Memory Mambo

Achy Obejas, whose short story and novel will open discussion of contemporary off-island writing, is clearly engaged in a dialogue with the Cuban canon. The title story of her debut collection, "We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?" positions itself as counterpoint to Cuban-American narratives of nostalgia by confronting head-on the selective, partial, rewriting of history under the heading of "things that can't be told." After invoking the taboo, Obejas proceeds to blast it wide open, telling all, revealing what it is that can't be told and why, and in so doing begins a journey, in the spirit of Carpentier, back to the source. In Memory Mambo, a complex, nuanced and masterfully crafted novel, Obejas continues the journey, exploding false memory, nostalgia, and the mythology of exile, along the way. In its entirety, the work is an extended exploration of the meaning of memory within the context of what it means to be Cuban for the diaspora of the late twentieth century. The novel achieves a definitive break with narratives of nostalgia and evocation. Its fearless and unmitigated interrogation of surrounding reality, her reality, that of the displaced Cubans of Chicago who live side by side with Puerto Ricans and Chicanos who hold contrasting views on Cuba, the U.S. and the wider world, brings Obejas in line with the marvelous-real. Obejas shares Carpentier's unwavering commitment to question surrounding reality down to the very bottom layer, and Lezama Lima's insistence on Cuban literature's intimate relationship with la realidad circundante, whether it is Havana, Santiago or Chicago. Obejas' close, knowing scrutiny of the local in Memory Mambo, with its slow accumulation of revealing detail, is what renders the narrative universal, in the best of the novelistic tradition.

The novel opens with an exploration of memory, raising pointed questions regarding the uses, misuses and meaning of memory. In fact, the entire first chapter is an extended meditation on memory, insisting on the insoluble connection between memory and historical consciousness. It is memory that will determine how the individual situates him or herself within the flow of history. This link between individual memory and historicity is manifest in the opening paragraph.

I've always thought of memory as a distinct, individual thing. I've read with curiosity about the large parts of our brains where memory resides--how these areas remain vital, as animated at seventy-five as at twenty-five years old. Scientists say that when we think we're losing our memory what's actually happening is that we've blocked or severed connections.(15)

The narrator, Juani Casas, intimates from the very beginning that if the individual's connections to the flow of history are "blocked" or "severed," distortion will reign, as is increasingly the case of the Cuban-Americans around her, the family and neighbors that make up the social fabric of her life. Their contaminated memories can spread, contagiously, the way the plague of forgetting spreads to the entire community in García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.

...I often wonder just how distinct my memories are. Sometimes I'm convinced they're someone else's recollections I've absorbed. I'm not talking about hooking into past lives, or other links established spiritually or psychically to other times. I'm not talking at all about suppressed memories. It's just that sometimes other lives lived right alongside mine interrupt, barge in on my senses, and I no longer know if I really lived through an experience or just heard about it so many times, or so convincingly, that I believed it for myself--became the lens through which it was captured, retold and shaped.(16)

There is much in Obejas' narrative, and the historical, ontological, existential questions raised by her narrator, Juani, that places the work squarely within the trajectory of the Cuban novel. In The Repeating Island, Benítez Rojo identifies the search for origins, for roots, the need for rediscovery of the divided self, and the cultural fragmentation that originated with the plantation as recurring elements in the Caribbean novel. Memory Mambo explores themes common to the Caribbean novel, with equal concern for historical specificity; in this case the historical specificity of Cuban émigrés in the United States. The origins remain the same, but the journey back is longer and more circuitous since the point of departure for the émigré writer is that of a Caribbean once removed. In the development of Cuban literature we find that the passage from lo criollo to lo cubano, from a sense of Caribbeanness to a Caribbean, Cuban nationalism, was, in broad strokes, a movement from Europe to Cuba. The conclusion of Mendéz Capote's Memorias de una cubanita que nacio con el siglo suggests precisely that swing away from Old World origins toward an embrace of Caribbeanness as the European-educated bourgeoisie comes to terms with the extreme limitations of independence as defined by the Republic in its second decade. Facing the present constructively, with an eye to shaping the future, for Méndez Capote and the class she inhabits and represents, meant letting go of the past, of traditions that were disintegrating, in any case, under U.S. dominance.

If there was a strong sense of unity among the early émigrés who, once uprooted, had no one to hold on to except each other, by the 1990s that coherence is severely eroded. The protagonist of Memory Mambo is adrift in a disintegrating universe with nothing but herself to rely on. Surrounded by émigrés who have done nothing but lie to themselves and each other since their arrival, Juani's is a journey into historical truth. Remembering and forgetting, truth and lies, both move the plot forward and shape the character's narratives. Juani's discourse rises to the challenge of not telling lies to herself, though the climax of the novel revolves around a lie she has presented to the others and must now retract. The protagonist's truth-seeking and truth-telling narrative is meant to serve as counterpoint to the false memories expressed in the collective narrative of the enclave of exile. As narrator, her function is that of Carpentier's novelistic Adam, naming and renaming the things of her world, a world in which nothing is solid and all appearances deceive. From the first line to the last, Memory Mambo describes the form and content of a disintegrating social reality. The identity of the émigré community is coming apart at the seams, in the family, the community, the enclave itself. Survival depends on abandoning the myth of cohesion, confronting the process of disintegration, and struggling to create something new with the pieces as they fall away. The narrator describes communication among exiles as one that takes place in a vernacular, a way of speaking, that is "neither Cuban nor American, neither genetic or processed." In a line that resonates throughout the narrative, the protagonist defines the linguistic and existential terrain negotiated by all the novel's characters: "We communicate, I suspect, like deaf people--not so much compensating for the lost sense, but creating a new syntax from the pieces of our displaced lives." The narrator succeeds while those around her fail. By rejecting false memory, she is able to regain the historical continuity others have lost and to reassemble the pieces of her displaced life, sorting out fact from fiction, from the multifaceted fictions that are shaped and reshaped in a vicious cycle that entraps. In her reflections on the meaning of memory and search for historical truth, the narrator begins at the beginning, recounting the facts--what she has been able to gather of the who, what, why, when, and where--of her family's departure from Cuba.

I didn't know what was going on. I was simply gathered up, like one more precious belonging, and packed into a stranger's bloated car in the middle of the night, then taken down through black, rural roads with the car lights turned off....
So if these are the facts, why do I remember so much more? (17)