Keywords

Afro-Puerto Rican author Mayra Santos Febres’ novel Fe en disfraz (2009) presents a bold examination of the consequences of sexual exploitation and abuse on black women during enslavement and the implications for contemporary society, a topic which continues to be under-explored in Puerto Rican and Latin American narrative. In the novel, Santos Febres invokes historical memory so as to re/present ideas surrounding time and the way in which black women’s lives were systemically eclipsed from the Puerto Rican landscape. In just 115 pages, and set in twenty-first-century USA, the story recounts the tale of Fe Verdejo, an Afro-Venezuelan historian who, while researching in a Chicago library, encounters several documents that connect the reader to black, female, Latin-American enslaved women of the eighteenth century. Indeed, despite its brevity and although it makes no specific mention of the history of enslavement in Puerto Rico, the novel manages to faithfully document the lived experiences of the enslaved (particularly women and children) across Latin America and the Caribbean.

This chapter argues that through an analysis of Santos Febres’ imagined (or re/invented) historical past as well as Fe’s life story, we are able to understand the brutal and dehumanizing nature of enslavement and the inherited sense of powerlessness among blacks which in turn redound to an understanding of the present-day realization of Caribbean societies, specifically Puerto Rico. In addition, this chapter examines the way in which Santos Febres’ play with time reveals the black female body to be a site of cultural inscription while at the same time one of resilience, thus foregrounding the centrality of this black female writer to contemporary Puerto Rican society.

Much of Santos Febres’ work centers on gender and sexuality, and this novel is no exception. However, Fe en disfraz distinguishes itself from her other works because it makes clear the history of blacks, that is, the African history of blacks in Latin America and in so doing, it foregrounds the positionality of blackness to the Puerto Rican landscape. This type of imaginative memorializing of the past is important today not simply because of the gaps in historical and official records regarding enslaved persons, but also because it provokes the reader to question official representations of blackness. Ultimately, this lacuna in the documentation of atrocities during enslavement is precisely what the novel seeks to remediate.

Fe en disfraz recounts the brief, intense relationship between the first-person narrator Martín Tirado, a white Puerto Rican, and the Afro-Venezuelan historian María Fernanda Verdejo, whose lives come together at the University of Chicago. Race is a constant concern in the novel although it is also true to state that Santos Febres does not specifically center it above other concerns such as gender, violence, and trauma. Martín Tirado is a computer scientist who leads a typically mundane life, and has a white Puerto Rican girlfriend, Agnes, who is a linguist in Madrid. However, Martín’s life changes radically and irrevocably following his move to work on a project in Chicago, which is where he meets the Afro-Venezuelan scholar. They begin a somewhat sordid relationship based on pain and passion. Their intense relationship serves to painfully reconstruct the lives of black enslaved women and thus underscore their impact on society. We can argue that Fe and Martín’s relationship is founded on historical relations, their love itself an historical experience while at the same time, the sexual sadism of their union highlights the repressive background of enslavement which they seek to document in an exhibition. Their sexual acts are described in great detail throughout the novel and their ritualistic nature serves to evoke the original trauma experienced by many enslaved black women. For Santos Febres, the erotic is intertwined with history in the present and in past time. In an echo of T.S. Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton” the first of The Four Quartets, in which all time is eternally present, Santos Febres consistently blurs time in the novel. Similarly, she also blurs geographical boundaries. By presenting Fe as Afro-Venezuelan and not Puerto Rican, she removes the memory of the specific Puerto Rican past and later as Fe’s research uncovers Venezuelan, Brazilian, Puerto Rican, and Costa Rican women, Santos Febres forces the reader to reflect on the legacy of enslavement across the entire Latin American region, including Puerto Rico.

