From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic

By Myriam J.A. Chancy

Sovereignty. Sugar. Revolution. These are the three axes this book uses to link the works of contemporary women artists from Haiti—a country excluded in contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literary studies—the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. In From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, Myriam Chancy aims to show that Haiti’s exclusion is grounded in its historical role as a site of ontological defiance. Her premise is that writers Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, Zoé Valdés, Loida Maritza Pérez, Marilyn Bobes, Achy Obejas, Nancy Morejón, and visual artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons attempt to defy fears of “otherness” by assuming the role of “archaeologists of amnesia.” They seek to elucidate women’s variegated lives within the confining walls of their national identifications—identifications wholly defined as male. They reach beyond the confining limits of national borders to discuss gender, race, sexuality, and class in ways that render possible the linking of all three nations. Nations such as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba are still locked in battles over self-determination, but, as Chancy demonstrates, women’s gendered revisionings may open doors to less exclusionary imaginings of social and political realities for Caribbean people in general.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Feb 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781554582730

Myriam J.A. Chancy

Myriam J.A. Chancy is the author of both non-fiction and fiction, including Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (1997), which won a Choice OAB Award for 1998, and Spirit of Haiti (2003), shortlisted for Best First Book, Canada/Caribbean region, Commonwealth Prize 2004. The Loneliness of Angels (2010) was shortlisted in the fiction category of the OCM Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature 2011 and won the 2011 Guyana Prize in Literature Caribbean Award, Best Fiction 2010. Chancy is HBA Chair in the Humanities, Scripps College, and a Guggenheim Fellow.

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FROM SUGAR TO REVOLUTION

FROM SUGAR TO REVOLUTION

Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and

the Dominican Republic

MYRIAM J. A. CHANCY

Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Chancy, Myriam J. A. (Myriam Josèphe Aimée), 1970–

From sugar to revolution : women’s visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic / Myriam J.A. Chancy.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued also in electronic format.

ISBN 978-1-55458-428-4

1. Cuban literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Dominican literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. Haitian literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Women and literature—Caribbean Area. 5. Women artists—Caribbean Area. I. Title.

PN849.C3C54 2012          809′.8928709729          C2011-905968-1

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued also in print format.

ISBN 978-1-55458-429-1 (PDF)

1. Cuban literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. Dominican literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 3. Haitian literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Women and literature—Caribbean Area. 5. Women artists—Caribbean Area. I. Title.

PN849.C3C54 2012a          809′.8928709729          C2011-905969-X

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Cover and page ii photo : Rêve Indigo: Port-au-Prince Cathedral Market, 1999, © 2010 by Myriam J. A. Chancy. Cover design by Sandra Friesen. Text design by Catharine Bonas-Taylor.

© 2012 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

www.wlupress.wlu.ca

This book is printed on FSC recycled paper and is certified Ecologo. It is made from 100% post-consumer fibre, processed chlorine free, and manufactured using biogas energy.

Printed in Canada

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or trans mitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

This work is dedicated to the resounding silence of my Dominican antecedents and the cacophonous clamour of my Haitian ancestors.

CONTENTS

Preface

The Stories We Cannot Tell

Introduction

¿Y donde esta tu abuela?: On the Respective Racial (Mis)Identifications of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic in the Context of Latin America and the Caribbean

PART I    SUGAR: Haiti

Facing the Mountains: Dominican Suppression and the Haitian Imaginary in the Works of Julia Alvarez and Edwidge Danticat

Recovering History Bone by Bone: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat

PART II    SOVEREIGNTY: Cuba

Travesía: Crossings of Sovereignty, Sexuality, and Race in the Cuban Female Imaginaries of Zoé Valdés, Nancy Moréjon, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons

Recovering Origins: A Conversation with María Magdalena Campos-Pons

PART III    REVOLUTION: The Dominican Republic

Subversive Sexualities: Marilyn Bobes, Achy Obejas, and Loida Maritza Pérez on Revolutionizing Gendered Identities Against Cuban and Dominican Landscapes

