3 - Dangerous Patriarchs: Sex and the Dynamics of Literary Vengeance

Summary

Inés María Martiatu uses literature as a means of settling accounts over a series of wrongs (conjugal and racial) committed against women and the nation respectively by dangerous patriarchs. Martiatu's short story ‘El senador’ revisits the political history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Cuba, setting out events that many Cuban historians have agreed contributed to the egregious ‘Guerrita de Raza’ of 1912. The protagonist of the story is Martín Morúa Delgado, Cuba's first black senator and the author of the infamous Ley Morúa which outlawed the organisation of political parties along racial lines and subsequently resulted in the 1912 race war. The illustrious public life of the politician is undermined by the narrative's construction of a seedy private life which is mired in incest, sexual abuse, marital dysfunction and a conscience deformed by homophobia. As we saw in the previous chapter, Excilia Saldaña's poetry constitutes an autobiographical exposé of domestic violence in the late 1950s on the eve of the Castro Revolution when the Republic is in its death throes. Martitau's fiction, on the other hand, sets as its focus the birth and early years of the Republic. ‘El senador’ engages with sexist violation and feminist revenge as an ideological response to racial betrayal in public national discourse in this new Republic. I argue that through literary vengeance Inés María Martiatu seeks to repair the damaged body of the home nation and to demand a space for women's sexual self-determination. In the process her fiction navigates public and private spaces in an attempt to bring to light the abuses of the past and to find a feminist solution for the future.

El senador: Literary Context

‘El senador’ is one of nine stories, produced during the 1980s and early 1990s, which were collected in the 2008 bilingual anthology Over the Waves and other Stories / Sobre las olas y otros cuentos. In his translator's notes to the 2008 anthology, Emmanuel Harris II highlights what he sees as two seminal features that distinguish the collection as a whole: the transgenerational filial negotiations presented in the texts, and the pre-eminence of ‘Africanness’ as an integral part of the quotidian Cuban experience (2008: ix–x). This observation has far more ideological significance than might be immediately apparent. In the 1990s literary panorama of Cuba, the Black family as subject is still a virtually invisible entity.