Through the work in Chicago, and following the finding of the various documents which relate to eighteenth-century, black, Latin American, enslaved women, the research trail takes Fe to Brazil where she makes the biggest find of all; the luxurious dress which Xica da Silva, a woman enslaved at birth who later gained her freedom, wore in an attempt to assimilate into the powerful white society of the time. The dress is a pale yellow with decorative lace trimming. It is a dress for a mulatto woman who wants to blend in as a white woman in society. Irresistibly attracted to the beautiful outfit, da Silva thinks that using it is the only way to be able to relate to others but more importantly to accept herself. Fe had found the dress in a convent and the Mother Superior had warned her to never wear it because it had witnessed many sorrows. However, Fe puts on the dress in Chicago on every Halloween. Adorned with the dress, Fe’s body becomes an allegory for the colonial past. And so it is that Fe’s relationship with Martín changes every 31 October when she dons the disguise of a formerly enslaved black woman striving to be accepted into white Brazilian society. This is the point when Fe Verdejo and Xica da Silva become one and the same woman. Like Xica da Silva and all black women past and present, Fe displays the collective pain of generations of black women, the history of violence wreaked upon them, and internalized by them. As Valladares-Ruiz (2016) acknowledges, “Fe—conocedora de estos antecedentes y desatendiendo las recomendaciones de la monja—se apropia del traje y hace de él un lugar de memoria” (601). [Fe—aware of the background and disregarding the nun’s recommendations—appropriates the dress and makes it a site of memory]. In the narration, Santos Febres constantly plays with the momentary blurred space which exists in between pain and pleasure.

Ironically it is in the darkness of Halloween that Fe brings the stories of enslavement to light. Interestingly too, the novel’s title Fe en disfraz is metaphoric as it presents the idea of skin as a costume. Skin (specifically skin color) is what connects the protagonist Fe Verdejo to the ancestors. But Xica has a dual identity: her connection is not solely to the enslaved black ancestors but also to the white enslavers.

However, when Fe puts on the dress, she assimilates into the night, she becomes one with the carnivalesque masquerade. Santos Febres describes in great detail the beauty of the golden yellow silk dress adorned with rhinestones and pearls. The dress becomes costume and masks Fe’s real self. It is as if Xica’s spirit possesses her. At the same time, we also learn that the wires of the harness in place to keep the shape of the dress are corroded and scrape and slice small cuts into Fe’s skin as she walks. The pain inflicted by the movement of the dress is a constant reminder to Fe that she can never fully blend in, in much the same way that Xica da Silva was ultimately unable to assimilate despite her love for her former enslaver. Fe’s Halloween masquerade moves us back in time to see the history of various enslaved women over the decades who struggled to overcome the exploitative laboring conditions and sexual abuse, to surmount the male enslavers whose attraction to them came at all costs, and to disguise and hide their skin which ultimately became a symbol of pain. Through the dress, Santos Febres shows us that these narratives of pain are intergenerational and again reinforces the notion that traumatic remnants from the past continue to affect black women’s lives today.

At the same time, by making Martín Tirado a white Puerto Rican man and the narrator of the tale, Santos Febres sets him up to be the “official” source of information for the reader. The novel is told from Martín’s point of view and this reinforces the notion that history is told from specific perspectives (white, male, upper class, heteronormative). Santos Febres’ choice of Martín as the narrator of the story is a critique of the bias of official historical narratives in Puerto Rico and across Latin America. Through Martín, we realize the author’s play with narrative and her subtle questioning of who precisely gets to tell official stories, and how they are told, especially where Afro-Puerto Ricans are concerned. In a similar vein, in his essay “Desiring Colonial Bodies in Mayra Santos Febres’ Fe en disfraz,” Victor Figueroa points out:

the text insists, history is never evoked from a neutral, objective position. Even historians write—or, to use Hayden White’s now classic formulation, “emplot” their historical narratives—from specific locations and moments, with their concomitant political agendas and ideological compromises or commitments. (Figueroa 2017, 56)

In the novel Santos Febres does not make a direct statement about blacks in Puerto Rico but rather she forces the reader to consider the ways in which blackness has been essentialized as negative across Latin America and in so doing, she reminds the reader that this association of blackness with negativity also exists in Puerto Rico. Moreover, official narratives traditionally silence black history and represent slavery as milder in Puerto Rico and indeed throughout the Hispanic world (Godreau et al. 2008, 119). Jamaican critic Erna Brodber critically reflects on the relationship between the white master and the black enslaved female. She posits that:

Our question here is not whether there is genuine affection between slave and master or whether the relationship was crassly developed with ulterior motives; the issue is, what the relationship does to the liberation process. (Brodber, 28)

Here Brodber points out that the effects of slavery and slave/master relationships are not just difficult to understand in part because the black is psychically debilitated by being forced to negate her blackness but also that these relationships must be examined if we are to recognize the pain of degradation and dehumanization that is the legacy of the enslavement of blacks across the Caribbean.

