Memory: A Way of Expressing its own Personal Identity

The Different Characters’ Perceptions of Recollection in Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban

In Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban as well as in the chapter “Memory” in Edwards’ Postcolonial Literature textbook, the theme of memory is at the centre of attention and is addressed from different points of view. On the one hand, Edwards approaches the theme in a broader view, introducing different works from authors with different issues about memory. On the other hand, García’s novel presents an opposition between characters concerning the perception of memory. However, keywords such as truth and identity are linked to memory in both authors especially in the novel Anil’s Ghost in Edwards and related to Lourdes, Celia and Pilar in Dreaming in Cuban. Thus, in comparison to Anil’s Ghost, this is throughout the different perceptions of memory on the one side of Lourdes and Celia and on the other side of Pilar, that the women recollect past events in order to express or forge their identity.

The perception of Celia that recollection lies in the beauty of a creative memory, is linked to the freedom of expressing a personal identity. At the beginning of the novel, while Celia is cooking for her grandchildren and looking at the sea, she “realizes” (García 1992: 47) that a restricted memory is atrocious and lets no personal recollection “Memory cannot be confined, Celia realizes, looking out the kitchen window to the sea. It’s slate gray, the color of undeveloped film. Capturing images suddenly seems to her an act of cruelty.” (García 1992: 47-48). The ambiguity in the second sentence of whether the sea or the memory is “slate gray” (García 1992: 47) is open to interpretation. One possible interpretation is that even though the sea could have seemed gray, “the color of undeveloped film” (García 1992: 47-48) mainly refers to a photograph so to “confined” (García 1992: 47) memory. In this way, it is related to Celia’s viewpoint that beauty is found in the apperception and reconstruction of the authentic experience and not in captured “images” (García 1992: 48). What is more, Celia not only “realizes” that “memory cannot be confined” (García 1992: 47) but “capturing” pictures also “suddenly” appear to her as “an act of cruelty” (García 1992: 48). To some extent, these words demonstrate Celia’s rapid awareness that unforgettable and unchangeable memories are terrifying. In this way, in order to exaggerate her profound disagreement about limited memory, Celia uses the hyperbole “act of cruelty” (García 1992: 48). Thus, this liberty to recollect the events as she wants to remember can be linked to the expression of a personal identity as she is free to perceive the world as she wishes. Relatively in his Postcolonial Literature textbook, Justin D. Edwards puts in relation the recollection with personal identity as it appears in the novel Anil’s Ghost “In this narrative of recollection, we witness not an identity that is fixed and given, but improvised, constructed, negotiated in the conditions of danger and trauma.” (Edwards 2008: 137). To some extent, though Anil’s Ghost and Dreaming in Cuban are narratives about memories and the characters have the liberty to remember the events as they want, Celia does not have to confront “danger” and “trauma” (Edwards 2008: 137). In Anil’s Ghost, the protagonist Anil faces traumatic memory recovering “Sri Lanka’s national crimes and murders” (Edwards 2008: 136) in order to discover a part of her identity. In Dreaming in Cuban Celia forged her identity during the independence time in Cuba so at a time where major advances have been made in the country and living conditions were favourable. Hence, whether for Anil or Celia the identity is constructed through living memories and not an imposed recollection of the past.

Along the same lines Lourdes agrees with the perception of Celia regarding creative memory but opposes her daughter Pilar who needs the truth from the past to find her identity. Lourdes evaluates the lives of others from her point of view, which is claimed by Pilar “Mom filters other people’s lives through her distorting lens. Maybe it’s that wandering eye of hers. It makes her see only what she wants to see instead of what’s really there.” (García 1992: 176). In this saying, the vision of Lourdes that she sees and interprets the world in her own manner contrasts with Pilar’s conception of memory and past events. This latter wants to know the events as they happened so “what’s really there” and not how her mother “wants to see” them (García 1992: 176). However, each character, even Pilar, has over the years a “distorting lens” as memory selects instants it wants to keep and those it wants to forget. Thus, it increases the difficulty of recounting memories without interpretation nor a particular point of view. Following the same idea, as Felicia says to her son, retelling events or truth from the past depends on how the mind transform the facts and give them sense “Imagination, like memory, can transform lies to truths” (García 1992: 88). In other words, what is relevant is not the event itself or what happened in the past but how the characters decide to link them. In the case of Pilar who is searching her identity, having events told from a constantly changing memory of her family is insufficient. Even if she “remember[s] everything that’s happened to [her] since [she] was a baby, even word-for-word conversations” (García 1992: 26), she was only two when “[she] left Cuba” (García 1992: 26) for America. Thus, she needs original and reliable information about her grandmother and events that happened before her birth in Cuba to discover where she belongs. In this way, Dreaming in Cuban is similar to the novel Anil’s Ghost because as Edwards points out: “Anil’s Ghost is a fiction that uses memory as a subject to explore the complexities of truth.” (Edwards 2008: 137). While Anil uses her own memory to get to the truth and recovers her own history, Pilar deals with the intricacies of truth through the memory of her relatives to have her questions answered and find her identity.

To conclude, while Lourdes and Celia perceive the beauty of memory in the interpretation and rearrangement of remembrances, Pilar relies on the truth of the events. The fact that memories change throughout the years and depend on how the characters want to rally them does not concord with Pilar’s perception of memory. In this way, Lourdes and Celia express their personal identity across recollection as they are free to have their own conception of the world. On the contrary, Pilar as Anil in the novel Anil’s Ghost, focuses on the reality of what happened in Cuba or the past of her grandmother with the aim of determining her identity.

Bibliography

• Edwards, Justin D. “Chapter Twelve: Memory.” Postcolonial Literature. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan. (2008): 129-138.

• García, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books. 1992.