MOON, STARS AND SHARING THE SKY OF NATIONHOOD, ORA "BLUER, ERESHER CUBA," IN CHRISTINA GARCÍA'S THE AGÜERO SISTERS by Zoya Khan University of Soulh Alabama Long ago the sun married the moon, and they had many children. Their daughters were stars and stayed close to their mother's side. But their sons followed their father across the morning sky. Soon the father became cross and ordered his children home. The sons, small suns themselves, fell into the ocean and drowned. That is why the sun bums alone but the moon shares the sky. ("A story of the gods," The Agüero Sisters, 258) THIS limitless expanse of the stars is the "original geography" of the maternal nationhood that Cristina Garcia charts in her novel The Agüero Sisters (1997). Spanning four generations of the Agüero family, the novel rewrites nationhood as a maternal bond transcending spatial as well as temporal borders. The two Agüero sisters, Constancia and Reina (the first in the US and the other in Cuba), are both haunted by the death of their mother and the subsequent sui- cide of their father forty years earlier. Through the uneasy relationship be- tween the two sisters and their ambiguous ties to their shared past, ostensibly, the novel critiques the dominant construction of Cubanness as an entangled mass of phallocentric myths suppressing the intrinsically and enduringly femi- nine nature of the nation. At a deeper level, however, the novel deploys this overt feminist subaltern positioning to validate the location of Miami as the center of a new revitalized Cuban nationhood. 73