Santos Febres centers the reader on the absence of information surrounding enslaved Africans. In fact, at the end of the novel Santos Febres leaves a poignant Nota de la autora (Author’s note) in which she describes everything in her narrative as a mixed bag of sources. She tells the reader:

Fe en disfraz es muchas cosas, pero, también, es una novela acerca de la memoria, de la herida que es recordar. Está montada sobre documentos falsos, falsificados, reescritos con retazos de declaraciones de esclavos que recogí de múltiples fuentes primarias y secundarias; que recombiné, traduje o que, francamente, inventé. (Nota de la autora)

[Faith in Disguise is many things, but it is also a novel about memory, of the wound that is to remember. It is mounted on false, falsified documents, rewritten with snippets of statements of slaves that I collected from multiple primary and secondary sources; that I reassembled, translated or, frankly, invented.] (Author’s note.)

The author’s machinations with the material found in her research, tantamount to archival disruption, underscore the thorny issue of the lacuna in historical documentation regarding enslaved blacks but perhaps also serve to remove any direct confrontation with the Puerto Rican public. At the same time, this could show how Santos Febres may herself be grappling with the harshness of black history in her own interrogation as a black woman.

Additionally, there is a possible parodic intent behind the author’s choice of job for Martín, as a digital archivist. She explicitly tasks this white man with digitizing and preserving the records of black enslaved women in the twenty-first century when mere decades earlier, Puerto Rico’s clear embracing of mestizaje as the way forward for the Puerto Rican nation was meant to rid it of its black past (Godreau 2006, 182). Thus, a previously erased past is not simply being re-written but is being documented and digitized so as to make a permanent record of these enslaved women and ironically, this is being done by a white male. Martín’s role is not merely to liberate Fe, but it is also to rewrite and to right history, by making a permanent record. The ancestral pain of slavery is remembered, and the wound is sealed by the very act of reminding us that the past is not dead. It is only through remembrance that we learn to accept the past. Martín tells us:

Soy algo así como un investigador virtual. Hago la mismísima tarea del monje escribe, pero en tiempos cibernéticos. Recompongo (e ilustro) fragmentos del pasado. Los ofrezco al presente en tiempo hiperreal, un tiempo que pretende burlar la muerte de lo orgánico, la quietud del papel, la lentitud de los hechos (17).

[I am a kind of virtual researcher. I do the same work as a scribe, but in cyber times. I recompose (and illustrate) fragments of the past. I offer them to the present in hyper-real time, a time that aims to circumvent the death of the organic, the stillness of paper, the slow pace of events.]

During the time that Martín is assisting Fe in digitizing the legal papers and manuscripts which she has found at the library in Chicago, they find documents which reveal information about the history of enslavement in Latin America. In the exhibition and on the website, Martín serves to give direction and, in a way, imparts value to the documents and the artifacts in the digitizing process. He rewrites history in much the same way that Santos Febres herself invents the narrative of the novel, both working to impart significance and meaning to the historical events described. For the exhibition, Martín writes explanatory notes and illustrations. He seeks to add in music and in this way rewrite the narrative by injecting his own white perspective. He says to Fe: “Quizás sea bueno armar algo con movimiento: un hipertexto con animación y música de Liszt o, quizás música de cámara” (51–52). [Perhaps it would be good to include movement: a hypertext with animation and music by Liszt, or maybe Chamber music.]

