Uterine narrative in Mayra Santos-Febres: childhood and fragments of adolescence

Abstract

The present article puts forth the Uterine Narrative as a paradigm of creation and a method of literary analysis that appeals to the intellectual history or history of ideas as elements that allow for the understanding of not only the works and their interrelationships, but also the lives of the writers and the subjects of their works. The analysis is structured around two periods of Mayra Santos Febres' life: childhood and adolescence. The theoretical framework encompasses dialogues with intellectual history studies and autoethnography. The article proposes that the author's creative process is influenced by both familiar and academic female figures, to the point that a narrative-creative system is produced, which is presented here as Uterine Narrative: method of analysis, creative perspective, and discursive paradigm. This system facilitates the author's association with a political, historical, and literary aesthetic project centered on the Afro-descendant Caribbean.