Paul Miller (Vanderbilt University)
As result of the Cuban diaspora we are by now quite accustomed to an image of the Caribbean island which is more a product of phantasmagoric than terrestrial geography. The machinery of nostalgia of exiled Cuban writers such as Zoé Valdés in Paris or Christina García in the USA produces an imaginary cartography that is in fact resonant with the universal trend towards a displaced national imaginary.
In this paper I will reflect on this process of rendering Cuba a figment of memory and nostalgia, but will take into consideration an additional ethnic component: the Judaism in writers such as Achy Obejas, Esther Rebeca Shapiro Roc, Ruth Behar and José Kozer. Unlike the situation of the Jewish writer from Argentina, Brazil or even Mexico, The hyphen in the moniker, "Cuban-Jewish writer" is an extremely tenuous link. Despite the weak roots in the Cuba nation for these writers—all now residing in the USA and writing in either English or Spanish—Cuba curiously persists as a enduring reference: José Kozer's poem "Diaspora" expresses a double duality of Cuban-Jewish exile:
The shop in Havana is dust
and the Irish cotton is dust
and my father, a dusty Jew,
day after day comes home with a loaf of bread beneath his arm.
Double duality--Jewish and Cuban, present and past--inform Kozer's poetics. Dust, Cotton and Bread are chronotopes that mark the present as a tenuous space. My talk will gauge these dualities and discuss the space in Cuban literature for the Cuban-Jewish diasporic contributions. Within the context of the "Going Caribbean" conference, I will conclude my talk with a brief consideration of comparative possibilities of Jewish identity in other Caribbean contexts, especially Jamaica and Curaçao.