Through the inclusion of the sound effects and specifically classical music, Martín subtly shifts the audience’s thinking away from the brutality effected on the black enslaved subjects, to one of soothing entertainment but through a westernized framing of the world. So that the harshness of slavery is not memorialized through the exhibition but rather, the lack of sensitivity clearly shows the reader the ways in which white, European privilege continues to dehumanize blacks till today. Contradictorily, Santos Febres’ most interesting bid to positively reconstitute the image of enslaved Africans occurs when Martín, in seeking to find some images of the enslaved, is told by Fe that these were few and occurred either in the event of a necessary sale, or when a crime had been committed, or in a few pornographic photos. Despite Fe’s comments, Martín repeatedly reflects aloud on what the women would have looked like. It is only with Fe’s cryptic response indicating that the enslaved women would have looked exactly like her, that Martín connects the past and the present. According to Joy De Gruy (2017) it is at this point that the cognitive dissonance that is associated with slavery comes to the fore as Martín regains a sense of humanity. He says:

Me quedé mirando a Fe, en silencio. Curiosamente, nunca antes me había detenido a pensar que sus esclavas se le parecieran. Que ella, presente y ante mí, tuviera la misma tez, el mismo cuerpo que una esclava agredida hace más de doscientos años. Que el objeto de su estudio estuviera tan cerca de su piel. (53)

[I remained looking at Fe, in silence. Curiously, I had never before stopped to think that her slaves would have resembled her. That she, present before me, would have had the same skin, the same body as an abused slave over two hundred years ago. That the object of her research would have been so close to her skin.]

In these few words, Martín acknowledges that as a white man, he experiences the world in a very different manner to Fe, a black woman. His life experience has separated him from her. He would not have had to strive for acceptance as did Fe at the convent that she attended. His whiteness would have assured him full inclusion at school while earning him a certain privilege.

Clearly the novel’s main thrust is the comprehensive documentation of the experiences of the enslaved blacks (particularly women and children) across Latin America and the Caribbean. This seems to contrast ironically with Santos Febres’ choice of digitizing the records. In the twenty-first century, digital records most definitely suggest permanence yet this notion is at odds with the records of enslavement and the trade which have been destroyed, lost, or were never properly recorded. Santos Febres underscores the idea that it is impossible to comprehensively, faithfully, and/or truthfully re-create the experience of the enslaved. In critically thinking about issues surrounding the abuse of enslaved women, Santos Febres is forced to re-create history given the lacuna of information which she (much like Fe, the character) finds when researching the black experience of the era. Interestingly, throughout the novel she seeks to correct ideas and long-held, false assumptions of the past and of these enslaved black women by constantly playing with notions of past and present realities. As Patricia Valladares-Ruiz points out:

En la novela de Santos-Febres el acto liberador no ocurre en el espacio colonial—como consecuencia de la abolición—, sino en el presente, como resultado de la reinterpretación de las relaciones de poder definidas por el sistema de jerarquías raciales. (Valladares-Ruiz 2016, 599)

[In Santos Febres’ novel, the liberating act does not occur in the colonial space—as a result of abolition—, but rather in the present, as a result of the reinterpreting of the relations of power defined by the system of racial hierarchies.]

In her seminal study Common Threads: Themes in Afro-Hispanic Women’s Literature, Clementina R. Adams (1998) suggests: “What is important in labeling a writer Afro-Hispanic is the degree to which she finds the African roots and their influence to be an important part of her humanity” (21). The manifestation of this humanism is evident in Fe en disfraz. From the start, Fe Verdejo’s fortuitous encounter with Martín Tirado and similarly her chance finding of the historical documents relating to the enslaved empowers her as an historical agent and presents the reader with a more humanistic view of the liberation of Afro-Puerto Ricans. Santos Febres does not suggest that this is unique to Puerto Rico. But as a black woman, and given the paucity of information in terms of documented historical records, she sets about making these enslaved women more real to the reader through Fe’s eyes. And through her narrative, Santos Febres ensures that the reader grasps the vast importance of Fe’s project specifically to black people in the Hispanic Caribbean in the twenty-first century. The project at the museum brings a deep level of consciousness to their humanity. In this, Santos Febres seems to concur with other Caribbean thinkers, for example Hall (1999), who speaks of the self that is constructed by narratives (16). Erna Brodber (2003) also distinctively presents the case of Jamaica where she argues that slaves were “denied their humanity and this unto perpetuity” (13) but that this wrong can be made right through re-representations and interrogations of the myths of slavery which currently exist.

