In Cristina Garcia’s novel Dreaming in Cuban as in a lot of other postcolonial works can be found supernatural events like ghosts or visions. These supernatural events happening in a realistic context are also called magical realism. In this novel, all of the three generations of the family Del Pino women encounter such events and are able to communicate with their relatives, even though they are not living in the same country. In this story, magical realism helps protagonists to overcome physical boundaries and to see or hear each other. It keeps all three women closer, even if there have been altercations between them in the past. Magical realism reveals to the protagonists what had been kept secret and what they have not been able to hear and see.

Although it is not the first time that a character is confronted with a supernatural event, the moment when Celia “closes her eyes and speaks to her granddaughter, imagines her words as slivers of light piercing the murky night” (Garcia 7) marks the first time that a character is able to interact with another one by telepathy. As Maria Rice Bellamy suggests in her book titled Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction, “Pilar remains closely connected to Celia and Cuba through telepathic conversations that overcome the physical distance between New York and Cuba” (Bellamy 79). It is therefore by means of magical realism that these two protagonists are able to communicate together even though thousands of kilometres separate them and they have not seen each other physically since Pilar and her family left Cuba. Telepathy helps them to keep in touch and to stay close with each other. As a proof that telepathy really exists between Celia and her granddaughter, the young girl says that she “hear[s] her speaking to [her] at night, just before [she] fall[s] asleep” (Garcia 29). This communication, as said before, brings the two women closer to each other as Celia tell her granddaughter that “she wants to see [Pilar] again” and that she “tells [her] she loves [her]” (Garcia 29). These conversations are so strong that it is part of what motives Pilar to take the trip back to Cuba.

These visions can also lead to communication in another way than by having a spoken conversation. Sometimes, the protagonists are only able to see the others but not to hear them. It is the case for Celia, at the beginning of the novel, when Jorge, her deceased husband, “emerges from the light and comes toward her, taller than the palms, walking on water” (Garcia 5). Here, three points can be seen which immediately set the story into the magical realism category. Jorge is seen as a gigantic person, walking on water and, above all, he is supposed to be dead. Communication is difficult, as Celia can only see her husband’s mouth move but she “cannot read his immense lips” (Garcia 5). Here, the communication is broken, as Celia is not able to understand Jorge. However, as Bellamy specifies, “Garcia uses alternative forms of connection, specifically total recall and dreams, to create relational bridges between characters even when they do not consciously seek them” (Bellamy 80). As she explains, the protagonists are communicating even if they think that they cannot understand each other. It is unconscious. Another example is found when Pilar has an “image of Abuela Celia underwater, standing on a reef” who “calls to [Pilar] but [she] can’t hear her” (Garcia 220). In her work titled Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas, Shannin Shroeder links this vision to “Celia’s walk into the ocean at the end of the novel” (Shroeder 70). Again, this vision helps the two characters to communicate, even if no pronounced word is understood.

Lourdes also encounters such unnatural events, especially when her deceased father “greets [her] forty days after she buried him” (Garcia 64). Although she fears this first meeting with her father and comes back home with a “presentiment of disaster” (Garcia 65), the other times she sees him will benefit her. According to Bellamy, the use of magical realism “facilitate the interaction of people distanced by ideology, geography and even death” (Bellamy 79). It works for Lourdes on every point Bellamy makes. As her father finally reveals her that her mother loved her and that her sister Felicia died, he finally persuades Lourdes to “go to them” (Garcia 196). This communication between Lourdes and Jorge therefore helps her to get closer to her Cuban family, distant to her geographically. In addition, she meets there her mother Celia, who is also distant to her ideologically. Celia is militating in favour of Fidel Castro’s regime but her daughter is completely against it. She even called Lourdes a “traitor to the revolution” (Garcia 26) when the latter decided to leave Cuba to go to the United States. This marks how much they have distant ideology. Finally, the fact that she has conversations with her deceased father makes her interact with somebody distant to her because of death. In his book titled Postcolonial Literature, Justin D. Edwards writes that writer Toni Morrison “asserts that the literary use of haunting offers the possibility of representing ‘unspeakable things unspoken’” (Edwards 119). In Dreaming in Cuban, the moment when Jorge reveals to Lourdes what really happened between him and Celia marks a haunting scene of a ghost revealing what had not been spoken during Jorge’s life.

Throughout the novel, multiples supernatural events happen and help the protagonists to interact together. Magical realism allows them to overcome every boundary of any nature. Even if the characters are very distant in a geographical way, political beliefs and even if they are separated by death, these supernatural events build bridges allowing them to communicate together. It gives them the power to speak about what is unspeakable in their life and tighten the links between them.

Works Cited:

Bellamy, Maria Rice. Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015: 76-102

Edwards, Justin D. Postcolonial Literature. New York: PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2008: 118-128

Garcia, Cristina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books, 1993

Schroeder, Shannin. Rediscovering Magical Realism in the Americas. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004: 69-82