3 - The Palimpsestuous (Re)writing of the Island as a Dialogic Practice: Literature in the Second Degree in Abilio Estévez's Tuyo es el reino

Summary

As we have seen, there has been a proliferation of the use of intertextuality in recent Cuban fiction, and the process of creation appears as a topic in all the novels studied in this book. This process of creation becomes a mechanism that the characters of the novels use to reach self-knowledge, as a way of creating a collective memory and of resisting established authority.

While Abilio Estévez has achieved international success with his novels and his writings for the theatre, critical studies of his works have been relatively few and far between. This is possibly a result of the literariness and complexity of his works, which may appeal to a limited number of readers rather than to a wider commercial readership, or to the ‘lado mezquino’, which Estévez identified with a lack of critical response after the success of his first novel. Abilio Estévez has given several published interviews – for example with Sanjuana Martínez (1997), Armando Alanís (1998), Dean Luis Reyes (2001), Magda Resik Aguirre (2001), Eduardo Béjar (2002–03), Asunción Horno-Delgado (2006) and Luis Manuel García Méndez (2009) – in which he has shed light on important aspects of his books, including Tuyo es el reino (1997), the novel which occupies my attention in this chapter. In these interviews Estévez admits that he has tried to recover the happy days of his childhood in this novel, written as a homage to literature, and we can see how the writing of the novel itself is created through the narrative voice as the author attempts to apprehend the essence of ‘Cubanness’.