Travel, Permanence and Identity in Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban and Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy

NADIA DER-OHANNESIAN

Cadernos do Centro Cultural Teresa D´Ávila. Faculdades Integradas Teresa D'Ávila

Lugar: Lorena, SP; Año: 2012 p. 84 - 84

bstract In Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina Garcia traces the story of a Cuban family across three generations. The cultural and historical contexts help develop the central themes of exile, memory, identity and family relationships. In Kincaid´s Lucy, the protagonist and narrator travels from a Caribbean island to the United States to work as an au pair during the transition between her adolescence and her adult life. The present work aims to analyze the construction and development of the individual identity in Lucy, the narrator and protagonist in Lucy, and Celia del Pino and Pilar Puente, a grandmother and her granddaughter in Garcia´s novel. This analysis has been guided by the following questions. Is there a relationship between this identity building process and the spatial dimension? If so, how does this relationship manifest itself in each of the characters? A possible answer to these interrogations is that individual identity in Lucy, Pilar and Celia is constructed in relation t