Between Shores: The Road and the Nation in Guantanamera

Transcription

1 c. B. NOgueXa Page 1 of 10 Between Shores: The Road and the Nation in Guantanamera A Work in Progress by: Claudia Barbosa Nogueira University of Maryland, College Park Presented at the 26& Annual Caribbean Studies Association Conference in St. Maarten, 2001 No part of this work may be cited, referenced, or reproduced without prior consent of the author. Copyright 2001 by Claudia Barbosa Nogueira

2 Page 2 of 10 Timothy Corrigan, in his study of road films, claims that one of the underlying tensions that define the genre is that between departure and destination. The narrative of a road film, one that attempts to allocate value not only to the places the characters leave and enter, but also to the process of leaving and entering, is intrinsically connected to a problematizing of progress. Through the application of episodic structures, frequent usage of hand-held cameras, and a constant reference to landscape as navigable terrain, the road film, as Corrigan explains, is emblematic of a specific relationship with time and space that can best be described as post-modern. Corrigan7s study, although focused on American mainstream cinema, points to an interesting set of problematics when discussing a film in a national context. How does the notion of mobility, of people, specifically, relate to an identification with place? How are borders, politically contested and/or geographically determined, translated as narrative structures? How is an understanding of history, that which is so significant to national identification, contested in the postmodern framework that Corrigan defines? How, in short, are limits, be they temporal, political, geographical, or narrational, negotiated to contain movement and change? Tomb Gutierrez Alea, in his film Guantanamera, explores these questions as they relate to an identieing process through which Cubans are made to locate themselves within a space that is not only nationally specific, but culturally and politically unique. By using the road-movie genre, the filmis granted the power of re-tracing, re-mapping as it were, the nation in a spatial and temporal context - it allows the concept of nationality to be granted mobility. One of the first images of the film is a map of Cuba, an image that hnctions not only to provide a structure to the narrative (a journey from one end of

3 Page 3 of 10 Cuba to the other), but to place this narrative within a charted and politically defined space. This map hther creates the forum through which the narrative is given national relevance - the map hnctions to literally connect the film to the place it depicts. The women in this film - Gina, the protagonist, Yoyita, the deceased opera singer, and Niurka, the absent daughter - hnction very similarly to this map. They not only allow for narrative connections to be made, connections that propel and add significance to the plot, but serve as spaces of connection. They represent, quite literally, a connection to place - both geographic and political - and hnction as relational sites between viewer and film,as well as citizen and nation. If the road is the means through which Cuba is depicted as "una sola," as one of the hnerary officials claims, the women are the means through which this connection is made applicable to the viewer. The women's mobility, in the diegesis and out of it, within the boundaries of the nation and outside it, seems to represent movement itself, a representation which is particularly interesting, it seems to me, given the ways in which the road movie genre is primarily concerned with the wanderings of men, and the ways in which representations of women's connections to nation so often are illustrative of an almost a-political, allegorical relation (I am referencing here to such figures as Pocahontas, Iracema, and La Malinche). What does it mean, then, that Gutierrez Alea has not only placed women within a national construct, but that he has emphasized their mobility through, as well as in, this construct? Gina's journey from Guantanamo to Havana is perhaps the most central to the film's narrative and thematic structures. Her growth towards a healthy understanding of her potential, both romantic and professional, parallels the film's progression from a

4 Page 4 of 10 depiction of a decaying Cuba, to one of a nation and people 111 of possibility. In this way, the death which propels Gina to Havana and to her own mobilizing agency, can be seen as illustrative of a political, social, andlor economic death which motivates the nation towards creative uses of resources and forces. Gina's journey, then, is a didactic one in that it serves as a model for identification - an identification with the past, with the land, and with a sense of civic and personal responsibility. The viewer follows Gina as she increasingly becomes more open and susceptible to change. As she begins to literally let her hair down, Gina becomes more in charge of the direction of her life and, interestingly, more representative of a national understanding of potential. ARer Mariano, Gina's former student and love interest, tells his fiiend, Ramon, of her previous job as an economics professor, Ramon says that she, then, knows how to get them out of the mess they're in. This comment is made ghbly, as an implicit observation on the devastating, and, apparently hopeless, economic situation that is continually referenced throughout the film. As Ramon says these words, the camera focuses on a group of people walking the road on foot, with heavy bags in their arms or on their heads. The pairing of this image with Ramon's commentary serves to effectively situate a practice that has been used throughout the film - a blending of dramatic, narrative- specific dialogue and action with shots documenting existing conditions in the places the characters travel through. Sometimes this blending is unobtrusive and seamless, as when visual information, such as crumbling walls, is presented as a backdrop to the central action. Other times it serves as a disruption to the narrative flow, as when restaurants that have no food keep the characters searching not only for the most direct path to their destination but for a path that allows for sustenance.

