BROOKS, continued

Any text can be read from a feminist point of view, that is, from the point of view that brings out a text’s alignment with, participation in, and subversion of patriarchal norms. But, I do not want to talk about the reader but about the text itself, so, again, what is distinctive in a feminist text? Many theorists talk about a text that is fluid, ambiguous, and experimental, but even though Rivera-Valdés’ narrative prose is very fluid, those are not the characteristics that make her “forbidden stories” a feminist work. Is Rivera-Valdés’ gender what makes her work a feminist text? Is it because of the large number of female characters that appear in her stories? In my opinion, it is not the sex of the author, the content of the , or the characters living in this work’s fictional world, although Meyers Spacks suggests so (7 - 35). It is neither the author’s “life” outside of her literary creation or the author’s psyche, as Barthes assures (145). It is not only the style of the work, but a shift in the stories presented in the work itself. A feminist work is a subversive and destabilizing one. It is a work that presents, for example, female characters —who are hybrids, mestizas, nomads— in charge of their own “destiny” and able to challenge the restrictive phallocentric/patriarchal norms. [Note] But how does Rivera-Valdés manage to do so in Las historias prohibidas/The Forbidden Stories?

First of all, a feminist text possesses a certain uneasiness about where it is going to be classified and/or located. This uneasiness and/or mobility is what, according to Gloria Anzaldiia, makes those texts nomads and mestizos. In the case of Las historias prohibidas/The Forbidden Stories, the hybridity and/or mobility is first presented in the form of an introductory note signed by the fictional author, Marta Veneranda, who has gathered all the stories for this compilation. According to Marta Veneranda, the introductory note’s purpose is to explain to us, the readers, how the primary interest she first had in these stories changed. Marta Veneranda, a former student of psychology who decides to work on a project for her doctoral studies guided by one of her psychology professors, Arnold Haley, moves from a psychology project rooted in social issues to the realm of literature. She explains that she tried to gather information based on the questionnaires prepared by her professor, but they did not cover all the information the interviewed people were giving her. Since Dr. Haley, who represents phallogocentric thought, recommended Marta Veneranda to focus more on “concrete details” because her “attention to other details [...] would not allow [her] to draw any scientifically valid conclusions,” she decided not to change her “research method but [her] discipline” (8).

The stories in Las historias prohibidas/The Forbidden Stories told to Marta Veneranda by the diverse narrators are a kind of fictional truth that works as both stories and therapeutic confessions (Bejel 221). These stories presented by Marta Veneranda, who has escaped from Dr. Haley’s phallogocentrism, have moved from one discipline to another (from psychology to literature), earning that uneasiness Anzaldúa talked about when considering the main characteristic of a mestiza literature. Like Anzaldúa, Rivera-Valdés’ main character, Marta Veneranda, “has discovered that she can’t hold concepts or ideas in rigid boundaries” (79). [Note]

But the mobility of Las historias prohibidas/The Forbidden Stories is not only in the domain of disciplines. According to Emilio Bejel, “the struggle for classification (and also for the process of (ssimilation/rejection) is at times obvious and at others quite veiled in Rivera-Valdés’ work” (210-20). Her texts have been considered, at times, as Cuban literature because they are written in Spanish. They have been classified as “ethnic literature” because the characters are non-whites, but the texts that contain them have been produced in The United States and as Cuban-American literature of the exile because it deals with immigration. But Las historias prohibidas/The Forbidden Stories is neither literature of exile nor immigration. Unlike the Cuban literature of the exile, which is marked by a feeling of loss and separation, and unlike the Cuban literature of the immigration, which carry the past as a heavy burden, Las historias prohibidas/The Forbidden Stories is more like nomadic literature because this literature is “a form of resisting assimilation or homologation into dominant ways of representing the self (Braidotti 25). Rivera-Valdés is against, in particular, the most traditional and yet dominant forms of representing the female subjectivity within the patriarchal culture and she articulates this battle throughout her characters.

The characters that repeatedly appear in Las historias prohibidas/The Forbidden Stories are the narrators of their own experiences. In the vast majority, they are working class women, some of them are lesbians, all of them Latinas and middle-aged. These characters’ marginality gives them a double and triple vision, transforming them into exceptionally active human beings. It is precisely these character-narrators’ agency and capacity to transform their own lives that defines the exceptionality of Rivera-Valdés’ female characters in Las historias prohibidas/The Forbidden Stories. Her protagonists are active in multiple ways. First, none of them are only housekeepers hence they are economically independent from men. This independence allows Mayté Perdomo, the character in “Cinco ventanas del mismo lado” (“Five Windows on the Same Side”), to stay in New York by herself instead of following her husband to Chicago. For the narrator in “Los ojos lindos de Adela” (“Adela’s Lovely Eyes”), her willingness to look for jobs and being independent allows her not only to earn her own money, but also to take positions to help her girlfriend, Adela, and, later, to go to college.

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