A Review of Democracy, If He Hollers Let Him Go, and Dreaming in Cuban

Works of historical fiction, as per the wont of their authors, generally reflect similar thematic or stylistic trends. While the tone or issue may vary widely, the general purpose is to elucidate on a particular historical era with a personalist perspective which reveals the emotional reactions and bonds of individuals to significant events, or simply contemporary realities. In the case of this paper's chosen selections-Democracy, If He Hollers Let Him Go, and Dreaming in Cuban-it may be a point of contention whether they constitute "historical fiction" as they were published in not too distant a period from the depicted era and contain broad introspective insights more relevant to a memoir. Nonetheless, their value, particularly as it pertains to this course, lies primarily in the ability to convey-though with varying degrees of successful vividness-concepts and realities of the past to the modern reader.

So long as one remains conscious, then, of the contextual emotional content of these books, an important theme can readily be discerned throughout each, even as it functions with a great deal of elasticity in form and presentation. Democracy, If He Hollers Let Him Go, and Dreaming in Cuban all contain characters that are ingrained with, or eventually develop, a great deal of discontent for existing realities. The result is a pervasive sense of alienation to which all arrive from different points and react to in a multitude of ways. This alienation does not take place merely from the abstracts of society or a race but from more concrete systems of governance and familial bonds which are inextricable from these.

The first of these, Democracy, presents a situation which can be viewed as either a tale of dual periods of disillusionment or simply of a requisite abandonment of naiveté. In Henry Adams's casting of Mrs. Lee as an aristocrat who is essentially aloof and unenlightened of common concerns it is hardly certain that her tiring with the tasks of high society represents a profound shift, or any real crisis, of personal values. Rather it comes across more as abrupt and inconsequential a move as the flicking of a switch-Mrs. Lee has a whim to associate her self with politics, has the ability to do so, and therefore does it.

Subsequently, American politics are revealed to Mrs. Lee as an orgy of corruption and self-aggrandizement-certainly far, very far, from her initial idealized conceptions of what are the purposes of government, of the citizen's representatives, of the very system of democracy. It is important that Lee instinctively recoils from this reality in the end, and the figures, such as Ratcliffe, that are meant to symbolize it. Here an opportunity is missed to present Lee as ultimately a figure of hypocrisy and apathy in her indulgences. However, rather than view her trek with disdain she ends up as a rather sympathetic figure who is simply caught up in forces she simply could not have anticipated. The tone of the message appears highly pessimistic-certainly what Adams intends to capture is a dreary portrait of America-and what might be received is a nihilistic approach to one's surroundings. After all, she had found her life wanting in the first place (even as she might appear as accomplished to so many others), but when she attempts to implement serious change she ends up in a much worse state than that which she began with. In any case, though, she is found to be more mature for her experiences and by refusing Ratcliffe's advances she has certainly maintained her dignity and achieved some sort of victory.

In contrast to the learned disappointments of Mrs. Lee are the omnipresent realities of racism depicted in If He Hollers Let Him Go. With Bob Jones there is not so much a cataclysmic experience which precipitates an evolution in his perceptions of society-though he certainly reacts to events-so much as there is an apparent struggle to navigate his way through the world despite the fact that every person and every action and every situation which he encounters only heighten his consciousness of race and prejudice. The issue is not merely material. The prospects of job opportunities in cities with war plants, particularly if there were labor shortages due to the war's demands for manpower, meant that blacks and other Americans migrated cross country for work. The former began to be delegated authority but chiefly leaders such as Jones serve as figureheads for the black labor force.

The most important toll is that which is taken on Jones's emotional and mental well-being, even his sanity. As the encounters with daily torments are increasingly internalized, Jones struggles with fantasies of retribution; acts aimed not merely at particular individual culprits who have injured or otherwise humiliated him but desperate blows against society at large with the intention of escaping the conception of color which overwhelms and overpowers him. Violence-murder and rape-would be of little consequence but Jones's own pitiful self-destruction. And so this conflict recalls most pertinently corruption of the campaign for black rights and advancement in America which, in the time of Jones, is yet to achieve its most important accomplishments. Integration and solidarity makes way for the antagonistic desires of separatism and "black power"-most relevantly (and infamously) the "insurrectionary act" of raping white women as described by Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver in his memoir, Soul on Ice.

It is perhaps in Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban that the strongest indication of alienating effects can be found. This is certainly true of the relation between characters and their shifting perceptions of nation and society. More acutely however is a sense of alienation in the related effects on characters' relationships with one another, separated, divided, by geography and by ideology.

The starkest example of the former is in the second generational figure of Lourdes. Her experience with the effects of the Cuban Revolution was so personally shattering that she decides to emigrate, to abandon Cuba not merely in the (significant) physical sense of relocating her person to a distant land but to fully absorb the persona and identity of American. This is in stark contrast to the mother Celia, who had not merely any love lost for Batista but worships at the feet of "El Lider". Lourdes is intended to serve as the abrasive, rigid stand-in of ideological intolerance. Cuban exiles, the whole lot of them it is constantly brayed, are fanatics who can not possibly come to grip with the new Cuba. They come from a line of reactionaries and fallen elites, if not violent criminals. They were never willing to give the new Cuba, or Castro, or his glorious Revolution-now more than forty years strong-enough of a chance and thus should drown on their own irrelevance and stop attempting to interfere in a country they reject. It is in such a narrative subtext that it is possible for the self-styled vanguard and shore watchmen of the Castro regime comes across not as simply a crank but the more endearing figure than anyone who goes to great length to secure a better life for themselves and their family.

But here there is the perfectly valid pretext of moral ambivalence which is demonstrated by the third generation Pilar, with which the author herself identifies most strongly. Having developed no connection in any real sense-emotional or otherwise-to the country in which she lives, Pilar longs for the place of her birth. She yearns to immerse herself into a Cuban identity even as she is unsure of what that identity really means. It is precisely because of the position that Lourdes has put her family in that this is a reaction; it is a reaction against a society, a society to which she does not feel allegiance and thus it could not rightly be said to be "her" society. More implicitly it is a reaction against the perceived conformity and rigidity of her mother's generation which Garcia caricatures so effortlessly.

Central to the book's narrative is, after all, a demonstration of how the fissures which wreck one's identification with or even acceptance of existing society, governance, and politics can in many cases have unalterable effects on relations with which strictly they should have no bearing. It is telling how Pilar attempts to embrace Celia, and by extension a fig-leaf of her home land, from a distance-a safe, comfortable distance which affords a romanticism unhampered by ugly reality. Garcia's examples of personal-political splits, piling an instance of alienation on another, are extreme. But then so was the Cuban Revolution.

In traversing from one work to another, the commonality of a theme might seem to succumb unfailingly to a schism. It is certainly true that there is a lot which separates one of these novels from every other. Lee's is a tale of ignorance scorned; disillusionment but personal triumph. Others, such as Jones or even Garcia's Pilar (or even Felicia) could reasonably be said to have had no real investment to begin with; indeed perhaps a few of these characters had justifiable reasons not to. But bearing all of these variations in mind, one central theme persists: that is a consistent emphasis on the character's dearth of a significant attachment, missing in its relation to the wider environment; that is to say, alienation.