Nunca fui primeira dama: autoficção e memória na reconfiguração de uma nação

Abstract

This dissertation aims to analyze the book Nunca fui primeira dama (2010) by the Cuban writer Wendy Guerra, investigating the connections between the traces of the protagonist's memory, the author's alter ego, and the reconfiguration of a given society through a literary work of an autofictional nature. The history of the Cuban revolution and the life of Célia Sánchez, the former secretary and Fidel Castro’s right-hand “man”, are exposed as the background of this autofictional work, which narrates the search, the encounter of the protagonist with her lost mother and, in the trajectory of search, finds herself and the reconfiguration of her own nation. The general objective of this research was to analyze how Cuban female autofictional writing reinvigorates memories to bring back the identity construction of significant characters, historically speaking, as well as of the nation itself. To develop such a study, we used researchers and scholars, such as: BERND (2018); FIGUEIREDO (2017); NORONHA (2014); RICOEUR (2007); SELIGMANN-SILVA (2003), among others as theoretical contribution of the analysis. In a first moment the bibliographical research and the reading of the novel were realized. In the sequence, a historical and cultural survey of Latin America and, particularly, of Cuba, as well as the political trajectory of the government of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution, were carried out. After these surveys, the novel analysis was done with a view to bibliographical and theoretical researches on autofiction, memory, archive and archon. In a final analysis a fifth theory, pertinent to this study and related to the theory of autofiction /interiority writing, was added. Anteriority writing or filiation novel is the theory added at the end of this work because it is an "evolution", furthermore, a sequence of interiority writing that becomes appropriate in our literary analysis. Remembering that the perspective of analysis is also based on postcolonial theory focusing on memories that connect to the current Latin American proposal of autofiction.