Latinx Literature Unbound by Rodriguez Ralph E.;

Author:Rodriguez, Ralph E.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

The Intimacy and Distance of Loneliness

Ana Menéndez is the daughter of Cuban exiles who fled to Los Angeles in the 1960s before settling in Miami. Since 1991, she has worked as a journalist in the United States and abroad, most recently as a prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald. As a reporter, she has written about Cuba, Haiti, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and India, where she was based for three years. She is also a former Fulbright Scholar to Egypt. She holds a BA in English from Florida International University. She received her MFA from New York University’s creative writing program, where she was a New York Times fellow. She is the author of four books of fiction: In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, which was a 2001 New York Times Notable Book of the Year and whose title story won a Pushcart Prize; Loving Che (2004); The Last War (2009), chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the top 100 books of the year; and Adios, Happy Homeland! (2011).

Menéndez’s story “Why We Left” is an apt, perhaps perfect, complement to both Manuel Muñoz’s “Monkey, Sí” and Patricia Engel’s “Green” because it makes a distinct yet connected use of the pronouns we and you. In its, at times, lyric rendering of the I in the story, it also serves as an ideal set up for the following chapter in this study, in which I take up the lyric self and the radical singularity of the I, but more on that in a moment. “Why We Left” comes from her collection In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, which details the lives of characters in the wake of the Cuban revolution. Many of the characters speak of the loss of homeland; they deal with the plight of living in exile, of having been a regal German Shepherd in Cuba, but only a degraded mutt in the United States; they wrestle with the complications of family, and a persistent theme throughout is memory—its nostalgia, its capacity to misremember, and the illusions it creates. In a collection of exquisite stories, “Why We Left,” however, stands out as special for a number of formal reasons, and those formal matters, especially the use of pronouns, are what I aim to tackle in this section.

From its very title, Menéndez plants a number of dramatic questions in the reader’s mind: Who is the we? From where have they left? And why have they left? We, readers, know, that is, what we are reading toward as we embark on our narrative journey. We get answers to these questions, but they are either not as direct as we might imagine, or they are not, given the context in which the story appears, what we might expect. Let me begin with the we.

The we here is not the unique we of “Monkey, Sí.” It is, rather, the common use of we, a pronoun that indicates a group of at least two people, one of whom is I. That is precisely what

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.