5 Page 5 of 10 This practice is particularly relevant to Gina's finction in the film, not only in that her pedagogy and research are described by Mariano as being explorations into the practical application of socialist principles, a blending of theory and praxis, but also because she serves as the connecting point for the many sub-plots and structures that are woven into the film. She is the one, after all, that allows for the meetings to occur between both traveling parties, and allows for these meetings to have a thematic, as well as narrative, significance. In a sense, then, Gina very literally serves as a unifling force in the film, allowing Ramon's comment on her efficacy as a solution to the economic problems of Cuba to be given not only relevance in the context of the film, but also an element of applicability in a larger, national context. Gina tells her husband, at the end of the film, that she has decided to accept an offer to do a radio show for youth, claiming that she will not offer direction, so much as support. Her choice represents an escape from a stagnating personal and professional life, a process of growth that she hopes to impart and model for W re citizens. What intrigues me most about this choice, however, is its emphasis on abstaining from direction. In a road film, a vehicle that depends so much on direction as a guiding motif, such a claim on Gina's part is particularly revealing. Gina's journey, the power she is given to unite the borders of Cuba and a complex narrative structure through mobility and development, is findarnentally linked to a conception of direction that does not demarcate space, limit it to a specific trajectory, so much as enable movement and growth. As a representation of an identiflmg process with, and between, land and ideology, Gina's journey to the capital is, in a sense, very much a challenge to limits - geographic, political, and economic - a challenge that exemplifies the kinds of

6 connections Gutierrez Alea attempts to make in his exploration of boundaries and borders. C. B. Nogueira Page 6 of 10 Not only are the national borders referenced in this film, but the borders of the film itself are made parallel to the passage of time between birth and death. As the impetus for the journey, death figures prominently as one of the most important demarcating influences in the film. The death of Yoyita, Gina's aunt, allows for Gina's growth, a phenomenon that is explained through the Iku story told half-way through the film. A non-diegetic narrator explains that Olofin created life but forgot to create death. As the world became over-populated and humans unhappy and restless, Olofin called upon Iku to remedy the situation. Iku made a huge flood envelop the earth, and only those that were young enough to climb trees or mountains survived. As such, death is presented as necessary for the maintenance of life, since it allows for change and development. Gutierrez Alea's insertion of the Iku myth within the narrative allowed for certain transitions to be effectively achieved. The legend situated the narrative within an unbounded, timeless framework, granting it the power of applicability. It also placed the narrative in a Cuban-specific context, making this applicability one of national relevance and signification. The legend, then, served to connect the narrative to a historical sense of identity and identification to place. Yoyita, who dies early in the film, fbnctions quite similarly to this myth, as she allows for certain themes to be explored and given specificity. Her body, a corpse that is ironically mobilized by death, also serves as a site for transformation and transition. It is through her body that a totality of experience is achieved; the process of taking her body through various locations towards a destination

7 Page 7 of 10 allows for the space represented in the aforementioned map to be transformed into a network of placement. Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, writes, "A Space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense articulated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it7' (1 17). Travel, therefore, the physical crossing and re-crossing of space, is an integral process in the creation of that space and, consequently, in the creation of a specific relationship or value allocation to that space. Moving across space is, then, both a creative and, in a sense, normalizing experience. Space that been crossed, traversed, journeyed, is space with a context, space with a history - a history of transformation and re-construction. As Yoyita allows for a cohesive narrative progression and a unified national depiction, her inert corpse becomes a vehicle of transition, a signifier of space and its defining possibilities. An opera singer who, we are told, is known not only as Yoyita, but as Madame Butterfly and Cecilia Valdes, her body is thoroughly depicted as a transformative agent, so much so, that her final performance, the re-appropriation of her body not only to a historic and cultural reference, but also to a re-gendered, re-racialized self, is made both volatile and apolitical. Because of a mix-up that is rendered comic and tragic, Yoyita's casket is mistakenly replaced with the casket of an elderly black man, so that the hneral performed at the end of the film is, in a sense, a mis-identification. Yoyita's transformative potential, therefore, functions to distance a conception of self from the body, making the self a non-specific identifling practice, an ideological construction that is both replaceable and replacing because it is, fundamentally, identity

