Author: Mary Louisa Cappelli

Abstract: "Is this a garden or a cemetery? I want a garden. I need a garden. How proud I am to be Cuban! How terrified I am to be Cuban!" declares Yocandra in Zoé Valdés’s Yocandra in the Paradise of NADA. In this essay, I interrogate the revolutionary contradictions inscribed on female sexualized bodies showing how women’s histories are registered in their scars, each scar representing a historical marker in the body’s memory of lived experience. Moreover, I examine how Valdés’s narrative fiction reveals how subjugation and exploitation often materialize as sexualized and politicized wounds. The female sexualized and eroticized body works as an allegorical transcript for the toxic masculinization and militarization of the Cuban Revolution.

Keywords: Cuba; Cuban Revolution; Fidel Castro; Zoé Valdés; sexual violence; Yocandra in the Paradise of NADA; George Bataille; eroticism; body politic.

DOI: 10.22161/ijels.442