Acts of Narrative Resistance: Women's Autobiographical Writings in the Americas

4. The Autobiographical Text as Memory Box: Nélida Piñon's The Republic of Dreams

4 / The Autobiographical Text as Memory Box: Nélida Piñon’s The Republic of Dreams Nélida Piñon’s autobiographical A república dos sonhos (1984; The Republic of Dreams, 1989), like Ana María Shua’s The Book of Memories, is about storytelling and the ways in which the stories we tell construct personal, family, and national identity. Like Shua, Piñon draws from her own family history in writing an epic narrative that represents the history of a nation. The Republic of Dreams tells the heroic saga of a Brazilian family with its origins in Galicia. Breta, the granddaughter in the novel who is to write the family story, proclaims, “If I hadn’t become a writer, grandfather, I was going to become a tramp” (612). Piñon, like her character Breta, is the granddaughter of Galician immigrants and has inherited from her own grandfather Daniel this desire to “hacer las Américas.” The Republic of Dreams charts her own voyage, her own geography , as a response, perhaps, to Piñon’s lament, in an interview with Catherine Tinker, that “woman has always been a remote soul, distanced from herself, as if she were a continent without land, a geography, waiting to be named” (quoted in Castro-Klarén, Molloy, and Sarlo 79). In The Republic of Dreams, Piñon names her continent(s) and her geography at the same time that she bears out her claim that “[w]e were the books of our ancestors; we’re their copyright” (79). Piñon holds a solid place in Brazilian, Latin American, and world literatures . Her honors, awards, and honorary doctorates are too numerous to mention here, but it might be recognized that she was the first woman to be elected president of the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters) in 1996, serving during the one hundredth year 94 / from self to family to nation of the Academy’s existence; the first woman and the first Brazilian to be awarded the prestigious Juan Rulfo Prize for Latin American and Caribbean Literature, in 1995; the first Brazilian selected for the Prince of Asturias Award of Letters (2005); and the first woman selected for the University of Guadalajara’s Julio Cortázar Chair, a distinguished professorship established by Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez. Her work has been translated into many languages, and her short stories have been widely anthologized. Nélida Piñon was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1937. Her maternal grandparents , Amada and Daniel, immigrated to Brazil from Galicia. (Piñon’s first name, Nélida, is an anagram of Daniel.) She grew up listening to the stories of her grandparents, stories of their lives as well as the tales of Galician legends and myths they passed on to the younger generations . Those stories became “the starting point of a complex web of fact and fiction that nurtures Piñon’s fertile mind. The author collected their tales, captured their memories, and embarked with them on a laborious task of spinning the fine threads of her own creativity into a compelling body of work” (Teixeira 22). That many adult autobiographers and writers come from storytelling families is hardly surprising, for, as John Paul Eakin notes, “the child’s immersion in a rich narrative culture of family storytelling doubtless informs the adult’s autobiographical impulse” (How 118). Nélida Piñon dedicates The Republic of Dreams to those family members whose stories she heard, those who came to Brazil: In memory: Amada Morgade Lois Daniel Cuiñas Cuiñas Lino Piñon Muños to: Maíta Cuiñas Peres Avelina Cuiñas Brito Celina Cuiñas de Almeida Antônio Cuiñas Morgade and to my mother: Carmen Cuiñas Piñon (5) Piñon relates her passion for myths to her Celtic roots: “I believe strongly in myths, in ancient stories. Yes, perhaps my interest in literature has to do with cultural genetics. The Celts were great storytellers, stories outside of time that others followed” (Riera 46). This connection between storytelling and Celtic heritage is echoed by the grandfather in The Republic of Dreams when he reminds his granddaughter, “This gift we have for the autobiographical text as memory box / 95 telling stories is owed to the fact that we’re Celts, Breta. It’s our greatest heritage” (72). In The Republic of Dreams, telling stories—the stories...