“I Smell the Ellero River Already”: Trauma and Exile in Roberto G. Fernández’s Holy Radishes!
“I Smell the Ellero River Already”: Trauma and Exile in Roberto G. Fernández’s Holy Radishes!

Summary/Abstract: Trauma studies aims to construct an intellectual and ethical response to human suffering and their cultural and artistic representations. Trauma studies have inspired an array of disciplinary and interdisciplinary criticism that offer paradigms for understanding human behavior and coping strategies. Drawing on postcolonial trauma theory, this essay analyzes how Roberto G. Fernández in his novel Holy Radishes!i complicates and challenges existing trauma paradigms suggesting that existing European psychoanalytic origins of the trauma theory are not adequate for depicting Cuban trauma experience. The text focuses on the specificity of trauma that constructs meaning through considering social, historical, and cultural contexts of traumatic experience. In other words, the paper aims to break with Eurocentrism by analyzing the text that bears witness to the suffering caused by exile. Thus the paper aims to discuss the usefulness of trauma theory for understanding colonial trauma caused by forced migration, exile, dispossession, diaspora, and political violence.

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