There can be no doubt that her own identity markers as black and female influence Santos Febres’ presentation of the positive recuperation and reconstruction of black identity among the women who populate the story, chief among them Fe Verdejo. It is through her character that Santos Febres presents the black female bodyscape. From the inception of the tale, Fe is performing identity. It is the 31st October and Halloween marks the remembrances of the dead, a liminal time when pagans felt that the souls of the dead revisited the earth. Santos Febres uses this notion of pagan ritual to demonstrate identity as performative. Specifically, she describes the moments of performance as comparative with resistance and she further captures the ways in which Fe’s black female body is consumed. Martín, Fe’s white lover, must carry out the acts of cleansing, as mandated by Fe, before his trysts with her. She demands it. Martín’s rituals are described in minute detail and in a way, they challenge the notion of the patriarchy as he is in fact performing for Fe in a strange reversal of patriarchal and colonial logic. That is, as Radost A. Rangelova (2012) signals, Fe “fashions her relationship with Martín to invert, physically and symbolically, the gender and racial hierarchies of power revealed through slave narratives. In this way, she becomes a model of black feminine agency” (154). Sex is realized throughout the novel as an extraordinary primal force. Santos Febres uses carnal desire in an attempt to articulate an historical vision of the erotic and at the same time effect a significant liberation. Martín says:

Alcanzo la navaja toledana, la que me regaló Fe durante aquel distante viaje. La acerco a mi pubis. Afeito primero las comisuras de la ingle; después, sobre el monte enmarañado que la cubre. Paso a librar de vellos la base, halo para estirar la piel aún más. Boca de Fe llegando hasta esa piel doblemente desnuda, sensible por el roce de la navaja. (15)

[I reach for the Toledo knife, the one that Faith gave me during that distant trip. I bring it closer to my pubis. I shave the corners of my groin first; later, the tangled mound that covers it. I move on to rid the base of hair, I pull down to stretch the skin even more. Fe’s mouth reaching that doubly naked skin, sensitive from the brush of the knife.]

The eroticism in Santos Febres’ novel affirms Martín as the object of desire and endows Fe at all times with dominance and at the same time a level of dignity. This is significant as Fe, a contemporary, black woman is finally able to recuperate some worth. Through the symbolism of the title as well as its theme, Fe en disfraz plays with the reader’s understanding of the idea of the purity of love and that of the erotic. Santos Febres uses an almost gothic element to describe the relationship between Fe and Martín. She discards any sense of abstractness normally related to love conventions in the European tradition and presents the total carnality of the human experience of love. Fe is all woman and is always presented in the context of the materiality of a real woman. In a twisting of history, Fe is always fiercely empowered. As Figueroa cogently argues:

For sexuality in the novel is not merely a metaphor or symbol for something else that needs to be brought up to the light. Sexuality and other affects are themselves, in Deleuzian fashion and by virtue of their being forms of desire, vehicles in the struggle for liberation, and spheres that need to be liberated in their own right. (Figueroa 2017, 59)

In a sense this highlights again Brodber’s questioning of the impact of the relationship. Fe is central to the liberation process because unlike enslaved women such as Diamantina (described in chapter III) or even free blacks such as Xica, she holds power. As a result of her performances in the sex acts with Martín, Fe is not seeking integration to his group. Rather, Fe’s use of Martín’s body is an effort to undo past trauma. At the psychic level, she remains grounded in her blackness as much as in her sexuality. Fe does more than simply show resistance to patriarchal structures of oppression. From childhood she is acutely aware of her role as a black woman. She chooses education as her route to success and a sure way out of the constraints of the past. She was not going to repeat the errors of her mother with an early pregnancy. Through her choice of education, Fe alters her historical path out of poverty and into success. Fe’s body represents the past history of her African ancestry while at the same time her intellect stands for the future. Although it is Martín who narrates, we see clearly that Fe is the mind behind the exhibition who will rewrite the historical, colonial representation of black enslaved women in much the same way that Santos Febres has chosen to rewrite this history. At the same time, as we have previously indicated, by demanding certain role play of Martín in terms of their relationship and especially his submission during the sex act, Fe is able to shed the domination enacted on black bodies for centuries.