The Heart of Home: A Conversation with Loida Maritza Pérez

Conclusion

Non progredi regredi est: The Making of Transformative Visions

Acknowledgements

Notes

Works Cited

Index

PREFACE

The Stories We Cannot Tell

The Incommensurability of Shared Histories

The genesis of this study took place in a moment of reflection when, putting down one historically based novel (The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat) and picking up another (In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez), I realized that a method of recomposition I had utilized to make sense of Caribbean women’s lives, their effaced and erased histories, could no longer hold.¹ I had initially intended for the scope of this text to be much wider, to codify and analyze the numerous emerging voices from the Latin Caribbean in a cross-cultural context, anchoring the work in the mythology of Haiti often echoed in the texts of other writers, especially from the Caribbean. One haunting part of history—the cane field massacres of 1937, as the event is known to Haitians, or El Corte, as it is known to (some) Dominicans—reflected in the work of Edwidge Danticat and Julia Alvarez, narrowed my explorations. I hoped to build my investigations of Haitian and Latin Caribbean women’s literary representations around the shared tragedy both authors had sought to elucidate in their writings. In revisiting their novels, I discovered that the texts I was reading struggled with interstices in time, gaps in knowledge that they were valiantly seeking to fill in order to make sense of a moment in Caribbean history shared across the border of two independent nation-states. Although the stories I read about the authors were compelling, the histories they sought to flesh out still lay incomplete as I closed the covers of their books. This is not to say that fiction should serve as a stand-in for historical archives, but that such lacunae are striking, given the fact that the Caribbean novel has traditionally served the purpose of filling in the gaps of official history. Thus, even though Danticat’s and Alvarez’s novels follow a long-established trajectory of Caribbean literature used by writers of the region to compensate for the excision of historical records and memories of the area’s vast population by writing fiction, poetry, and theatre—the novel being the chief medium that authors have used to build an archive giving testament to the region’s varied history—I was left to wonder to what extent fiction today can fulfill such a need.

There are two problems here: on the one hand, it may be that we are still too close to the historical incidents under discussion to do them justice, since the events of these time periods are still being sifted through by trained historians, and on the other, the genre of fiction remains in the arena of the imagination and, as such, cannot purport to fully disclose the facts of history. Fiction and other literary forms born of the imagination may put life into the proceedings of history, and though we now accept that the process is one that bears its own features of facticity, and that history, as we once understood it, is under revision, the author still has the liberty to mould their story to their intended effect. Between fact, fiction, and readers’ expectations (especially in the case of readers of Caribbean fiction, who are used to finding in it traces of historical moments not revealed in official versions of history), then, there are fissures aplenty. Still, given the fact that the Caribbean as a whole experiences entrenched struggles over sovereignty, human rights, and neocolonialism through North–South trade and cultural exchanges, it stands to reason that writers emanating from the region would respond to the need to historicize their creative works. We might consider, then, that today’s Caribbean writers, like their eighteenth-century counterparts, are engaged in a discourse concerning national and regional identity whether they are conscious of it or not. Like those authors who followed the Napoleonic wars, they are awake to the fact that in this mass experience of history, the national element is linked on the one hand with the problems of social transformation; and on the other, more and more people become aware of the connection between national and world history (Lukács 342). For the writers who concern me in this study, the question is not so much about the connection between national and world history (though such considerations may come into play on a more philosophical level, these are beyond the scope of this book), as it is about the connection between national, regional, and transnational history, given that many of the textual archives about the Caribbean are currently being produced outside of that region. The cultural production of Caribbean authors, whether inside or outside of the region, is such that it bears a responsibility to its multiple audiences: one debt to history and another to memory.

In assessing the rise and importance of the (European) historical novel, Georg Lukács argues that the significance of early- to mid-twentieth-century historical novels rests "[o]n the fact that their authors have tried to show artistically the concrete historical genesis of their time (342; emphasis mine). The artistic (and for Lukács, who was a Marxist, the political) merit of the work also comes from there being no substitute for a concrete relationship to the present or, what comes to the same thing, a concrete familiarity with popular life" (339). Lukács, of course, wrote at a time when debates about postmodernity, historiography, and post-coloniality were not yet being addressed, and so his discussion stops short of informing us of the shifts that occur in the genre by writers emanating from the Global South. Still, I would argue that historical Caribbean novels have a common goal with the texts of the traditions preceding them in the European context: the desire to ground their texts in the historical moment to which their present is tied, while also giving voice to the popular within those nation-states they seek to illustrate (or question) in their works.

Traditionally, at least in the sphere of the West Indian (i.e., anglophone) language, Caribbean authors sought to elucidate through the novel the experience of societies and individuals in the region. George Lamming for one, in his notable The Pleasures of Exile, presaged Homi Bhabha’s influential essay on the importance of the English book in missionizing colonial relationships, and understood the emergence of the novel in West Indian literature as a historical moment connected in and of itself to the preservation of cultural memory. He writes, The third important event in our history is the discovery of the novel by West Indians as a way of investigating and projecting the inner experiences of the West Indian community.… The novelist was the first to relate the West Indian experience from the inside. He was the first to chart the West Indian memory as far back as he could go. It is to the West Indian novelist—who had no existence twenty years ago—that the anthropologist and all other treatises about West Indians have to turn (Lamming 38). Originally written in 1960 when, indeed, very few Caribbean women writers had been published, Lamming’s text reflects both the gendered nature of writing in the region and its historical-social function. Wilson Harris, in his collection of critical essays, Tradition: The Writer and Society, originally published in 1967, advances the idea that art in colonized societies operates and moves toward

a transforming new vision (however dark and tortuous) [that] is alive to redress the balance of the old.… The exploration of the dead past, the exploration of a bridge across the divided conception of humanity, is still in its infancy, and the thawing effect this may have sooner or later on the derivatives of history—on the structure and language of the novel, for example—waits to be perceived and understood. (24)

Appearing some forty years after Harris’s assessment, Alvarez and Danticat and their works are heirs to the previous generation of novels produced by Lamming, Wilson, and others who sought to present West Indian realities. For one, Caribbean literature is no longer limited only to the anglophone Caribbean, nor to the British or other European metropoles. It now includes a variety of new sites, including the totality of the Americas, the United States being chief among these as a site of major production for contemporary Caribbean writers. Importantly, contemporary writers such as Danticat and Alvarez are also giving voice to an increasingly volatile subject—that of memory—since most Caribbean societies, in some way or another, are tied to oral cultures emanating from African spaces that can only be accessed through oral and cultural transmissions.

