Multiple Articulations of Exile in US Latina Literature: Confronting Exilic Absence and Trauma

The sudden dispossession accompanying a refugee flight is much more than the loss of a permanent home and a traditional occupation or than the parting from close friends and familiar places. It is also the death of the person one has become in a particular context, and every refugee must be his or her own midwife at the painful process of rebirth. Dervla Murphy The frequent theme of exile in US Latina literature is framed within the social and geopolitical reality of Latin America. Narratives of displacement and exile discussed in this article specifically focus on the Central American and Caribbean experience determined by the conditions of military regimes and authoritarianism in the second half of the twentieth century. Forced to flee severe political repression and state violence in their homelands, Central American and Caribbean civilians came to the US mainly as political refugees, participating in a massive population uprooting. In only three decades, from 1950-1983, almost two million people were forced to relocate: approximately 900,000 Cubans; 300,000 Dominicans; 200,000 Nicaraguans; 300,000 Salvadorans; and 200,000 Guatemalans came to the US as documented and undocumented refugees (Pastor 300). The effect of such massive relocations are typically experienced as a psychological rupture that inevitably problematizes the articulation of individual and collective subjectivity. As Edward Said notes, a rift between a human being and a native place often results in an alienation from the self (173). This absence of a strong grounding provokes feelings of uprootedness and nonbelonging, endangering one's personal sense of being and propelling one into perpetual solitude and nostalgia. The inability to find a stable and complete meaning provokes a crisis of self, a fragmented subjectivity placed in a continuous state of lack. Denied home and integrity in both the homeland and the immigrant location, exiles become confined to the space of absence and loss, or what Said calls "a perilous territory of not-belonging" (177). In her analysis of Latin American women's writing in exile, Reading the Body Politic (1993), Amy Kaminsky theorizes exile as a particular form of "presence-in-absence." She emphasizes its spatial configuration, pointing out that exile is primarily "from, and not to, a place" (30). As a physical topicality constituted by departure, exile is defined by "what is missing, not by what it contains," and its conditions of loss and emptiness foster "a will to return into presence" (32). Desire to reclaim presence is manifested, Kaminsky states, in perpetual longing, nostalgia, a wish to return, and a fear of return to the place where one can no longer be. Consequently, exile is experienced as dislocation, both physical and psychic. On the other hand, exile may also offer liberating possibilities. Kaminsky notes that the experience of physical and emotional rupture can lead to personal growth and transformation. Through the discovery of an inner capacity "to survive and grow in the new environment" (37), one may find a greater independence and confidence and thus gain a more fulfilling self-affirmation and realization. Kaminsky compares this act of self-discovery to rebirth, an emergence of new personhood and subjectivity. As the epigraph to this article states, the exilic rebirth is inevitably connected to death, "the death of the person one has become in a particular context." Evidently, this individual liberation or, in Murphy's words, "the painful process of rebirth"--is attained in traumatic circumstances, but this is precisely why its meaning is so powerful and valuable. This article focuses on the depiction of exile in three Latina texts--Helena Maria Viramontes' "The Cariboo Cafe," Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban, and Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents--in an attempt to investigate different articulations of the exilic condition. …