As with time, the notion of personal identity also becomes tremendously blurred in the novel as Fe comes to represent all black women. While in Chicago, she prepares for the exhibition about enslaved women, she notes the abuses inflicted on them. They are beaten, violently assaulted, raped, and their psychological damage ranging from loneliness to psychotic trauma is documented. This documentation occurs through the artifacts found of the enslaved women themselves which are central to an understanding of the historical relevance of the stories especially as Fe is unable to find pictorial evidence. Notably, Santos Febres appears to point out that the Anglophone Caribbean seems to have extremely well-documented historical testimonies, unlike the absence in the Hispanic Caribbean. Martín reveals:

En inglés, existen miles de declaraciones de esclavos que dan su testimonio en contra de la esclavitud. Mujeres educadas que formaban parte de sociedades abolicionistas les enseñaban a leer y a escribir, recogían sus palabras y, luego, financiaban la publicación de esos testimonios para que el público conociera los terrores de la trata. Oludah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, Frederich Douglass, esclavos con nombres y apellidos, contaron el infierno de sus vidas bajo el yugo de la esclavitud. En español, por el contrario, fuera de las memorias del cubano Juan Manzano o del testimonio Cimarrón de Miguel Barnet, no existe ninguna narrativa de esclavos; menos aún, de esclavas. (22–23)

[In English, there are thousands of statements by slaves giving their testimony against slavery. Educated women who were part of abolitionist societies taught them to read and write, collected their words, and then financed the publication of those testimonies so that the public knew the terrors of trafficking. Oludah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, Mary Prince, Frederich Douglass, slaves with first and last names, told of the hell of their lives under the yoke of slavery. In Spanish, on the contrary, apart from the memoirs of the Cuban Juan Manzano or the Cimarrón testimonio of Miguel Barnet, there is no narrative of slaves; even less so, of slave women.]

In this, Martín signals a time and a place where slaves had names and surnames, that is to say, their own identities. Paradoxically, their personal situations are no less difficult but the suggestion is that there was a spirit of resistance among the enslaved in the English Caribbean and the US that was not to be found in the Spanish Caribbean. This notion tallies with the idea commonly found in Puerto Rico that the institution of slavery in the Hispanic Caribbean was somehow more benign than that experienced in territories of other colonial powers.

Intriguingly, the collection that Fe finds carries no title. This also centers the idea of naming, or lack thereof and forces the reader to consider history’s inability to ever fully represent the vicissitudes of enslavement. Nevertheless, Fe and Martín’s ability to create the exhibition and website presents a way in which to share enslaved experiences despite the weight of historical erasure. Santos Febres not only documents the treatment and suffering of these enslaved persons but she is able to force the reader to actively engage in the lives of these persons in a more powerful manner than the reader of a testimony such as the very descriptive Biografía de un cimarrón (1993) by Miguel Barnet. And even though one might contest the accuracy of the account, the images evoked present a clear picture of the brutality, the violence, and the trauma in the lives of the black enslaved women but perhaps more importantly, Fe documents the very existence of these women, many of whom were erased from historical records. Thus, she manages to fill the gaps left by the Eurocentric, openly racist historiography which abound in the New World.