As I will show throughout this study, it is the forgotten aspects of African (diasporic) history, or should I say knowledge, that shadows or haunts many of the texts being produced by Caribbean writers. This is a point I will elucidate and return to in more detail below. Suffice it to say that in the creation of their novels, authors like Danticat and Alvarez must wrestle with history and memory, their own as well as that of a collective figured both as national and popular. As Paul Connerton writes in his investigation How Societies Remember, the fact that we no longer believe in the great ‘subjects’ of history—the proletariat, the party, the West—means, not the disappearance of these great master-narratives, but rather their continuing unconscious effectiveness as ways of thinking about and acting in our contemporary situation: Their persistence, in other words, as unconscious collective memories (1). He continues, It is an implicit rule that participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory (3). Connerton, of course, sought to elucidate practices of collective memory that could not be adequately textualized, situating the foundation for this study, like Lukács, in the responses to and collective commemoration of the French Revolution (4). He distinguished social memory from historical reconstruction (13), ultimately arguing that collective memories are sustained through a variety of performances and, as he claimed, to study the social formation of memory is to study those acts of transfer that make remembering in common possible (39). He also usefully brought our attention to the fact that it is possible to imagine that the members of two quite different groups may participate in the same event, even so catastrophic and all-engulfing an event as a great war, but still these two groups may be to such a degree incommensurable that their subsequent memories of that event, the memories they pass on to their children, can scarcely be said to refer to the ‘same’ event (20).²

Danticat’s and Alvarez’s respective novels, which investigate different aspects (and time periods) of the terror of Rafael Trujillo’s regime in Hispaniola, however, signal that though the authors are from the same island and are currently citizens of the same country, the collective memories they imagine in their works are not shared across the border of the two nations they represent in writing (Haiti and the Dominican Republic, or DR). While the authors have given voice to actors in the communal dramas shared across the border, the facts they glean from official (and nationalist) versions of history appear to remain unchanged and unbridgeable. Still, I would argue that even as incommensurate as they are, their novels seek, at both generational and geographic levels, to take the place of witnesses to prior generations for those in the present and those to come. In this sense, they occupy similar yet different positions from those who underwent the terrors of the histories they write about:

there were people who realized that the struggle of citizens against state power is the struggle of their memory against forced forgetting, and who made it their aim from the beginning not only to save themselves, but to survive as witnesses to later generations, to become relentless recorders.… In such circumstances, their writing of oppositional histories is not the only practice of documented historical reconstruction; but precisely because it is that it preserves the memory of social groups whose voice would otherwise have been silenced. (Connerton 15)

Danticat, Alvarez, and the other women whose works I will be investigating in this study all work against the power of collective forgetting and seek to give voice to the formerly silenced. How well they are able to achieve this un-silencing is a question open for debate. In ways that I will explain more fully in the following chapters, I show how each author has reconstituted her own island-myth in her text while simultaneously seeking to un-silence particular groups within the collectives for which each provides a form of witness.

The discovery of the significant gap in memory between the two novels with which I opened this introduction was a surprise so profound from a critical perspective that it led me to reshape the study, expanding some borders while closing others. For one thing, as Connerton has explored, it became clear that I needed to investigate other historical novels and contemporary short stories produced in similar conditions and by members of the same generations as Danticat/Alvarez, who themselves are about a generation apart. I ultimately wanted the study to include textual performances of identity, but these alone were not enough: I needed to include texts that were intended as performance pieces in order to explore the connections between lived and recorded memory, hence the inclusion of the work of Cuban visual artist María Magdalena Campos-Pons, whose work is situated in the nexus of performance, historiography, and collective storytelling/memory. I do so not only because Campos-Pons renders memory and the imagination in installation and performance-oriented art, but also because her work singularly focuses on the retention of African tradition by Afro-Cubans as signs of culture that exceed the Middle Passage, rather than being broken by it. Campos-Pons’s work is unique in its approach to both raced and gendered representations of Caribbean identity in a manner which suggests that we should not focus our investigations of memory only on its disruption, but more so on what the collective has managed to retain despite it. Along these lines, then, I should add that the study also comes out of a politicized, personal impulse; though I have identified myself as Haitian in all of my scholarship and am best known for pioneering contributions to the field of Haitian women’s studies in English (and in translation), I am actually one-quarter Dominican. I have a maternal Dominican grandfather whose family line includes individuals (like himself) who migrated from the Dominican Republic to Haiti in two previous and separate generations as far back as the mid-1800s, when Haiti was prosperous and perceived as a land of opportunity by Dominicans who had business and political aspirations. Further, as a result of my own lineage, which revealed a more harmonious exchange between Dominicans and Haitians than what scholarly and historical studies expose, it became clear to me that what compelled my investigation most, and what confounded it, was the triangular relationship between Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic.

Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic: Neighbourly Antipathies

For decades, Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic have hardly been discussed in the same breath. In contemporary Latin American literary studies and other disciplines in the humanities, the commonly held view is that the three cannot be discussed together because of linguistic differences; others argue that, of the three, Haiti is the only black country and should, therefore, be discussed separately for reasons of cultural/ethnic difference. Though these views may hold some truth, as I show throughout the study, Haiti’s exclusion from discourses in a variety of fields, but especially from Latin and anglophone Caribbean studies, has more to do with the historically defined fears of Haiti based on racial grounds. I discuss what I mean by this in the Introduction, which focuses entirely on racial discourses as they are relevant to the three nations under investigation, but suffice it to say that my purpose in this study is to highlight the ways in which race has played a central role in curtailing progressive conversation among the three nations. I am expressly concerned with the ways in which race has been used to delimit Haitians’ sphere of influence, or more precisely, due to its actual historical sphere of influence (as a result of the ideological and political reversals of the Haitian Revolution), with the ways Haiti has been cut out of regional conversations because of racial prejudice that hinges upon its disruption of the implicit codes of post-Enlightenment racial divisions at a time when such a disruption was conceived of as both a physical and ideological impossibility. Though I do not argue for race as an essentialist category of identification, it will at times seem as if I am classifying cultural groups according to essential categorizations; rather, my intention is to highlight the ways that racist essentialism has demarcated Haitians and other groups of African descent within the Caribbean as subalterns without agency. Whenever possible, I intend to disrupt the notion of race as an immoveable category by referring to the real of racial difference, insofar as racial difference can be situated in culture which, as I’ve indexed above, is often relegated to irretrievable annals of history.

In this, we can usefully borrow from psychoanalytic ventures in gender formation and analysis, as does Christopher Hanlon in his article, The Pleasures of Passing and the Real of Race, where he investigates Nella Larsen’s investment of racial difference with a phantasmic power that perseveres despite the ontological deficiencies of ‘race’ (27). Hanlon does so by recourse to Lacan’s theory of sexual difference, which Lacan defines as sexual difference as real because it "belongs to what he terms the order of the real, precisely as that which cannot be enclosed in either the symbolic register (which is to say, in language itself), or what Lacan refers to as the imaginary (the visual world or corporeal images by means of which the subject may liken or differentiate herself from others). ‘Real,’ for Lacan, is what perturbs both the imaginary and the symbolic (Hanlon 27). Hanlon thus asserts that the activity of passing, both historical and as represented by Nella Larsen (that is, the ability of mixed-race, African-descended Americans to pass as white and to deny both their cultural and family heritages in order to gain rights of access), is seen as an activity that, like Lacan’s definition of sexual difference, belongs to the order of the real because it denies racial difference both its symbolic and its imaginary support (27) by perturbing visual signs of race and their attendant social and political meanings. Hanlon goes on to suggest provocatively, the point about Passing is not simply that racial difference is an historically contingent notion … [the] point, rather, is something like the opposite, that racial difference is in a way what created or inscribed the twentieth-century American subject" (28).

As I discuss further in my chapter on race in Cuba, I want to pursue this line of thinking, arguing that at this historical juncture we need to think about why it has been easier for philosophy to concede that sex, gender, and sexuality are constructs wherein liminal identities are argued to be foundational even if distorted, while race remains a stable category of otherness in which a dominant race (European or white) maintains its normative status. Like Hanlon, I agree with the idea that blackness thus designates a kind of uncanny surplus, what is ‘in the subject more than the subject itself’ to borrow the Lacanian phrase (28). This becomes quite apropos when one considers spatiality in concert with historical time in the process of identity formation for either individuals or groups, especially for those of African descent, for whom historical time (following Hegel) is said not to exist. Historically, as in the case of the Haitian Revolution, disruptions of racial codes implied what black geographer Katherine McKittrick describes, in reference to the burning down of Montreal in 1734 by the Portuguese slave Angélique, as a radical form of geopolitical resistance and transcendence—which Angélique paid for with her life (117). One can argue that the systemic exclusion of Haitians from intellectual and political discourse post-revolution stems from a similar form of geopolitical resistance/transcendence. The case of Angélique is important because it upset the discourse then being articulated which was crucial for Canada to secure its standing as a state that did not hold slaves. The accidental conflagration of Montreal was a result of Angélique’s attempt to free herself by burning down the home of her owners, starting a fire that inadvertently spread to the rest of the city’s buildings. This act resulted in a punishment so severe that her body came to play the role of both defining and denying Canada’s racial and colonial hierarchies. As McKittrick explains, regardless of the identity of the actual arsonist (or the possibility of an accidental fire), the accused confessed, and in a Foucauldian manner, her confession under torture reinscribed race and gender hierarchies and affirmed existing assumptions: the unruly black slave was, as the local population knew, subhuman, primitive, and negligent. Thus, parading a black woman through local Montreal in the eighteenth century, executing her, and burning her remains, achieved two important spatial projects: spectacular punishment of someone and something that is said not to exist, and the destroying of bodily evidence: or, blackness is located, assessed as deviant, punished, erased, and cast beyond the nation (McKittrick 117). Interestingly, Afua Cooper, who has written the definitive history of the case under the title, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal makes an even more important claim: that the evidence of her life left behind in the court records of the case, which include her dictated autobiographical narrative, predates post-Enlightenment claims of proof of reason through the written text by at least half a century.³ Cooper thus argues that Angélique’s court transcripts are the first slave narrative produced in North America,⁴ and thus defy the argument of lack of reason in Africans well before the ideological counter-claims of the next century, claims that denied Africans a say in the discourse of race which sought to make them permanent subalterns in the family of man.⁵

