On Salvadoran identity as exile

Abstract

On Salvadoran Literary Identity as Exile examines the classical work of nine authors. Applying a psychoanalytic perspective, the essay takes as a point of departure a card that Roque Dalton sent from Cuba to a distant lover in El Salvador. Writing establishes debt and remembrance as the guiding principles to recover the past. A subjective compromise with the lost object of love the country and the dear dictates the motion of poetic inscription. This absence of the body to be recovered is then applied, in the first place, to Francisco Gavidia who founds Salvadoran Indigenismo using European iterary technics, while ignoring Native languages, then to Alberto Masferrer who portraits himself suffering the tribulations and passion of Christ in exile, before building a political project for the country. In the third place, Arturo Ambrogi foresees in the Salvadoran peasant the medieval poet localized in a locus amoenus delighted by the beauty of the countryside. Francisco Miranda Ruano inaugurates a more tragic view since his departure from the city to recreate the splendor of the countryside concludes on his return to the poor suburbs, before committing suicide. In the fifth place, Salarrué mixes fantasy and realism to portrait his various masks or personas, as well as to disguise sexual and racial violence. According to the Spanish proverb “the habit makes the monk”, being and acts are always judged by appearance. Claudia Lars prescribes a dual motion, first to substitute her real name, Carmen Brannon by her literary pseudonym, and afterwards to recover her childhood from her adult abilities, which
she develops. thanks to her foreign father’s poetic legacy. The brothers Alfredo and Miguel Ángel Espino propose a complex heritage. If the first idealizes the countryside in a nostalgic recovery of the mother’s womb whose counterpart names the impossible lover who inclines him to commit suicide- the second aims to restore a truly American education, without any revitalization of Native languages and their confiscated ancestral land. José Napoleón Rodríguez Ruiz stipulates how only a distant remembrance recovers a witness account of the past. By predicting a current topic -sexual harassment and migration his peasant character narrates how exile reinvents his rural identity. Finally, in a synodical return, from afar, Dalton replicates Rubén Darío’s nostalgia to be somebody else than he is at the time of recreating his formative years as a poet. In brief, this sketch of nine 20th century authors delineates not only how an idea of exile anticipates current diaspora. The essay also suggests how cultural studies continue a nostalgic recovery of memory by a synodic revolution, claiming the currency of those consecrated authors in a monolingual literary canon