Split and misplaced identities: a reading of Two Women (2011) by Magali Alabau and Three Beautiful Cubans (2022) by Nara Mansur

Abstract

In this paper we propose a comparative reading of two books of poetry by contemporary Cuban women authors who reside outside the island. Living in the United States since the late sixties, Magali Alabau (Cienfuegos, 1945) is a poet, actress and theater director. In Dos mujeres (2011) she explores the dialogue between two faces of the same protagonist who fight each other in torn scenes of departure, return and new farewells. For her part, Nara Mansur (Havana, 1969) is a poet, playwright and theater critic; since 2007 she has lived in Buenos Aires. In Tres lindas cubanas (2022) she investigates the bond between nomadic subjectivities, permeated by circumstances of love, displacement, transvestism and motherhood. Intertextuality plays a central role in both texts, since Alabau's book -like other collections of her poems- resorts to scenes from classical mythology, while Mansur's volume emerged from the theatrical rewriting of Chapter 6 of the novel Orlando, by Virginia Woolf. After a review of the category of post-exile, the analysis will delve into the configuration of fragmentary and queer identities, which are theatrically projected in multiple doubles and which record the experience of living at the intersection of territories and discourses.