Border Work: Resituating Twentieth-Century Latin American and Caribbean Women Writers

• Published in: Canadian Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Studies Vol. 37; no. 73; pp. 221 - 226
• Main Author: Etcheverry, Gabrielle
• Format: Journal Article Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Kingston Routledge 01.01.2012; Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Association Canadienne des études Latino-Américaines et Caraïbes; Taylor & Francis Group LLC; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: 20th century; Anthologies; Authors; Benavente, Lady Rojas; Betancourt, Madeline Camara; Caribbean; Cuba; Cultural identity; Discourse analysis; Feminism; Frye, David; Hispanic people; Language history; Latin America; Literature; Nonfiction; Peru; Postmodernism; Religion; Review articles; Review Essays / Essais; Roberts, Nicole; Walcott-Hackshaw, Elizabeth; Women; Womens studies; Writers; Jamaica; Cuba
• ISSN: 0826-3663; 2333-1461
• DOI: 10.1080/08263663.2012.10817034

Given the excellent work these women writers have accomplished over their lifetimes and the potential of this line of thinking, the analysis that is ultimately provided in Cuban Women Writers itself often ignores some very important facets of the Cuban matria. Her essay on [Lydia Cabrera]'s fascinating body of work rightly identifies Cabrera's seminal writings on Afro-Cuban culture and religion as "postmodern ethnography" à la Stephen A. Tyler, and she supports Cabrera's view that her ethnographic work faithfully represented the voices of the "walking archives" with which she worked. Unfortunately, this uncritical view of the "voice" of ethnography does not take into account the important class and racial differences between Cabrera and her Afro-Cuban "subjects" of study, many of whom were also ostensibly women and had had very different experiences of patria from Cabrera's. Without addressing the limits of the ethnographic voice and the privileged position of the researcher (whether or not they are engaged in more liberatory forms of research than early anthropologists) or qualifying the use of "woman" as a category of analysis, Cámara runs the risk of imposing yet another totalizing narrative onto a very complex group of texts and heterogeneous group of people. The replacement of one totalizing discourse by another is also evident in her treatment of Maria Elena Cruz Varela's complex work, where her analysis of the motif of the body - both as the Freudian feminine body and the Christian tortured body - are presented as expressions of liberation from the tyranny of [Castro]'s patriarchal nation-state. While Cruz Varela's poetic critique of the Castro regime (her very public dissidence led to her imprisonment and eventual exile) can certainly be read as being subversive, both Christianity and traditional psychoanalytic models (notwithstanding the work of Julia Kristeva she cites in this field) have constructed women in the negative and should be problematized as such in any analysis of their role in a "liberatory" feminist discourse. Nevertheless, Cámara's analysis of Cabrera's, Cruz Varela's, and [Zoe Valdes]'s work, their struggles with the Castro regime, and the experiences of exile they chronicle demonstrates the poignancy of these writers' re-imagining of the Patria/Matria in light of their imposed physical separation from the island.