La Gozadora Del Dolor

Because of her social and literary avant-garde activities during the first thirty years of the twentieth century, Graziella Garbalosa (La Habana, 1896-1977) -actress, singer, prolific poet and prose-writer- is an extraordinary figure in the Cuban artistic world. In spite of this strong presence in that nations cultural environment, but perhaps because of her continuous travels, there are few references to her in Cuban literary histories. Her works show a great awareness of narrative experiments (very much of the avant-garde period and notable in a woman writer), in which she explores the textualization -and hence the appropriation- of the female body. Her writing is all the more daring when placed in the context of her times, when honorable women were not considered to have erotic feelings. In 1920, married and with a daughter, she published a volume of poetry La jugueteria de amor. Her first novel, La gozadora del dolor (Havana, 1922), issued when she had separated from her husband, corresponds to the melodramas typical of the era: strongly emotional, with conflicting moral codes and an intense and exaggerated plot. The work exhibits a rhetoric of extremes, and there are scenes of graphic sensuality, as well as powerful realism, which together act to establish the authors thesis on erotic pleasure as a material act which leads to pain, horror and, finally, the ultimate tragedy. Shortly after the publication of Garbalosas second novel, El relicario. Novela de costumbres cubanas in 1923, her involvement in political protest force her into exile in Mexico, where she publishes another novel, Una mujer que sabe mirar, in 1927. Upon her return to Cuba in 1928 she publishes Mas arriba esta el sol. From then on she divides her residence between Cuba and Mexico, presents her scenic recitals through the United States and Europe (including Holland, Belgium, France and Spain), and continues to publish, mainly in Mexico: various literary volumes of stories and…