This book offers a significant original and timely contribution to the study of one of the
most important and notorious Latin American authors of the twentieth century: Reinaldo Arenas.
The text engages with the many extraordinary intersections created between Arenas' writing the
autobiographical construction of the literary subject and the exilic condition. Through
focusing on texts written on the island of Cuba and in exile the author analyses the ways in
which Arenas' writing emblemises a complex process of identification with and rejection of
his homeland - always an imagined place and which is as the place of his origins
intrinsically related to the maternal. She examines how the maternal and the motherland are
conflated and how the narrator-protagonists' identification is always in relation to and
dependent upon this dominant motif. The book also explores the extent to which Arenas' writing
is a tortuous attempt to escape from this dominance and to free himself and his writing from
the ties that bind him to the mother and the motherland and shows that Arenas suffered the
exilic condition long before his move to the United States in 1980 as part of the Mariel
exodus.
