Keywords

Antonia, the protagonist of Julia Alvarez’s Afterlife (2020), incessantly ponders not the meaning of life, but instead of afterlife. Afterlife for the recently widowed protagonist necessitates an understanding that prioritizes affection and empathy as opposed to action. Yet, in its own way, the novel represents a call to action, with a keen focus on current events and an open commentary on political and social realities both on the island of Hispaniola and in the United States. Further, Alvarez’s recent novel centers and decenters global sites of sovereignty and offers various interpretations of Dominican American women—Antonia and her sisters—and Mexican migrant workers—Mario and Estela—as “in transit.” While this chapter touches on how an understanding of in transit in Afterlife connects to the same term that serves as the crux to the 2013 Tribunal Court sentence in the Dominican Republic (also known as TC-0168 or la sentencia), the pages to follow also suggest that one can read the novel as a diasporic reflection on global, recurring themes of citizenship and statelessness. In this way, Afterlife offers readers a subtle commentary on how characters appear or are positioned as not always physically in motion or in transit, but as displaced—be it physically or metaphorically—or trying to place themselves. These disjointed relations to space allow a nuanced understanding of belonging, of sovereignty, and of what it means to be in transit.

This chapter asks how contemporary writers like Alvarez—on both sides of the island and from Hispaniola’s diasporic reaches—harness diverse genres of literature to offer calls to action and declarations of solidarity, thus offering new ways to both understand and complicate global notions of sovereignty. I consider Afterlife to explore how writers from Hispaniola’s diasporic communities can engage with an intra-island dialogue with respect to guiding concepts such as Sandra Pouchet Paquet’s notion of nomadic subjectivity and Katherine Zien’s articulation of acts of sovereignty within a Caribbean context. In transit narrative frames a recent interest in a transnational Hispaniola literary tradition—to quote the “intellectual project” as categorized by Kiran C. Jayaram’s and April J. Mayes’ anthology Transnational Hispaniola (2018, 2)—and connects this interest to the desnacionalización or denationalization of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent. Antonia daydreams about writing a novel centered on the “invisible people we don’t even know about” (Alvarez 2020, 33)—the same people that nonetheless keep our world going—and Alvarez’s Afterlife, via its questioning of sovereignty on a global scale, suggests that “in transit” individuals are often those most rendered invisible. This chapter positions Afterlife as a novel that allows for a radical remapping of the term “in transit” as I do not only understand it from a Dominican national context, but also a literary one.

I label literary texts as in transit to accentuate how they move through time, and, relatedly, to highlight an emphasis on space and nation. My interest in the term in transit stems from its purposeful use in the 2013 Tribunal Court ruling, but the contextualization of in transit as understood in Afterlife interprets the term more broadly. My attempt is to approach in transit in various ways to contextualize its presence in literature.1 Reconoci.do’s campaign of vidas suspendidas is one example that can be understood alongside a definition of in transit; the campaign surfaced as an initial response to the Effects of Resolution 12 on Dominicans of Haitian descent,2 an earlier 2007 decision of the Dominican Republic’s Central Electoral Board to restrict Dominicans’ access to official, governmental forms of identification. As Mayes (2018) notes, the campaign focuses on the Dominican cédula or identification card and how its politicized use often restricts access to education, marriage, banking, and other social services to Dominicans of Haitian descent (213). In many ways, the idea of a life being “suspended” resonates with a spatiotemporal understanding of the fluidity of in transit. The three elements of in transit narrative, as introduced herein, include: (1) a complex approach to space and geography and a scope that leans toward the transnational or intra-national; (2) a reflection, albeit subtle, on politics and, oftentimes, a consciousness with regard to the nomenclature of in transit (or, similarly, apátrida, desnacionalizado/a, etc.); and, (3) the presence of themes relating to (im)migration. Each of the three identified categories builds on the aforementioned work of scholars Pouchet Paquet (2010) and Zien (2017), largely for the ways they both offer conceptualizations of Caribbean space and time.