In historical scholarship, there is a tendency to essentialize the enslaved African. She/he is seen either as victim or as rebel. This type of categorization does not capture the experiences or indeed the at-times difficult choices that enslaved people have been forced to make. Santos Febres centers on the effects of exploitation of the black female body. Indeed, the erotic description of the torrid relationship between the two characters of Martín and Fe presents almost phantasmatic accounts of bodily being. Martín describes: “Tirados en el suelo, yo le curaba con mi lengua un rasguño en el hombro. La sangre de Fe sabía a minerales derretidos. Acabábamos de hacer el amor” (24). [Lying on the ground, I would cure a scratch on her shoulder with my tongue. Fe’s blood tasted of melted minerals. We had just made love.] Here Martín’s power and domination as a white male are shed as he becomes a part of the healing process. Martín’s desire for Fe and Santos Febres’ emphasis on the various body parts both serve to emphasize the past injustices which endure to today. They echo the idea of the body and blood of remembrance of Christ’s suffering which of course constantly reaffirm our very existence, that is, the present:

Los ancestros son la duplicidad y la contradicción. Los ancestros (y el acopio de sus saberes) son lo que nos fija en el tiempo. Esas largas genealogías de muertos intentan trazar una línea que, atravesando una masa informe de cuerpos, se desplaza por el espacio infinito. Eso es la Historia, una tenue línea que va uniendo en el aire a los ancestros —a esos pobres animales sacrificados en la pira del tiempo—. (92)

[The ancestors are duplicity and contradiction. The ancestors (and the sum of their knowledge) are what fixes us in time. These long genealogies of the dead try to draw a line that, crossing a shapeless mass of bodies, travels through infinite space. That is History, a thin line that unites the ancestors in the air—those poor animals sacrificed on the pyre of time—.]

Santos Febres repeatedly appears to be more concerned with characterizing the experiences of the many Afro-Hispanic women throughout history to contemporary times. The female subjects in the short vignettes in the novel reveal thoughts, accusations of sexual abuse, and actions carried out by enslaved women (in some cases young girls), against their masters. Throughout the novel, Santos Febres describes their lives, situations of abuse, and also the female psyche and the reader comes to understand the ways in which there were attempted erasures of black female identity. Fe comes to symbolize all black enslaved Caribbean women and this novel is more a testimony to that strength. The novel moves from the traditional depiction of the slave/master paradigm to the broader contemporary focus which includes the perspectives of the enslaved female characters. Thus, the text alludes to the ironic fact that black enslaved women and young girls who did not enjoy any official state rights were astute enough to be aware of the ways in which the system worked or could be manipulated to their advantage or usefulness of purpose. For example, one of the documents which Fe found recounts the story of Ana María (chapter VIII), a 12-year-old slave girl who goes to court seeking the state’s protection as she denounces her master’s nephew don Manuel Joseph García. The young girl testifies:

“García me dio un pescozón por el rezongo que traía. Por este motivo, le contesté que les pegase a sus criados y a sus esclavos, pero que yo no era su esclava. García me volvió a golpear, pero esta vez, tomó un zapato de mujer y, con el tacón me dio muchos golpes en la cabeza y me hirió en varias partes, mientras mi ama, doña Manuela, miraba y se reía”, aseguró la niña. (49)

[“Garcia gave me a hard slap because of the annoyance that he felt. For this reason, I replied that he beat his servants and his slaves, but that I was not his slave. García hit me again, but this time, he took a woman’s shoe and, with the heel, he gave me many blows on the head and wounded me in several places, while my mistress, doña Manuela, looked on and laughed”, said the child.]

Young women and girls would go to the tribunals or the master in attempted spaces of negotiation. But this close up, still-frame-like, graphic description presented by Santos Febres of the beating of the child ties in with her intention to point out to the reader the ways in which black female bodies were defiled, framed as unworthy of care, and violently mistreated. Reading through the description, one almost forgets that this is a child until Santos Febres’ reiteration at the end “aseguró la niña.” In addition, by naming the women, Santos Febres humanizes them by allowing us to hear specific voices. The details of their abuses clearly provide us with a record, albeit a fictional one, where previously no such details existed in official documents. In scripting their stories, Santos Febres underscores the idea of the black female bodyscape, a site of inscription of historical violence. In this intimate and subjective space, Santos Febres describes the pain, mistreatment, the wounds, and scars of these women: a trajectory over generations. She also presents their will, ambition, and the strength of their love and desire in their interactions when negotiating the power relations of the societies in which they lived. Although Brodber is more scathing in her analysis, indicating clearly that “double loyalty” (2003, 28) ensues from the white master-black enslaved woman relationship and that the resulting confusion would be debilitating for the enslaved blacks, Santos Febres sees more optimism in the course of time. By the end of the novel, when Fe’s dress is in Martín’s hands, we realize the potentiality of the mask. Martín now comes to represent love across all ages. His hands rewrite the historic wrongs to Fe, to Xica, and indeed to all women of color. Through the relationship, Fe is reconciled to her history. By the end of the novel, Fe is reborn in Martín’s healing hands:

