Regaining lost humanity: dealing with trauma in exile

If the processes of forced migration involve trauma, distance and rupture, what does it mean if both your country of origin and your new home try to erase you from their public memory? In this chapter, we present the literary work of Cuban-born Reinaldo Arenas as a representation of resilience against multiple traumas. Rather than dissociation, often found in documented cases of trauma, Arenas’s projections of self and place were a productive mechanism he used to survive. Literally and figuratively, for much of his life Arenas lived that embodied conviction, that indeed ‘words – might save him’ (1989, p. 49). Through the use of concepts that explore exile, re-storying, and the imagination, the chapter argues that Arenas’s work actively resisted the attempts by both the Cuban government and fellow exiles to create a homogenous and sanitised public memory. His re-narration of Cuba and the emphasis he placed on publishing his works until he could no longer physically write have implications with regard to how literary representations of trauma are analysed and the theoretical grounds that support them. Finally, we want to draw attention to the experiences of an individual targeted by forces of state and non-state institutions, demonstrating the complexities of lived experience when connected with larger cultural narratives