Martirio Fuentes, one of the characters interviewed for the collection of forbidden stories published by journalist Marta Veneranda, appears seven years later to recount her Stories of Little Women and Grown-Up Girls. This new book by Cuban author Sonia Rivera-Valdes can’t be read as a disparate element. No work inserted into an author’s poetics could solidly resist this kind of dismemberment; the relationships, however, point to more than an express desire to continue writing the book. Not rewriting, but retaking it from where it was left off the time. The modus operandi appears in the second paratext of the two, and inagurates the collection of stories: the essential note.

The one who writes and signs the essential note isn’t Sonia Rivera-Valdes, author, nor is it prologue writer X, but is rather one of the female characters in this new series of stories (Martirio), who states that she is the author of the entire book, as promised during a conversation several years ago with Marta Veneranda del Castillo Ovando... and “with the conclusion of this project I pay several debts” (Rivera-Valdés: 10). Martirio’s voice is the one that closes the first moment in the cycle of life histories that Rivera-Valdés continues on with here. There is a bridge that connects up the story “The Most Forbidden of All” with this initial note, and affirms its place in the story “The Deepest Seed of the Lemon”. The Martirio character reappears and tells, directly from her own experience (not the one reconstructed by Marta Veneranda), the final twist in the love relationship with Rocio.

Fragmented memory, fragmented history, the fragmented woman who recounts and describes, and who doesn’t try in any way to create a one-voiced cosmos. Every one of the interventions that return to events already told seems to want to relocate these events in their retelling.

The women of Sonia Rivera-Valdés stories are victims of a heterosexual patriarchal system; at the same time they are rebels and critics of this system. Their position in the power hierarchy is subversive, distinguished by possession of a voice. And not exactly a voice that spreads furtively, hidden, throughout the writing, but one that disconcerts and silences the dominant voice. The writing is the second moment in which what once was said quietly is reproduced. “The Eighth Fold”, one of the stories in the new book, hyperbolizes this gesture, and coming from a woman is construed as a political performance: Lucía, a professor of music, decides to no longer continue a physical relationship she is having with a married man. She makes the decision and announces it to him. He can’t believe that she would be the one to end their encounters, and he attempts to blackmail her, telling her he would destroy her public image. She, calmly, responds: “Whatever you think or say can go through the eighth fold of my ass.”(Rivera-Valdés: 115)

The lesbian characters, a series of them that the author also returns to in her second book, come to reaffirm an ideological system in which Rivera-Valdés mixes certain autobiographical moments, as in the exploration of the world of the lesbian couple–which in her case is also mixed in with the variables that exile and a nation’s dismembered body constitute. Emilo Bejel and Victor Fowler, in two different critical exercises, approach the idea that the lesbian couple is a synthesis of a series of symbolisms that include the historic-political Cuban in their transnational dimension. The Martirtio, a Cuban immigrant who abandoned the country in the sixties and finds herself physically and sexually in a moment with Rocio, born and raised after the Revolution, cristalizes in itself all the doubts, instabilities, loves, aggressions, and utopias that Cubans from both sides of the physical border have sustained for almost half a century. The old idea of identification of one’s country with a female, maternal figure is bifurcated with two women who love or hate one another despite a common language and history. In “The Deepest Seed of the Lemon” we witness the separation of these same bodies who now know it’s impossible to love, because the same national history they have been part of goes beyond its function as background scenery and runs into these protagonists’ intimacy. Their life histories are amply connected to the historic reference that overcomes them. Inscribed here are the faces of a national identity they represent, from which they isolate themselves so as to be able to rewrite history with dissonance. The homoerotic encounter is an element the writer explores from the duality the specific case of Cuban national history offers. Connected also to her instinct to revise and destabilize relationships to major or minor events of epic importance, those that are ordinarily the domain of the official media, she makes use of a dirty realism as an aesthetic movement, always choosing Havana as the specific backdrop to try out a unique and intimate, sociological approach to the nineties.

Playing an extremely symbolic and provocative game, Rivera-Valdés resumes her poetic narrative. Her exquisite description of tense situations, the overview of national circumstances affected by immigrants’ experiences, the obsession with placing centerstage intimate, forbidden stories—stories where women are able to acknowledge scenes that were historically impossible in Hollywood productions and on bestseller shelves; these are some of the clear signals Sonia Rivera-Valdés uses to delineate her irreverant narrative.

Being an author who escapes because of her age what could be nominated “generation of the nineties”, she recycles and creates topical discourses of this same group without renouncing her own obsessions. This excercise of mimesis appears powerfully in both of the author’s books. She converts it into a double recourse. On the one hand she assures its placement within a geneology of women who have used oral discourse as their formal means to approach the literary act, and on the other hand, with said identification, parodies the old Freudian axiom about the hyterical and phallic woman, envious of the power and voice of the father. Rivera-Valdés constructs and even deconstructs the voice of the mother, which is not only possible but interests her. She gathers that scattered voice inscribed in the air and transcribes it. Necessary work—like her stories, like herself.

Mabel R. Cuesta is a Cuban literary critic. She lives in New York.