En la memoria de mi dueña, sonarán latigazos y carimbos. Se desvanecerán cicatrices y humillaciones. Entonces, Fe, liberada, entenderá y se abrirá para mí. Ella misma lo ha querido. Me lo ha pedido todo este tiempo “Rompe el traje, desgárralo, sácame de aquí.” (114–115)

[In the memory of my owner [Fe], lashes and carimbos will sound. Scars and humiliations will fade. Then Faith, freed, will understand and open up for me. She herself wanted it. She constantly asks me to “Rip the dress, tear it apart, get me out.”]

In the dress, Fe’s skin is perforated and pierced. Wracked by the pain of the past, she knows that she must destroy the dress if she is to extirpate the past pain and the trauma that she continues to mentally experience as a result of her blackness. Martín here and now becomes representative of a Puerto Rico that saves her, that recuperates her story. Fe now understands that her socio-psychological peace lies in remembering and in accepting her blackness. The novel ends: “Abandonarse es, a veces, la única manera de comenzar” (115) [Giving in, is sometimes the only way to begin].

Deeply rooted in this story, as with memory, is Santos Febres’ insistent agenda to rewrite history. The past she tells the reader is not that far away from the present and perhaps even from the future. Through the theme of enslavement, she systematically rewrites in a profoundly eroticized manner the history which has traveled through time to confront the contemporary negotiation of male-female desire and identity and which finds roots in the intersection between an imaginary and imagined past and an opaque present. Santos Febres was forced to re-create this memory of enslavement given the absence discovered when she sought to research these black women. The novel ends before the opening of the exhibition. But by the end and through the note to the reader by the author, we come to realize that, much like Fe has sought to honor the memory of the enslaved African women, so too Santos Febres through the novel seeks to rewrite the lives of these women in the Hispanic Caribbean and to write them into history. She makes a significant and commanding representation of the black female subject. Weighed down by colonization, racialization, labor exploitation, as well as gender and sexual regulation, Santos Febres voices the black enslaved women’s right to social transformation. What appears most fascinating is that her assertions in this novel open the way to social development at both the psychic and corporeal levels. It is about Puerto Rican society being able to afford dignity to all of its members. That is to say, not just the dignity of body for blacks and whites alike but also the internalization of dignity among blacks themselves. The brevity of the novel also signals the author’s continued grappling with the burden of this history. Through the brief text, she forces the reader to confront, to know our past in all of its fullness; the trauma of violence, shared silence, suffering, and bodily harm.

For Santos Febres, taking on issues such as race, gender, and sexuality is an intellectual obligation for black women. As Victor Figueroa concludes, Santos Febres manages to “re-territorialize spaces, practices and affects colonized by power” (Figueroa 2017, 67). Through the use of alternative archives, Santos Febres presents the paradox of enslavement and forces us to understand its consequences on the black lives affected. Additionally, she aids with aspects of generational healing as she presents the reader with hope for a future of resilience and self-affirmation. Thus, to return to the Brodber quotation earlier cited, true liberation comes when, like Martín, the reader acknowledges his/her own uncomfortable desires and the role that they play in the liberation process. In Fe en disfraz, Santos Febres re-engineers the records found on the lives of black enslaved women so as to comprehensively describe the nature of their enslavement, and to ensure that in present-day Puerto Rico and across the Caribbean, we understand the notion of transgenerational trauma while necessarily raising our level of black consciousness.