Goodbye Mother

By Reinaldo Arenas

The seventies and eighties were for Latin America a period of deep disappointment and hard reconstruction of democratic life from the very foundations of the social pact. From one end of the political spectrum, the night of Tlatelolco in Mexico and the military coups in much of the Latin American republics, and from the other, the progressive Stalinization policy of the Cuban Revolution meant confronting the progressive ideals of the sixties with a reality that authoritarianism and state repression are the primary responses that go against the social polarization and impoverishment (Rafael, Pp. 68).

In a second stage, the public discredit self-imposed government, accompanied by a shift in international politics in the United States, caused much of the region a difficult return to democratic means, at least for now, seems definitive.

However, from the standpoint of literary historiography, the situation is far from easy given that the authors referred to merge with the great masters of Boom Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosacuando adopting the category of postmodernism as a concept epochal. And this decision is not in any way, fanciful. Indeed, as noted Malva E. Filer, “from the seventies, identification with postmodernism is becoming more appropriate, with the gradual abandonment of novelistic totes projects (such as Hopscotch).” (Brown & Wickham, Pp. 37)

Reinaldo Arenas make explicit testimony to the story “Goodbye Mother”, which was released by Angel Rama in his anthology of storytellers and was also included in the Venezuelan magazine Zone, has been the result of two successive processes of writing. From dating note that closes the text, we know that a primitive version, written in September 1973, has been lost and that the final version was developed in late 1980.

"Goodbye Mother" tells the long wake of a woman whose putrefaction process referred to ...