Regaining Lost Humanity: Dealing with trauma in exile

Abstract

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, which is 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).