Telling the Untold Stories

For women writers of the Caribbean as well as for larger marginalized communities, the relationship between oral traditions and written texts is a part of the defining thread of Caribbean historiography. In telling these stories that examine social and political issues, women writers many times also address challenges of uniting artistic creation with social commentary. In this article I draw on Waugh and Hutcheon's definitions of metafiction to examine the use of such texts by women writers of the Hispanophone Caribbean in order to highlight narrative strategies of historically marginalized groups to contest hegemonic constructions of the nation. In particular, I will demonstrate how the Cuban novel El columpio de Rey Spencer by Marta Rojas demonstrates a metafictional critique of homogenizing discourses through its examination of storytelling and the subaltern, tradition and progress. Through the creation of what González Mandri describes in her 2006 book Guarding Cultural Memory as hybrid texts that ‘... negotiate between telling their individual stories and the history of black communities and cultures in Cuba, specifically ... of women of the African diaspora ...’, Rojas’ deconstructive project creates interconnected, alternate articulations of individual and collective identities that reveal the multilingual, transnational Cuba

Art · Collective memory · CONTEST · Creole language · Diaspora · Hegemony · Historiography · Literature · Narrative · Oral tradition · Orality · Politics · Sociology · Storytelling · Subaltern · Anthropology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies

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  Carole Boyce Davies, Carole Boyce-Davies•Black Women, Writing And Identity•2002

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• Tropicalizations. Transcultural Representations of Latinidad

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• Metafiction

  Patricia Waugh•Poetics Today•1985

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• Gender and the Narratives of Migration

  Mary Chamberlain•History Workshop Journal•1997

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• Metafiction

  Ann Jefferson, Patricia Waugh•Poetics Today•1986

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• African Oral Literature

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• Identity, Class, and Nation

  Barry Carr•Hispanic American Historical Review•1998

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