Marassa and the Nothingness: Bilingual Edition

By Alanna Lockward

The story revolves around two sisters: Laura, who lives in Paris and commits suicide, and Mara, who lives in Santo Domingo and absorbs the death of her sister by setting out to starve herself to death. A third woman, Moira, first cousin of the siblings who lives in New York City, narrates their story as she travels to Santo Domingo to rescue Mara. For Moira, the trip is also an opportunity to cross over to Haiti to search for the remains of the sisters mother, Doa Manuela Ricart de Porter, who had gone there for a spiritual retreat and disappeared without a trace. Moiras journey offers descriptions of Haiti beyond stale references to poverty, the sordid or sensational,and the guilt often invoked in writings about Haiti and its relations with the Dominican Republic.
Profoundly feminist and allegorical, Marass and the Nothingness rewrites the narrative between these two nations by invoking unexpected figures revered in both sides of the island: Anacaona, the Virgin Altagracia, and the Sacred Twins.Certainly,this is a text that grows from dealing with the colonizer and colonized that, at least in the Caribbean, we all carry within. It shows the love that can emerge from understanding the 'other' not as a dehumanized object on which to unleash our furies or desires to dominate, but rather as an equal with whom to exchange something meaningfulpreciselybecause of our differences.

Sophie Marez
Assistant Professor of French and Spanish,
Borough of Manhattan Community College, CityUniversity of New York


"Alanna Lockward proves, once again, her phenomenal narrative skills of condensing in one single text the invisible (and macabre) structures upon which today's Caribbean realities are constructed"

Rita Indiana Hernndez
Author

In this short and haunting novel Alanna Lockward offers a new take on one of the most complex postcolonial histories in the Americas and rescinds the epic and masculinist lens through which it is often told; Marass and the Nothingness foregrounds womens friendship and their acts of care and how these, in the face of great pain and death, may promise another future.

Maja Horn
Associate Professor, Chair. Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures, Barnard College


Marass and the Nothingness is the first storytelling by an already experienced writer. Lockward prose is concise, precise, understated yet complex. Through the pages the reader hears the rumor of a Caribbean female existentialism. In her narrative and in all her work as curator, Alanna Lockward delivers decolonial ways of emotioning, being and doing.

Walter Mignolo
William H. Wannamaker Professor of Literature at Duke University



History, aesthetic workouts, word plays, dazzling Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Africa, this is reading Marass and the Nothingness , a most experimental novel . . .

Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger
Affiliated Professor of Literature, Institute of Romance Languages, RWTH Aachen, Germany

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Africa
• Release date: Feb 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781482825749

Alanna Lockward

Alanna Lockward is a Caribbean author and independent curator. She is the founding director of Art Labour Archives, an exceptional platform centered on theory, political activism, and art. Her interests are Caribbean marronage discursive and mystical legacies in time-based practices, critical race theory, decolonial aesthetics/aesthesis, Blak feminism, and womanist ethics. Lockward is the author of Apremio: apuntes sobre el pensamiento y la creación contemporánea desde el Caribe (Cendeac, 2006), a collection of essays, the short novel Marassá y la Nada (Santuario 2013), and Un Haití Dominicano. Tatuajes fantasmas y narrativas bilaterales (1994-2014) is a compilation of her investigative work on the history and current challenges between both island-nations (Santuario 2014). She was cultural editor of Listín Diario, research journalist of Rumbo magazine, and columnist of the Miami Herald and is currently a columnist of Acento.com.do. Her essays and reviews have been widely published internationally by Afrikadaa, Atlántica, ARTECONTEXTO, Arte X Excelencias, Art Nexus, Caribbean InTransit, and Savvy Journal. In 2014, she was the guest columnist of Camera Austria. Her nomadic character is imprinted in the multidimensional perspectives of her writings, after living in Mexico, Haiti, the United States, Australia, and currently between Berlin and Santo Domingo. Equally at home writing fiction, poetry, or essays, her vision of being in the world is impregnated by the notion of inseparability between the tangible and the invisible. She would die without avocado, Borges, and Audre Lorde. alannalockward(at)gmail.com

Book preview

ABOUT THE BOOK

The story revolves around two sisters: Laura, who lives in Paris and commits suicide, and Mara, who lives in Santo Domingo and absorbs the death of her sister by setting out to starve herself to death. A third woman, Moira, first cousin of the siblings who lives in New York City, narrates their story as she travels to Santo Domingo to rescue Mara. For Moira, the trip is also an opportunity to cross over to Haiti to search for the remains of the sisters’ mother, Doña Manuela Ricart de Porter, who had gone there for a spiritual retreat and disappeared without a trace. Moira’s journey offers descriptions of Haiti beyond stale references to poverty, the sordid or sensational, and the guilt often invoked in writings about Haiti and its relations with the Dominican Republic.

Profoundly feminist and allegorical, Marassá and the Nothingness rewrites the narrative between these two nations by invoking unexpected figures revered in both sides of the island: Anacaona, the Virgin Altagracia, and the Sacred Twins. Certainly, this is a text that grows from dealing with the colonizer and colonized that, at least in the Caribbean, we all carry within. It shows the love that can emerge from understanding the ‘other’ not as a dehumanized object on which to unleash our furies or desires to dominate, but rather as an equal with whom to exchange something meaningful precisely because of our differences.