In the Introduction, I thus argue that Haitians are made to occupy a similar space of blackness, located, assessed as deviant, punished, erased and cast beyond the nation, that is, beyond the regional borders of Latin America and the Caribbean, and beyond the margins of humanity. Haiti, after all, has her uses.⁶ I construct my argument by examining disciplinary discomforts with Haiti, particularly in Latin Caribbean/American studies, and by demonstrating the usefulness of bridging the gap between disciplines via the work of contemporary literary critics, historians, and philosophers who have powerfully reconsidered Haiti’s historical challenge to Enlightenment discourses. For some, the Introduction will be a difficult chapter to contend with, as it seeks to expose hypocrisies in fields often devoted to uplifting the marginalized and giving voice to the voiceless; it also runs counter to the disciplinary ideal by which Latin American states are posited as racially enlightened vis-à-vis places like the United States. In light of Haiti’s effacement over time from the disciplinary discourses that should be most interested in the inclusion of an analysis of Haiti’s historical trajectory, this work attempts to examine closely the reasons behind that marginalization using a feminist lens, no small task. I ask readers to bear the discomfort of that expository chapter with the understanding that it seeks not to negate the advances made in Latin American and Latin Caribbean literary and cultural studies, but to examine a consistent, resurgent thread in the field that, I believe, has retarded progress along (and because of) racial lines; such lines of demarcation can be further followed across the spaces of gender and sexuality, toward fields of margins within margins. The point here is to realize that attending to the spaces marked as desolate and those who inhabit them could result in de-marginalizing the whole, or in concretizing the endeavour to make central the claims for autonomy and sovereignty of entire nations against neo-colonial powers. For those on the margins of the margins perhaps have more to tell us about ourselves and our cultures than do the European metropoles we have been forced to look toward, and with which Caribbean nations increasingly have very little in common. Expanding from this chapter, in the remaining sections of the text I aim to compare and contrast how the Dominican Republic and Cuba have historically been positioned differently than Haiti in terms of race, and the ways in which the female writers and artist under discussion redress such anomalies of categorization contemporaneously.

It is, however, important to note that the severing of Haiti in political and academic discourses only occurs in the 1960s, after ties to Cuba were cut off by the United States and during the worst years of the Duvalier regime. Indeed, in political science or Latin American studies that rift has never been explicit, since the politics of each of these nations is inextricably entwined and reflected in the political trajectory of the others, as I will discuss below. Prior to this moment, a series of texts, some propagandistic, others purporting to be legitimate historical tracts, sought only to link the three nations under the good neighbor policy,⁷ with which the U.S. momentarily sought to promote its aims not through military intervention (which it had used forcibly in the early decades of the twentieth century) but through persuasion of a gentler kind (i.e., economic/cultural influence, support of Latin American leaders, etc.). The most notorious of these was produced by Row, Peterson, and Company, under the auspices of the United States Commissioner of Education John W. Studebaker, who served as the editorial director for their The Good Neighbor Series (1940s). To explain the series, Studebaker wrote a preface which stated, Heretofore, our cultural currents have mainly run east and west. Naturally our schools have emphasized the history, geography, and culture of Western Europe. The time has now come to clear away the mists of ignorance and to capitalize the imagination-stirring possibilities of a study of the twenty diverse nations making up that brave new world south of the Rio Grande (Greenbie 2). For this imprint, Sydney Greenbie produced Three Island Nations: Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic in 1942, complete with a Spanish/Haitian Creole pronouncing glossary and an illustrated guide to the three nations, aimed at educating Americans while simultaneously depicting Cubans, Haitians, and Dominicans as impoverished citizens ruled over by tyrannical leaders. Mixing a reverential rhetoric with one that is simultaneously paternalistic, Greenbie’s text achieves its aims.

Introducing the nation of Haiti, which he admits to having carried out a brave fight for freedom, Greenbie prefaces the section by assuaging American fears of their Southern neighbours, not by alluding to dread of anti-colonial insurrection but to encroachments from European forces: Every now and then people in the United States become afraid that one of our Latin-American neighbors may endanger the hemisphere’s freedom by joining some European combination of nations. But we can rest easy (32). Intended for use in schoolrooms (there is a question/discussion section for teachers), the text is clearly propagandistic, ending on the hopeful note of North–South relations to benefit the United States in the direction of an American commonwealth of nations similar to that of Great Britain, held together by bonds of action and common interest (Greenbie 81).

