Barnet, Miguel (1940–)

Miguel Barnet (b. 28 January 1940), Cuban novelist, poet, essayist, and ethnologist. Born in Havana, educated in a local American primary school, and later a student of the distinguished ethnographer Fernando Ortíz, Miguel Barnet came of age during the final years of the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, he became an active contributor to the process of literary experimentation and cultural reclamation it set in motion. Barnet first came to national attention as the poet of La piedra fina y el pavorreal (1963) and the much-praised La sagrada familia (1967), a lyrical autopsy of petit bourgeois domestic life. Publication of Biografía de un cimarrón (1966; The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, 1968), the first in an ethnic tetralogy of documentary narratives, brought almost immediate international acclaim and established him as an innovating pioneer of the testimonial genre in contemporary Latin America. La canción de Rachel (1969; Rachel's Song, 1991), Gallego (1981), and La vida real (1986) confirmed his reputation as Cuba's premier exponent of the documentary novel.

Barnet explores the common ground between anthropology and literature, blending the methods and procedures of the novelist's and biographer's art—oral history—and the ethnographer's record of popular life and culture. Each work is a vivid textual re-creation of the spoken voice of ordinary, often-disdained or socially slighted Cuban citizens: a runaway black slave; a small-time mestizo female cabaret entertainer of the 1940s; a Spanish immigrant to the island; and a peasant migrant to the United States. The individuals usually absent from conventional history thus become emblematic personifications of Cuba's evolving historical experience and ethnocultural development; those lost to national recollection are reclaimed for the collectivity: "Memory, as a part of the imagination," Barnet notes in the prologue to La vida real, "… [is] the essential key of all my work of testimony."

Barnet has been a professor of folklore at Havana's School for Art Instructors (1961–1966), a researcher for the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore of the Cuban Academy of Science, and most recently a member of the editorial board of Unión, the journal of the Union of Cuban Artists and Writers (UNEAC). His other collections of poetry include Isla de Guijes (1964), Orikis y otros poemas (1980), and Carta de noche (1982).

See alsoLiterature: Spanish America .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Seymour Menton, Prose Fiction of the Cuban Revolution (1975), esp. pp. 83-85.

Roberto González Echevarría, "Biografía de un cimarrón and the Novel of the Cuban Revolution," in Novel 13, no. 3 (1980): 249-263.

Julio A. Martínez, ed., Dictionary of Twentieth Century Cuban Literature (1990), pp. 59-64.

Emilio Bejel, Escribir en Cuba: Entrevistas con escritores cubanos, 1979–1989 (1991), pp. 15-29.

Additional Bibliography

Azougarh, Abdeslam. Miguel Barnet: Rescate e invención de la memoria. Genéve: Slatkine, 1996.

Howe, Linda S. Transgression and Conformity: Cuban Writers and Artists after the Revolution. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004.

Luis, William and Ann González, eds. Modern Latin-American Fiction Writers. Second Series. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994.

Sklodowska, Elzbieta. "Miguel Barnet: Hacia la poética de la novela testimonial." Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 14 (1988): 139-149.

                                   Roberto MÁrquez