Jacqueline Herranz Brooks

Note: This text includes a number of notes and translations from Spanish to English. These notes are clearly marked by brackets [] and can be accessed by positioning the mouse over the linked note.

In 1998, when I was still living in Cuba, I came across a book published that year in Havana, written in the United States by a Cuban émigré, Sonia Rivera-Valdés, which had won the Casa de las Américas award in the island the year before. The book - a collection of 9 short stories and an Explanatory note entitled, Las historias prohibidas de Marta Veneranda (The Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda), where diverse fictional characters confess to the main protagonist and fictional author of the “forbidden stories” their most intimate experiences, especially those that are considered by themselves as shameful ones - was “categorized” in different ways. Readers, of course, had their own experience and views about these stories, yet all of them agreed on one point: when they started reading, they couldn’t stop until it was finished. While some readers insisted on calling Sonia Rivera-Valdés’ book as “very real,” others classified this book as soft-porno literature, and considered her style as “light” writing. While some critics, such as Zaida Corniell, compared the author’s style with that of Anais Nin, other writers, such as William Monaham, wrote in a blurb for the book that the pieces were “vastly entertaining, slyly heretical, and probably the most important book of stories since Joyce’s Dubliners.” For me, Las historias prohibidas /The Forbidden Stories (the book and its award) ruptured the constantly reproduced model in Cuba (and almost everywhere else) where the presence of literature written by men was (and still is) overwhelming. At that time, I did not appreciate the implications of this breach opened by this literary work. Back then, I wondered how a book written in such a colloquial, yet literary language, a book that uses the first person, and does not talk about what Carpentier considered the “big themes,” could be classified and/or be considered “good literature.” [Note] It is just today that I can come out with my own criteria about this book, a very slippery and unclassifiable one, which I now consider to be feminist writing. But what is feminist about a feminist book anyway? How is a feminist text to be distinguished from the patriarchal and phallocentric ones? And, what is distinctive about it so we can say that it is subversive?

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