More purportedly academic efforts from around the same time period exhibit a similar lack of impartiality. For instance, in his Cuba, Haiti, & The Dominican Republic, published in 1965, John Edwin Fagg explains the purpose of his text in its opening sentence, following the subtitle, Three Neighbors with Divergent Careers by stating, Cuba’s situation and prospects today, matters of great importance to a watchful world, necessarily relate to those of its neighbors, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, on the island of Hispaniola (1). Delineating the three countries’ similarities in terms of geographical proximity, antipathy toward one another, topography, and history going back to the Arawaks, Fagg’s text proceeds to demonstrate how (in his opinion) each of the three nations has failed to prosper since Spanish/French colonization and how each is left to fend for itself for lack of a viable relationship with the U.S. Of Cuba post-1963–64, Fagg writes, The United States and Cuba were going in different directions—politically, economically, and intellectually. If this trend continued, two countries that had been intimate so long might live in a state of continuous hostility, and hundreds of thousands of Cuba’s best citizens might be doomed to perpetual exile (111). Seemingly unaware of the U.S.’s role in bringing François Duvalier to power (and training his militia of terror), Fagg writes of Haiti, Mad tyrants Haiti has known before. By ignoring public affairs its population has survived and increased generation after generation, changing its ways but little. These ways might spell happiness in some respects, but not according to Western ideals of progress (137). And finally, of the DR post-Bosch, Fagg concludes: the startling American intervention [of May 1965] with thousands of armed men dramatized the irregular nature of the little nation’s political development, which had always been subject to sudden and disagreeable change. There was little to inspire optimism concerning the future of democratic institutions in the Dominican Republic (165). Through Fagg’s rather depressing little text, we are made to understand that the future of these countries lay in U.S. hands, and that the failure of each to thrive post-colonization resulted from a lack of proper understanding or implementation of Western-style democracy. There are, of course, no explorations of the U.S.’s interference with the governance of each of the countries throughout history. Ironically, of course, most of the authors I write about in this study are presently residing in the U.S., giving credence to one part of Fagg’s assessment: the important role the U.S. does play in the history and lives of the citizens of each of these countries. More importantly, whatever these authors’ conclusions, in the mid-1960s it was taken for granted that one could speak of the DR, Haiti, and Cuba in simultaneity. This is no longer the case.

The hostilities between the citizens and governments of the three nations as discussed by Fagg is still true today, and citizens struggle with the meaning of a memory which has more or less effaced the history that fuelled such animosities. When I travelled to the Dominican Republic to investigate aspects of my study further, I found that I was seen as an oddity, a morena claiming to be Haitian (depending on whether the category of morena was pejorative for the speaker⁸) when she could pass for a Dominican. The denials of race and history ran deep only miles from the Haitian border. Across the waters and seemingly a world away when travelling in Cuba, most customarily assumed I was Cuban and spoke to me in Spanish, my Haitianness absorbed as a common tie. In contradistinction to my experience in the DR, in Cuba, Haiti and its revolution were exalted. Yet, as I have chosen them for this study, I found that the themes explored by women writers and artists of the three nation-states often reflect similar concerns with women’s rights, U.S. cultural imperialism, racial politics, and the excavation of national histories through women’s consciousness. If some do not use the word feminist to describe themselves or their representations, their works advance feminist perspectives nonetheless, and, in the case of writers in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, advance capsizing views of women’s sexuality in cultural contexts that actively repress and deny women’s agency over their bodies. How was I to bring together the dissonance of national identifications with the consonance of particular women’s visions, especially as the numbers of women being published from all three nations grows exponentially on a yearly basis?⁹

Women Artists as Archaeologists

The criteria for the selection of works I analyze are numerous, though my study is necessarily narrow in scope. Each work, whether it is textual or visual, can be neatly summarized by the following list of attributes: the work (1) makes the effort to halt the process of historical amnesia, often employing innovative forms or subversive content in order to meet this goal; (2) attempts to excavate particularly incoherent moments of history with a feminist consciousness; (3) reformulates the national body as both feminized (in terms of both subjugation and a rise in feminist thought) and racialized, sometimes with mixed results, as I will show in the case of Alvarez; (4) advances concepts of sexual choice and empowerment for women; and (5) exhibits an awareness of a long history of U.S. encroachment/imperialism. Of these attributes, the centring axis of my exploration is that of race: how race has come to fracture considerations of Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba; and how each of the authors and the visual artist seek to reconsider racialized as well as gendered discourses and identity formations in each of these three nations. The centralization of women’s bodies and experiences dominates the texts I have chosen by Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, Zoé Valdés, Loida Maritza Pérez, Marilyn Bobes, Achy Obejas, Nancy Morejón, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, with references to other signal texts by Caribbean women writers of the three regions, such as Dominican-American writer Angie Cruz, throughout. The texts under investigation were chosen because they exhibited a kind of shared communication with other writers, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, but in all except a few cases, the writers/artists discussed here have produced unexpected narratives about obscured moments in history or of raced and gendered aspects of Haitian, Cuban, or Dominican cultures.

