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Beyond resistance in Dominican American women’s fiction: Healing and growth through the spectrum of quietude in Angie Cruz’s Soledad and Naima Coster’s Halsey Street

Más allá de la resistencia en la literatura de ficción de las mujeres dominico-americanas: Sanación y crecimiento a través del arco de la quietud en Soledad de Angie Cruz y Halsey Street de Naima Coster

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Abstract

The Dominican Republic and its relationship with Dominican America have often been studied in relation to the brutal regime of Rafael Trujillo, tíguere masculinity, and the political sphere. Writers like Julia Álvarez and Junot Díaz, as well as anthologies of Dominican women’s writing, form a literary archive that conceives of women’s writing as a perpetual act of rebellion, mostly against Trujillo and Trujillista models of masculinity. Starting from Lorgia García-Peña’s conception of “contradiction” (2016) and Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet (2012), this article argues that Angie Cruz’s Soledad (2001) and Naima Coster’s Halsey Street (2017) are a counter-archive of woman-centered, Dominican American narratives of return dependent on feminized forms of expression and belonging—namely art, quiet, secrecy, surrender, and interiority. These novels reclaim the power of these acts and spaces along a spectrum of quietude, ranging from acts of alienation to tools for bonding, healing, and growth.

Resumen

La República Dominicana y su relación con la América dominicana con frecuencia se estudian en relación con el régimen sanguinario de Rafael Trujillo, la masculinidad tíguere y la esfera política. Autores como Julia Álvarez y Junot Díaz y las antologías de obras de mujeres dominicanas conforman un archivo literario que concibe la escritura femenina como un acto de rebelión perpetuo, mayormente en contra de Trujillo y los modelos Trujillistas de masculinidad. Partiendo de la idea de “Contradicción” de Lorgia García-Peña (2016) y The Sovereignty of Quiet de Kevin Quashie (2012), este artículo argumenta que las obras Soledad de Angie Cruz (2001) y Halsey Street de Naima Coster (2017) representan un contra-archivo de narrativas de retorno centradas en la mujer dominico-americana que dependen de formas feminizadas de expresión y pertenencia: particularmente arte, quietud, secreto, rendición e interioridad. Estas novelas recuperan el poder de estos actos y espacios a lo largo de un arco de quietud que oscila y comprende actos de alienación así como herramientas para intimar, sanar y crecer.

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Notes

  1. For more on tíguere masculinity, see Krohn-Hansen (1996, 2009) and Collado (2002), and for Trujillista tigueraje’s influence on Dominican intellectualism, see Torres-Saillant (2002).

  2. Examples include Álvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), on the Mirabal sisters’ murders, and Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), in which Trujillo is depicted as Sauron, an all-seeing evil force from The Lord of the Rings.

  3. I adopt this term from García-Peña (2016) who defines capital-D “Dominicanidad” as “hegemonic and official versions of Dominicanness” while lower-case-D “dominicanidad” represents “the people and the ideas related to Dominicanness” (p. 213, fn1).

  4. See also Rodríguez (2018), who considers the place of resistance politics in Latinx literary studies.

  5. There has been limited scholarship on Soledad. As far as I am aware, this is the first study of Naima Coster’s debut novel.

  6. I use the term Latinx in line with Milian (2020) and Lopez (2018) who consider the X a space of possibility, which includes previously erased groups such as those not aligning with gender binaries as well as Blackness and Indigeneity.

  7. As Thornton and Ubiera note, Dominican studies scholarship has often focused on the relationship between Haiti and DR, casting Dominicans as “self-hating blacks” or a “novel racial problem” (2019, p. 413). Although conceptions of Afrodominicanidad inform this article, they do so not to reify the Haiti-DR divide but rather to inform my readings of gender, class, race, and migration in the texts. Like Ramírez (2018), I am not interested in homogenizing Africanity but rather in exploring “the prismatic nature of the African diaspora” in the Dominican context (p. 154). See also Candelario (2007) and Silvio Torres-Saillant’s oeuvre.

  8. See Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert (2001, 2011).

  9. Ramírez explores the complexities of DR sex work and sex worker narratives in chapter 5 of Colonial Phantoms (2018).

  10. Whenever the story focuses on Mirella’s point of view, Penelope’s name is written with the accent over the second ‘e’ to indicate the mother’s Dominican Spanish accent as well as the disconnect between how Penelope sees herself and how her mother sees her. I will use “Penelope” throughout the paper, unless quoting a line that uses the accent.

  11. See Larsen (1988) on “narrar el trujillato” and de Maeseneer (2008) on “(dejar de) narrar el (neo)trujillato.” De Maeseneer defines both terms (2008, p. 1053n1).

  12. For more on the initiation process and secrecy that surrounds these religions, see Moreno Vega (2000), Clark (2005, 2007), and Carr (2015).

  13. See Arreola (2019) who similarly analyzes the blackness of dominicanidad in Cruz’s second novel, Let It Rain Coffee (2006).

  14. Women of color writers have frequently noted the accessibility of poetry compared to other forms, most notably Lorde (2007 [1984]) and Anzaldúa (1981).

  15. The centrality of painting to the daughters’ lives in both novels evokes the painting at the center of the mythic DR figure, la Virgen de Altagracia. See Roorda et al. (2014, p. 393).

  16. See also Otero (2016).

  17. Ramírez’s conception of montería and el monte is applicable here (2018, p. 22).

  18. See also Zamora (2017) on AfroDominican women as an “embodied archive” (p. 2).

  19. In Halsey Street, water is everywhere: las cascadas in Aguas Frescas, the water that roils and boils when Mirella and Penelope have their big fight that leads to their years-long estrangement, the mother and daughter’s final time together taking place at the beach, and Penelope attempting to cleanse and cool the cigarette burns on her arms created as she tries to process her mother’s sudden death. Although outside of the scope of this paper, future work should look at the power of water in that novel as well.

  20. See Lantigua (2001).

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to the organizers of the Global Dominicanidades pre-LASA article workshop (Lorgia García-Peña, Elizabeth Manley, and Sharina Maillo-Pozo), for which I wrote the first draft of this article. Thank you as well to the workshop participants, especially my discussant, Diego Ubiera. Thanks also to the 2019–2020 Colloquium for the Study of Latina/o/x Culture and Theory at CUNY Graduate Center for workshopping the revised version of this piece. Special thanks to my discussant Maja Horn, as well as Bill Orchard, Inmaculada Lara-Bonilla, Sonia Rodriguez, and Cristina Pérez Jiménez. Mil gracias to Omaris Zamora, who curated a supportive daily writing space during the pandemic. Finally, thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their excellent feedback.

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    Regina Marie Mills

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Mills, R.M. Beyond resistance in Dominican American women’s fiction: Healing and growth through the spectrum of quietude in Angie Cruz’s Soledad and Naima Coster’s Halsey Street. Lat Stud 19, 70–91 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-021-00286-8

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