Iraida López’s book Impossible Returns: Narratives of the Cuban Diaspora explores narratives of physical and metaphorical returns to Cuba by the one-and-a-half generation. The book recognizes the emphasis existing scholarship has placed on both the acts of leaving the homeland and living in diaspora. In doing so, Impossible Returns seeks to fill a void in these discourses by analyzing the “abstract and concrete” returns Cubans and Cuban-American artists and artistic expression have made. López’s book is essential to the discussion of the Cuban 1.5 generation’s relationship to their receiving countries, to the island, to the exile/immigrant community, and to their own mediated memory of the last two. Since the 1.5 generation was taken out of their homeland as children, its members have a unique and complex bicultural, bilingual, often transnational identity, and a seemingly heightened “homing desire.”
From the Revolution’s perspective, this diasporic group is “redeemable” because they did not choose to leave and thus they have historically been afforded more opportunities for mobility to-and-from the island. López builds on her analysis of foundational theories of Cuban and other diasporas, transnationality, returning, and post-memory in order to explore different types of returning to Cuban roots, to physically returning to the island, and to address the island’s reception of these types of returns. Memory, identity, and a claiming and reconstructing of home(land) all play roles in not only creating frictions between the different generations in the diaspora, but also they ultimately inform the constant redefinition and expansion of ‘lo cubano’.
The title of the book hints at the dark reality of the subject of returning, that one can never really return to the same space and time that one remembers. Returning is impossible first because that time and space is constructed, endlessly recreated and fictionalized in the memory of that subject or in the collective memory of a diasporic group. This occurs partly consciously and partly unconsciously, both as a coping strategy in order to mitigate the trauma of rupture and discontinuity and as a natural act that occurs during the transition from childhood to adulthood. Thus the book deals with deuteragonists searching for their vérité.
Chapter one explains the socio-economic and political power struggle between the United States and Cuba that culminates, but does not end with the Cold War. It also introduces each of the migration waves that are referred to throughout the book. In chapter two, López describes how artists come to terms with or prepare for a return– the questions and curiosities that drive their desire to return and what they face once they arrive. In addition, the chapter discusses the coping devices or compromises the discourse has to create or compromise on in order to include their representation of return.
Chapter three focuses on how a “homing desire” leads to a preservation or rescuing of the Spanish language in artists of the diaspora. López uses Ana Mendieta in this chapter to discuss how artists manifest this homing desire with a literal representation of merging their fractured selves with the earth in an eco-feminist trope in order to reconcile body and land. The result of this ends up “spilling out” of the physical and geographical confines of the temporal artistic expression, and so we unground Cuban national identity and characterize it as a transnational identity that cannot be confined to the island. This discussion continues throughout the book while arguing for Cuban-American critics to be included in island discussions of ‘lo cubano’. Chapter four, follows this lead, looking at narratives of return through childhood memories that end up returning to the simulacrum of Cuba – Miami. Here López engages with this enigma, and questions why writers would focus so heavily on returning to the simulacrum and not the actual island. I think it is easier – less traumatic – to return to Miami because as López notes, the collective memory about Cuba in Miami is almost dogmatic. That is to say, by returning to Miami, the 1.5 generation does not have to visit the source of the wound–they can just visit similar wounds that validate the existence of their own.
Chapter five discusses “vicarious returns and a usable past” or those return narratives that utilize their fictional characters to imagine an even further fictionalized explanation of family history. Each of the examples from Cristina Garía’s The Agüero Sisters, Achy Obejas’s Days of Awe, and Ana Menéndez’s Loving Che share a violent plot that leads to fracture and loss of (family) history and highlights the homing desire through an emphasis on searching for a Mother/Nation. The last chapter, chapter six, focuses on the island’s view of émigrés and returnees, the politics of shifting nomenclatures, and delineates a “Boomerang Aesthetic.” This chapter utilizes film and music as sources to illustrate a “Boomerang” or transnational aesthetic that prioritizes an audible and fluid to-and-fro representing the mobility of the returnees.
Discussing the politicalization of the émigrés’ body by the Revolution, López explains the perceived differences between those bodies that left before and after the Post-Soviet period. While the émigrés that left before the Post-Soviet period were politically criticized and/ or demonized by the Revolution, those who left as children are redeemable because it was not their decision to leave in the first place, and those who left after the Post- Soviet period are more likely to be considered economic immigrants. The “Boomerang Aesthetics’” emphasis on mobility, in turn highlights that the artist that physically travels between homeland and home in diaspora is also able to enter into the conversation about émigrés. From subject to speaker, the Boomerang subject’s ability to self-represent themselves does not negate the existing physical barriers between the populations, but it does contribute to the present discourse in a way that promotes a transnational understanding and empathy between the two populations.
