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To write is to disclose the world and to offer it as a task to the generosity of the reader. It is to have a recourse to the consciousness of others in order to make one's self be recognized as essential to the totality of being.
Jean Paul Sartre, "What is Literature"
Gradually the stars 'faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves - or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality
Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
In; seeking refuge in memory as a means to supplement the sense of loss and displacement caused by exile, Reinaldo Arenas's autobiography Antes que anochezca symbolically manifests the post-colonial Other's attempt to revise the historical nation from a marginal perspective. Articulated with an incontrovertible sense of property and authority, Arenas's autobiography challenges the traditional discourse on Cuban history by presenting the Other's accountability in its formation. In pursuing the negotiation of meaning between the poles of fiction and fact, as well as the personal account and the collective, Antes denunciates the role of hegemonic ideologies in the struggle to maintain a sense of individual identity. As a homosexual, exile, and political dissident, Arenas is ominously conscious of his location on the margins of Cuban society. The celebration of his literary persona throughout the pages of Antes places in evidence an ideological construction of otherness that is ultimately used as a rhetorical strategy of self-affirmation and authority over the historical account.
Divided into sixty-nine micro-narratives and a postscript consisting of a suicide note, Antes can be viewed as a paradoxical text. Firstly, the work's notably excessive characterization of its author's persecution under Castro's regime presents particular episodes that border on the ridiculous and the absurd, tampering with the very fabric of reality. Secondly, Arenas often contradicts communal experiences of real occurrences, which consequentially denotes the fictive stylishness with which the author crafts the autobiographical genre. An example of this contradiction can be seen in the episode where Arenas narrates the burial of his friend and mentor, the Cuban poet Virgilio Pinera. As the author recounts, the funeral of Pinera was attended by a multitude of individuals who followed the funerary vehicle on bicycles and skates:
El coche fúnebre de Virgilio marchaba a...