Lastly, but most importantly, the feature I grappled with the most was the legacy of fear and self-censorship endemic to the countries represented by these writers, with a history both of liberatory revolutions and oppressive dictatorial regimes hinging on racial fears and antagonisms. What brought me to the making of this fractured text was, in fact, the ellipses of the works I read in its preparation, works that seemed to want to make peace with the past, but that often could not move through the morass of imposed history. In some cases, that lack of ability to see forward is intentional, a critique of the limits imposed upon suppressed populations, women being chief among these, and in others, it is the product of an inability to see through that suppression, falling victim to it. It is those limits that compel me in this endeavour, for though some cannot fill the gaps, others, as I will demonstrate, seek only to do so, knowing full well that they will be misread or disregarded altogether in their attempts. At the crux of the analysis of each work is a consideration of the limits of agency for female subjects, whose very bodies are utilized as objects in trade and as receptors for projections of phantasmagoric exoticizations from the outside. As in prior efforts, it is my contention that texts by women have the most to teach us about the limits of subjectivity and identity. For they, more than their male counterparts, provide probing questions into a wide-ranging set of issues pertaining to women’s and human rights which challenge and sometimes even transcend questions of the nation-state because they come from regions where women have little to no political representation, little to no economic parity with males, and are subject to exploitation and violence prescribed by gender. The ultimate question I ask of these texts is the following: How can the bodies of women in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba be reclaimed, if at all, and can they, as figures of the nation, reformulate the body politic? I investigate, through the works created by women originally from Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, whether or not such reclamation must take place through corporeality or through ideology. My argument suggests that both are necessary, and yet it takes up the latter issue of ideology as its own trope, hence my unconventional methodology, choice of texts, and purposefully limited scope of investigation.

As I have stated earlier, this is an unmoored text. My premise is that Caribbean women artists generally, and the women artists investigated here, a number of whom are situated in the U.S., are the new archaeologists of a historical site we would do well to call amnesia. Spokespersons for a majority that is nonetheless politically marginalized in outmoded, patriarchally regimented cultures, they seek to elucidate women’s variegated lives within the confining walls of their national identifications, national identifications that are currently wholly defined as male. As they seek to articulate this new body, one that is inclusive rather than exclusive, they interrogate the degree to which male nationalism is a response to the feminization of the nation-state through colonization and simultaneously expose women’s lives within that construction. The result is to overturn the notion that the nation must be overdeter-mined as male in response to encroaching narratives fabricated by the colonial powers that lay elsewhere, in Europe or in the U.S. They make this clear by advancing central female protagonists who, by virtue of their dominance in written or visual texts, become emblematic of the ideal (if not idealized) subject in the nation under transformation. To state that the women whose works I address here are interested in fashioning not a new state but one under construction is to suggest that none of these narratives seek to replace an old regime of consciousness with a new one that is simply inversed or feminist, but that they see themselves as actively participating in a critique of history and present-day culture, while offering plausible alternatives to the static constructions of nation, metropolis, dominant-versus-subordinate powers, and identity, as each has been historically determined within the Caribbean ethos. They do so, more often than not, by exploring race and class, problematizing notions of national identity, and sometimes producing problematic versions of such variegated identities.

Importantly, late-twentieth-century women writers of the region recognize the degree to which migration to, or interaction with, the U.S. has distorted or contributed to shifts in identity formation for Haitians, Dominicans, and Cubans. I suggest that this shift in perception is an important facet of the current study because it clarifies the neo-colonial character of present-day cultural formation in the Caribbean, a neo-colonialism which, especially in the case of Haiti, is often ignored or denied. Caribbean nations such as Haiti, the DR, and Cuba are still locked in a battle over self-determination despite their nominally independent states, by virtue of their trade (or lack thereof) with the U.S.

Interventions and interruptions in their self-governance have also maintained their relative states of dependence on their Northern neighbours; all of this has contributed to the continuation of the dominance/feminization dyad which characterizes all imperial nation-building endeavours whereby other lands and their people (not to say their men) are colonized (or, in these cases, controlled by proxy) through a demasculinization process meant to ensure their subservience. It will come as no surprise, then, that five of the eight central writers/artist I investigate in the study reside in the U.S., while three (all of Cuban origin) do not; it should be noted also that all the central authors and artist were born in the Caribbean, and that the majority emigrated in young adulthood after receiving their formal education and training in their nation of origin. Given the increasing study of Caribbean diasporas, or of the placement of writers of Caribbean origin in the category of new ethnics so that their works are taught as part of ethnic studies under the rubric of hyphenated Americans (Haitian-American, Dominican-American, Cuban-American, etc.), it might stand to reason to expect a reading of these works as exemplifying diasporic consciousness. As has been the case for decades in Caribbean studies, however, Caribbean literature is largely understood as a body of literature produced in multiple nation-states of the Caribbean, including texts written by those who have been forced into political or economic exile. As such, even though a rise in diasporic identities has come about because of such exiles, especially in the case of first- or second-generation writers, Caribbean studies has expanded to include these literatures in those of the original nations, as they reflect, from new vantage points, the transformation of the cultures of origin through migration, biculturalism, and transnationalism, especially in the case of those writers who continue to return to their nations of origin. I am choosing to situate the texts at hand within the disciplinary perspective of a Caribbeanist, situating the works as extensions of the nation of origin.