8 Page 8 of 10 as process. The body, as a vehicle for the self, is "spatialiied" through its volatility and navigability, granting it the hnction of signifier. In this way, the self is made essentially apolitical and abstract, absolutely separate from race, gender, or other constructions of identification. This separation allows for the validity of the maxim that literally frames Yoyita's character (in the form of a banner that backgrounds her celebration in Guantanamo) that "La cultura es inrnortal." Yoyita overcomes the limits of life and death, the limits of a geographic national identity, and the limits of gender and race, through a performance of identification not with any particular site or location, but as a location in itself She concretizes identity by making it equivalent to space, an entity that can be arrived at, departed, and endlessly navigable. Yoyita and Gina can be read as hnctional components in that they both serve to connect the narrative to a national process - Yoyita serves as the transformative force of identification, the space upon which, and through which, change occurs, and Gina hnctions as the connecting mechanism through which that change is given substance and form. Both, therefore, reflect a process that gives the nation-state a narrative structure. By presenting the nation through a journey, by defining its contours not based on externally-constructed delineations, but on internal formations, the nation's limits are opened to allow for development. The shores which frame the nation and the contested nature of the land within these shores, are made to frame a story, a history, and are transformed from limits to context. This transformation is particularly relevant to a revitalizing re-focus on a Caribbean island as inhabiting the space between shores, not bounded by water and foreign control. The "carretera" which connects Cuba and structures the plot of the film is ideologically significant, then, and those who traverse it

9 Page 9 of 10 are transformed into mobile representations of nationhood. The women discussed so far occupy a very specific place in this process, as they are the vehicles through which mobilization is made apparent and practiced. In a very significant sense, their bodies are coded as foundational to a national identification, a grounding of a changing society. Although their bodies move through time and space, their subjectivity becomes more and more rooted in the landscape of the film, both geographical and political. I want to conclude my presentation with a very brief analysis of a character whose hnction in the narrative is immensely significant, although she herself is not present. Her body, then, is not a part of the diegesis, although her motivations and mobilizing hnction help to define the national narration. This is Niurka, Gina and Adolfo's daughter who emigrated to Miami. Adolfo blames Gina for their daughter's emigration, claiming that Gina's lack of guidance and direction allowed Niurka to "stray" fiom a specifically national narrative. Gina claims that it was the fact the Niurka felt confined in the family's structure and was forced to explore alternatives to doing things in secret. In a sense, Gina personalizes Niurka's absence, making it a consequence of a claustrophobically oppressive structure evidenced through the body and actions of Adolfo. She makes Niurka's desertion fiom the diegesis one of not only political import, but of personal significance. It is insinuated, then, that had the family allowed for more exploration and freedom, Niurka's position in the narrative would be far more represented and representative. Gina, therefore, claims that a familial deconstruction of stagnating boundaries and limits is equivalent to, and has direct bearing on, national development. Niurka's absence, then, is not a focus on what Cuba is not, but on how Cuba's limits and boundaries are enforced and constructed. Gina, the connecting force in

10 Page 10 of 10 the narrative, seems to emphasize the formative space between shores, rather than the divisive space outside it. By focusing on a Cuba that is internally constructed and narratively expansive, and by having women be the means through which this construction is manifested, complifcated and changing terrain. Gina, Yoyita, and Niurka, the bodies in motion whose presence, and absence, define the trajectory of the narrative, become locations within which the nation is made identifiable and identifling. Their journeys, therefore, are transcribed within a new conceptualization of nationhood, a map that focuses not on places, but on processes through which to amve at destinations. Their bodies are, finally, in perpetual motion and transition, yet fbndamentally rooted in a national soil. Works Cited Corrigan, Timothy. A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, Guantanamera. Tomas Gutierrez Alea, dir