5 - (Re)writing the Body as a Feminine Strategy: Yanitzia Canetti's Al otro lado

Summary

One of the most complete and competent studies of Yanitzia Canetti's work is that of Yvette Fuentes (2002). Fuentes shows how Cuban women writers in the Diaspora display an isolation that challenges patriarchal discourses. She examines the three women writers that I study in this book, though the choice of novel in her study of Chaviano differs (Fuentes selects El hombre, la hembra y el hambre for her investigation). With reference to her analysis of Canetti's Al otro lado, Fuentes studies the discursive narratives (that is, fantasy, parody and allegory) that Canetti uses to undermine notions of gender and national identity. However, what for Fuentes is an aislamiento that allows these women to talk back ‘to those wielding power’ for me is a dialogic process that Canetti uses to respond to hegemonic discourses. While Fuentes considers it a feature of Cuban women writers of the Diaspora that these authors reflect in their works an ‘in-betweenness’, a ‘continual double movement’, I argue that this is a fluidity expressed by all Cuban writers, male or female, inside or outside Cuba, during the Special Period and beyond.

Rebecca Marquis (2006) has also undertaken a study focused on authority and rhetoric in confessional narratives, such as that of Canetti. Marquis considers the confession of Canetti's nameless protagonist as a strategy to assert female authorship and authority in writing within a history of women's confessional literature.