A Wounded Discourse: The Poetics of Disease in Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban

Abstract

My essay, "A Wounded Discourse: The Poetics of Disease in Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban," examines the implications of the overdetermination of disease in Garcia's novel. I argue that diseased and disabled bodies highlight the difficulties of expressing the fraught political relations between family members as well as between the United States and Cuba. As such, my analysis extends Edouard Glissant's theory of the organic relational systems of plant life to examine the relational aspects of human bodies. I argue that Garcia's deployment of ill bodies in rhizomatic terms subverts the dichotomized, incapacitating discourse surrounding the two nations. I also argue that current theories of disability studies must incorporate traditional, non-Western forms of knowledge about the body, health and disease in order to comprehend the transnational disability that marks the space between Cuba and the U.S.