I would agree with scholars such as James Clifford that [t]he nation-state, as common territory and time, is traversed and, to varying degrees, subverted by diasporic attachments and that unlike immigrants, diasporic individuals do not abandon places of origin in order to assimilate into a new nation (451); indeed, in the case of the works I have chosen for this study, it is the attachment to the old place that interests me. Though valuable, the present study does not seek to place the literature and art at hand within the context of a dualistic gazing between two nations—that of origin and adoption. Studies of diasporic literature by and large engage in what Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin have termed a dual ontology in which the diasporic subject is seen to look in two directions—towards an historical cultural identity on one hand, and the society of relocation on the other (425). Keeping in mind my purpose here, as I detailed above, I have deliberately chosen texts by authors and works by one artist that clearly reflect upon particular historical moments in the original nation-state or on the vexed identity of the (gendered and raced) citizen of the original nation-state; I have purposefully chosen not to focus on those works produced by the same artists that focus on migration or hyphenated Caribbean/U.S. identities. This approach was not taken to deny the utility of a diasporic reading, but to think productively about how the freedom to reflect on the place of origin from a distance reveals certain truths about that place that might be otherwise difficult to bring to the surface, especially when concerning social markers or historical occurrences that figure in the national discourse as shameful.¹⁰ In this sense, I am reading the works as extensions of the literatures of the nation-state in so far as the writers/artists consciously render them as such, consistent with the reading of literatures of exile in Caribbean studies as part and parcel of national literatures; in this sense, the texts are glocal¹¹ yet I am interested in how they reflect the space of origin instead of the space of transformation in the new locale via diasporic dislocation. Rather than choose texts by contemporary writers/artists working today in Haiti, the DR, or Cuba, whose themes may resonate well with my purpose in this study, I have also chosen these particular texts and artists for reasons of accessibility to readers and scholars in the U.S., where the majority of intellectual production in Caribbean studies is increasingly published and disseminated.

The chosen works, produced in English, are predominantly shared texts in the larger discipline through which I can suggest new ways of situating Haiti in Caribbean studies discourse as well as present interdisciplinary analytical approaches to the texts to yield new readings and possibilities for cross-cultural interpretation. I have also chosen these texts to encourage a transnational dialogue that I believe has been increasingly diminished by the tendency in literary scholarship to situate texts by Caribbean-born authors and artists living in the U.S. and writing in English solely as hyphenated Americans. The focus here, then, is on the intelligence of the inner world of the narratives constituted by the authors, the imagined landscapes in which they question the markers of raced and gendered identity as established in their respective cultural sites of origin. Those inner worlds are incontestably situated in the local space of the nation of origin and, as I will argue, attempt to reimagine the body politic of the nation from within rather than from without for the characters and, in the case of art installations, the figures, that inhabit their textual and artistic spaces, even as the authors/artist create their works at a (productive) remove from the nation of origin.¹²

Interdisciplinary Methodology

The tripartite structure of the text is also meant to encourage readers to reflect on the parallel that can be drawn between women’s subordination and the national subordinations of Haiti, the DR, and Cuba. Throughout I will draw attention to the history, often denied, which binds the three nations together by recourse to historical (and contemporary revisionist historical), sociological, anthropological, and geographic studies, and as I have stated above, I will show how that history often has resulted in imperial projects of a colonizing nature to erase women’s bodies or to covertly exploit their labour.

To be clear about the national cross-currents which bind the three nations, I think it is fair to explain here the subtitles I am employing for each of the three sections: Sovereignty, Sugar, and Revolution. To my mind, these are the three axes which connect Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, though present studies in a variety of disciplines from sociology to history would deny their existence (hence the lack of any recent work to date contemplating all three nations at once), yet to be sure, I am radically re-envisioning the significance of these terms in the present study. As a point of fact, all three nations have struggled to maintain their sovereignty since times of colonization and enslavement. Haiti’s Revolution is mythologized throughout the Americas and yet, in the Dominican Republic, Independence Day celebrates independence from Haiti’s first leaders, former African slaves.¹³ Since that time, however, Haitians have been routinely subjected to the DR’s encroachment into Haitian territory. The first chapter of the text addresses this particular phenomenon, the marginalization of Haiti in Caribbean discourses, and regional struggles over sovereignty. Most interestingly, the three nations have been explicitly connected since the late 1700s by the sugar plantations employing slave labour; as a result of Haiti’s self-emancipation in the early 1800s, U.S.-based buyers turned to the DR and to Cuba for their sugar resources. Ironically, what I term the new sugar of the late twentieth century could very well be women’s bodies and labour in all three nations; this is all the more true in Cuba, which, cut off from the most lucrative global trade networks, seeks to revitalize the tourist trade through worn stereotypes