A major strength of the book is the way that López creates spaces for the telling of Cuban narratives from all angles of the diaspora without ignoring and criticizing some of the structural violence present in established discourse. One such example is the tactful way that she describes differences in nomenclature – exile vs. immigrant for example. López recognizes how the different waves have different “rules of engagement” when it comes to the homing desire and the construction of “lo cubano.” Another strength of the book is López’s recognition and inclusion of American-Born-Cubans (ABCers). Although work by the artist Ana Mendieta is well recognized, her artwork, like that of many of the 1.5 generation, has been largely ignored in criticism about the voicing and reconstructing of Cuban narratives. López’s discussion of work by the author Ana Menéndez in the chapter about “vicarious returns” and a “fictionalized usable past” (chapter 5) highlights the existing gaps in present discourse and the value of their inclusion.
Another insightful characteristic of López’s work is that she directly acknowledges nuances in, for example, child migrations and does not allow the discourse of trauma or exceptionalism to isolate the experiences of this generation. Rather, she allows other examples from around the world to organically inform and evolve the thoughts around Cuban migration experiences. López is cognizant of heterogeneity and multiplicities of voices and experiences in this generation and does not try to oversimplify around the generation or the diaspora in order to reach a clear and conclusive answer. This recognition and acceptance of the chaos that entangles physical, metaphorical and/ or spiritual “ruptures, loss, [and] discontinuity,” and the necessary creations of a kind of shared imaginary allows her to elegantly weave through narrations of different genres and create a more comprehensive definition of the one-and-a-half generation of Cuban-Americans and of the lasting effects of forced migrations in general.
López’s dedication to the subject is evidenced by her visibly ardent research and expertise, especially coming across in the author’s tone and discussion of her own experiences as part of this generation that tie it all together. As part of the ABC generation myself, I too faced many of the challenges that López outlines in the preface and introduction: issues of guilt and not wanting to betray the diaspora, issues of inherited, broken, and/ or mismatched memories that try to put pieces of the puzzle together to create an image, an imaginary, a history, and an identity. One such instance of the inclusivity of López’s observations can be seen in the following section: “The older relatives are distraught at the behavior of their children whose desire to go back to the land of their ancestors is viewed as a betrayal. If the elders are not shocked by the intention, they are at least puzzled by it” (2). She could have said go back to the land of their birth and have excluded the ABCers from this discussion, especially since the 1.5 generation is her focus.
I experience the guilt of having “betrayed” my family by not only physically returning to the island, but by making this imaginary the focus of my intellectual pursuit, using the study of Russian literature of the 20th century as a mode to mediate and come to terms with the violence and trauma in my own family’s history. This route to my roots definitely “puzzled” and continues to confound my relatives. They just cannot comprehend why I would choose Russian when “they came here so I would not have to study Russian.” For them it was a political choice, but for me it was a safer and more accepting genre – that was close enough to my family’s past, but not exactly. Safer because Russian violence and trauma became a simulacrum for Cuba in my own understanding and more accepting because adults did not respond to my curiosity with: “you do not understand because you are American.” I began with gulag literature because those narratives of violence, terror, and trauma were similar – albeit more detailed than the stories I grew up hearing about Cuba. Russian literature would give me a language through which I could discuss and explore a Cuban imaginary I was building in my mind, a Cuban imagery through a Russian lens.
But no amount of reading and imagining could have prepared me for the uncanny feeling of physically “returning” to Cuba – a place I had never been: of visiting houses of people whom I had only ever met on the phone or in other people’s stories about them, of going inside the homes of people I had never met and finding pictures of myself at all stages of life. Or meeting grown adults I had always heard of in another’s recollections of the adult’s childhood and adolescence. When I visited Russia for the first time, I lived in an international student dorm in St. Petersburg during “White Nights”. To me it is and forever will be the Alice and Wonderland city. Any informed visitor will feel the tug-of-war between East and West, between past and present. Visiting Cuba for the first time, after I had visited Russia, was like a darker mirror image of my Russian experience. Fear of the unknown, fear of what I had heard, fear that it would never feel like home, that no number or books or films would help to fill the gaps. But most of all I feared I would realize the exaggerations, the untruths, and lapses in my family’s numerous testimonies. I had never felt the feelings of “ruptures, loss, discontinuity” stronger than when I returned to a place where I had both never been before and yet felt a deniable pull of home.
Author: Iraida H. López
Title: Impossible Returns: Narratives of the Cuban Diaspora
Release Date: 29 September 2015
Press: University Press of Florida
312 Pages, $74. 95
Hard Cover ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-6103-0