Sophie Maríñez

Assistant Professor of French and Spanish,

Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York

MARASSA

and the

NOTHINGNESS

Bilingual Edition

Alanna Lockward

Translated by Amari Barash,

revised by Jorge Lockward

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Copyright © 2016 by Alanna Lockward.

Illustrated by Gabriela Vainsencher

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/africa

CONTENTS

About The Book

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About the Author

1

Nothing happens. When someone dies, everything stops and there is only Death. With the passage of time, one begins to forget a little: the Nothingness transforms itself into something less heavy. But in the end, its hard lightness reminds us that it was once there, and it only weighs on us a little less.

Just as I had felt it the first time, the scent was like the shadow of a phantom forest. Juniper, sandalwood, oak, cedar, mahogany, guava, and rosewood aroused an aromatic trail leading to shelves filled with incense, crystals, and candles of every color and shape. Among the petals of a lotus, a floating Buddha diligently yet discreetly blessed the placid atmosphere of the shop. Reflecting in the door of the small office, a spherical prism resembling a baby’s mobile formed a round rainbow. Cassandra opened the door and the psychedelic circle projected on the center of her back like the natural prolongation of an impenetrable equation; she lit a white candle and turned on her laptop almost at the same time.

Here, I said, impatient to leave, giving her the packet of incense that had been sitting in my purse for three weeks. Guess who I ran into when I went for your incense?

A tiny torture runs through my chest: industrious little ants delighted in biting me incessantly, my heart quivering between clammy hands and my dry eyes red as his truck. Doubt and paralysis: two blades of scissors crippled by a ray of pain. Why do I always find what I’m not looking for? What was Andrés doing in an Indian shop? Buying props for his new film, or a gift for his new lover?

The consecreated rosewood incense that could only be found in the capital had resuscitated the perpetual questioning, like a ruinous mirror that refused to forget me.

2

"It was the baker who sounded the alarm. Laura had that incredible magnetism; the guy would climb seven flights of stairs every morning with two croissants. He said it was because he didn’t want Laura to go out in the cold so early. She hadn’t answered the door in three days, and because Laura always stopped by to let him know when she was going away, he called the police. The man is destroyed. Destroyed. Imagine! He found a way to go into the apartment with the police and saw her hanging from the ceiling with those belts around her neck.

I didn’t have any problems with the ticket you bought me online. The detectives were waiting for me at the airport; when I got there, she was already frozen. There was also no problem with the birth certificate, which I forgot to bring – and even if I’d remembered, I didn’t have a copy – because Laura had her stuff super organized. The police already had her passport, and they gave it to me as soon as I stepped off the plane. It was the first thing they gave me, without even saying hello. In other words, there was no problem with the French. The airline says I can travel with the French death certificate, so anyways, Moira, what can I tell you? Don’t worry, nothing is happening, stay calm, I’ll call you again when I get to Santo Domingo… is it cold in New York?

3

The profane, colorful, and enormous saints of the Saint-Soleil artists open the hatches of their burnt-sugar inheritance in the Oloffson’s reception area. Mara’s description of the Victorian walls, with the Vodou flags and their intricate sequined designs, was exact. In front of the back wall, a band was milking the prismatic combination of rock and Haitian religion. RAM.¹ A cliff of burned sugarcane above a sea of sequins. A crowd packed the lobby, singing in chorus and moving as though the sea would balance them from within, like Jonah must have moved inside the whale, lots of people moving like the whale itself, slow, heavy, gentle, with the rhythm of many waves compressed into one and then repeated. Leaving the empty reception area, I joined the swaying, dancing alone, like I had when Mara and I had gone clubbing all over New York. I sensed her gaze running through me like a damning, invisible sweat. Mara hated the night clubs, hated the smoke, but she hated it even more when Julián would arrive in his pilot suit asking for me; Mara is such a bad liar, like a cockroach without antennas, always getting lost, never able to effortlessly repeat the same lie like the pros do.

Ici, à Saint-Domingue, nous n’avons seulement que deux stations: Été et Infern.² After the third round of Barbancourt, we were like a bunch of long-lost cousins thrilled to have found each other again. We laughed in unison at the Frenchman’s joke, like an obedient school of sardines inevitably following the choreographic dictum of their leader. His invitation to share their table had made me feel at home. We were classic strangers, singing the same boleros until the wee hours, each of us with a different accent, but all with the utmost passion.

Si yo encontrara un alma como la mía,

cuantas cosas secretas le contaría,

un alma que al mirarme sin decir nada

me lo dijese todo con la mirada.

Alma mía sola, siempre sola,

sin que nadie comprenda tu sufrimiento,

tu horrible padecer…"³

Three, five times, again and again, Carmen the peppy Mexican, sneezed. And while we helped her recover, dying of laughter, the Frenchman’s Haitian wife, who hadn’t succeeded in detecting the origin of my accent, asked me again where I was from.

Je suis dominicaine.

Dominicaine?