratives, in a defensive effort which recycles shame into creativity. This study will examine those tactics of self–construction and how they are deployed, offering a reflection on shame, metanarratives, ‘marginal’ subjectivities, and the power of creative resistance. The main voice of the novel, Juani, needs to narrate her origins and her family history. She is looking for a frame against which she can meaningfully situate her life as a Cuban immigrant in Chicago, already raised as an American, but mysteriously aching for an island about which she 29 SECOLAS Annals, Volume 52, 2008 knows almost nothing. Juani is set upon discovering (or even reconstructing /making up) her own history. Her need is not unique or even personal, since, as critic Hayden White explains, historical narratives are vital because they function as “metaphorical statements which suggest a relation of similitude between such events and processes and the story types that we conventionally use to endow the events of our lives with culturally sanctioned meanings”(88). These “story types” to which White refers can very well be homologated to “scripts,” as described in the early sixties by Silvan Tomkins, the founder of Affect Theory. This American philosopher and psychologist shocked the American academia by postulating that emotions, or “affects” as he called them, are the main driving force behind personality formation. Tomkins challenged prevailing popular consent among his fellow researchers that instinctual impulses or “drives” were the real motivational energy for human behavior. According to Tomkins, even if drives do motivate conduct, it is affects that ultimately amplify or minimize drives’ strength. Another of his postulates, relevant here, is that our behavior is continually organized through ‘scripts’ that allow us to negotiate the ‘scenes’ or ‘plots’ of our existence. Tomkins explained that “the script deals with the individual’s rules for predicting, interpreting, responding to, and controlling a magnified set of scenes” (Shame and its Sisters 180). Having in mind the Tomkian definition of personal ‘scripts,’ we can read Juani as being intent on reorganizing her own “script,” in order to...