The “beautiful scars”: meta-autobiography, gender and intellectual action in Dinosauria soy. Memorias de Graziella Pogolotti

Abstract

This article places Graziella Pogolotti’s Dinosauria soy. Memorias (2011) in the transnational context of Cuban autobiographies written after the Revolution. First, it analyzes the major narrative threads present in the work, paying special attention to the meta-autobiographical component and the gender perspective. Following this, the study takes the conceptualization of the autobiography as a literary act based on a referential simulacrum introduced as an intellectual action. Within that framework, the article introduces the hypothesis according to which the author’s memoir style reveals a female voice who expresses the awareness of her own historical role amidst the constraints arisen from the relationship between the intellectual and the Revolution. Finally, this analysis concludes that Pogolotti, from the knowledge of the impossible referentiality, offers a genuine autobiographical reconstruction, close to self-examination, with the main desire of fulfilling her commitment as a revolutionary intellectual.