Reading Arenas through Currere

This chapter provides a reading of Arenas’s literary output vis-à-vis a curricular lens to highlight the effects of this author’s testimonial literature on the imagination of the Cuban Revolution’s past, present, and future. As this chapter argues, Arenas’s literary corpus can be read as a powerful counter-historical curriculum that successfully intervenes in the Cuban revolutionary history premised on self-referentiality and the testimonial qualities of his writing. Yet, Arenas’s truth-telling enterprise also takes place in literature’s more-than-representational and ambiguous domains, thus recasting the concept of history as a more dialogically open enterprise. Arenas’s literary imagination thrives, precisely, on ambiguity, which opens history to new meanings as his marginal phenomenology reads the nation anew in the space between mimesis and poiesis.