The lonely figure

This essay aims to explore how the voice of memory and its rich resonance in Ana Menéndez’s eponymous short story “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd” in her collection of that name can be read for and heard. Memory choreographs its discourse, and reading the figurations and figures that emerge makes visible the contours of what André Aciman has called the exile’s “compulsive retrospection”. The theoretical framework for these explorations and excavations is based on the approaches that tropology, Bakhtin’s conception of architectonics and cognitive linguistics take to figuration, the construction of memory, and orientation. Keywords: Cuban‐American literatureexilememorytropologyarchitectonics Notes This article focuses on the short story “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd”, not the collection it is from, which carries the same title. In the rest of this essay I will for the most part use the concept of troping to denote these processes, since the word belongs to a vocabulary more conducive to this analysis than mapping does. In the few instances where I use mapping the implication of this term will be clear from the context. All references to Ana Menéndez, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd (New York: Grove Press, 2001). The park exists and is described on the Web page “Must See Miami” as follows: Domino Park resides in one of the predominantly Cuban districts of the greater Miami area. It is located on the corner of Calle Ocho and fifteenth‐avenue in Little Havana. Domino Park is a gathering place for the men and women of Little Havana. They have congregated in the mini‐park for years, challenging each other to domino games. Although players sometimes choose to challenge each other to games of chess, the main staple of the park is dominos. The park received its nickname, Domino Park, for that very reason. Before the construction of Domino Park, which occurred in 1976, the men of Little Havana played dominos on the corner of fifteenth‐avenue. They would sit directly across from the Tower Theater and played well into the night. Originally, the players used shaky tables and a rigged, lighting system. The city of Miami spent $115,000 to build the park’s magnificent architecture. (http://www.mustseemiami.com/attractions/domino‐park.html) A type of men’s shirt that originated in 18th‐century Cuba, and spread to other parts of the Americas by way of Yucatan, where wealthy Cubans often vacationed. I use the word perspection rather than perspective to emphasize the “act of viewing, looking closely into, beholding” (OED). This emphasis enhances the meaning of event of vision as ongoing, constitutive and constituted event, not as object. Perera locates the park to a register of objectivization. “Within this enclosure with its touristy labelling, it seemed as though the domino players were performing their culture—albeit reluctantly—for onlookers, creating what could be described as ‘canned culture’ both in its containment and condensation” (9). In Perera’s observation of the park in its actual existence the profound lack of engagement between point of spectation and spectacle highlights the absence of domain crossing. One problem here is that by the same token there are also as many readers of those very figures. The exact dynamics of this escapes clear formulations since any attempt at exploring the figure is already compromised. The construction “reading for” must take, literally and grammatically speaking, an object. Manicero means peanut vendor. It is also the name of a famous (Cuban) son of the 1930s, as well as a type of dance. We may well ask with Perera whether the state of non‐belonging “locate[s] [the domino players] in a ‘no‐man’s land’?” (12) Perera’s analysis of this particular joke and its relation to the story adds an interesting twist to the carnivalesque element. She proposes a reading where the joke “articulates a paradigm for [the players’] relationship with their homeland, recreated in memory, and with their present life in Miami” (13). Máximo’s telling of jokes to a double audience, “that of his friends and the gawking tourists” (13), serves both to “conceal (behind the laughter) and partly subvert the painful dynamics that have translated, even transformed, Juanito the mangy dog” (14). This reading suggests the suspension between home and not‐home on a more or less permanent basis, where the carnivalesque has become transience’s companion. It also echoes, albeit from a different perspective, the present essay’s argument that the figure of suspension does not leave Máximo any more, but leaves him in a “fictitious space

Art · History

• Figural Realism

  Open Access•Hayden White•Figural Realism•2019

  Add to list

• Luis Cernuda and the Poetics of Exile

  Michael Ugarte•Modern Language Notes•1986

  Add to list

• Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads

  Open Access•Gerard Steen, Gerard J Steen•Journal of Pragmatics•2003

  Add to list