Dominican (American) Literature Beyond “la sombra de Trujillo”

Afterlife, marking Alvarez’s first adult novel in over a decade, weaves together three plotlines that each center on a unique crisis—be it personal, familial, or societal. The novel’s protagonist, Antonia Vega, is a retired English professor who just lost her husband, but her own introverted ways of dealing with the sudden death and loss of her partner are challenged when her sister disappears and, concurrently, a pregnant and undocumented teen arrives to rural Vermont in need of assistance. As a Dominican immigrant, Antonia confronted and challenged notions of belonging as an “Other” in a small, rural town in Vermont—in which she had given up “trying to explain the colonial intricacies of her ethnicity” (Alvarez 2020, 13)—long before she began navigating her new status as widow. My analysis of the novel approaches both belonging and nationalism from the perspective of this female protagonist and outlines a classification for literary texts deemed “in transit narratives.”

In addition to a close reading of the novel, Alvarez’s activism—both inside and outside of the literary realm—proves helpful to consider. In 2013, shortly after enforcement of TC-0168 began, Alvarez penned a letter to the Editor of the New York Times alongside Junot Díaz, Edwidge Danticat, and Mark Kurlansky. In the brief letter the writers classify the ruling as institutionalized racism and proclaim: “For any who thought that there was a new Dominican Republic, a modern state leaving behind the abuse and racism of the past, the highest court in the country has taken a huge step backward with Ruling 0168-13” (Kurlansky et al. 2013, n.p.). Beyond uniting her voice with other writers of Hispaniola’s diaspora to denounce TC-0168, Alvarez is also a founding member of Border of Lights, a volunteer collective committed to remembering victims of the 1937 Massacre while also highlighting the solidarity that exists among Haitian and Dominican border communities.3 While critics highlight how Alvarez’s narratives incessantly return to her patria—one of many Caribbean diasporic writers considered “dialoguers with the reality and memory of their homelands” (Oboler 1996, 308)—it is also true that her perspective is often female-centered. Tegan Zimmerman confirms that Alvarez’s “quest” in In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), for example, is to “provide a feminist polyphonic alternative to the patriarchal master narrative of the nation and recuperate the lives of the Mirabal sisters” (Zimmerman 2020, 96).

Further, Alvarez’s historically rooted novels, including In the Time of the Butterflies and In the Name of Salomé, often fall in line with the multitudinous twentieth-century Dominican and Dominican American texts that speak to “la sombra” or the shadow of Trujillo, an image that Neil Larsen (1988) notes “refuses to disappear” (123, all translations mine). Given the masculine pulse of the Trujillo regime—a pattern analyzed by Maja Horn in Masculinity After Trujillo—these female-centered texts that offer counter-narratives of twentieth-century Hispaniola are critical to arriving at a more complex and nuanced understanding of the 1937 Massacre and the Trujillo Regime. Horn highlights the “centrality of gender notions in structuring Dominican political, public, and private imaginaries” and contextualizes such gendered discourses in the literary realm (Horn 2014, 9). Other recent Dominican American novels—of Angie Cruz, Elizabeth Acevedo, and Nelly Rosario, for example—also center the female diasporic experience, a pattern that Afterlife follows. Does Alvarez’s recent novel, then, mark a new type of novel for the author? Does an exploration of afterlife render a new reckoning with post-life or with a spatiotemporal reality that is disjointed from the earthbound experience? With regards to notions of time in particular, a discussion of afterlife urges readers to confront unknown futures and unmapped realities; the title alone frames the novel’s compartmentalization of the passing of time.

Considering the ways in which Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies in some ways decenters Haitian–Dominican relations or predates the current trend in Transnational Hispaniola Studies to reexamine interisland relations, Afterlife not only acutely tackles themes related to anti-Haitianism, but goes a step further to confront social and political injustices on a global scale. Alvarez, for example, addresses the criticism of her bestseller In the Time of the Butterflies and defends her historical ex/in-clusions: “I’ve been taken to task sometimes because the novel did not address the massacre and the Mirabal sisters were alive then. ‘Why didn’t you say more about the Haitian Massacre?’ It’s important to remember that I was writing from the point of view of particular characters. None of my research into their lives yielded an awareness or response to what happened. I can’t colonize my characters and plant in their heads and sensibilities what isn’t there—especially for historical characters” (Myers 2021, 450). In the Name of Salomé, another example of Alvarez’s historical fiction, comments on Dominican poet and educator Salomé Ureña’s heritage. The novel includes “several moments when the fictional Ureña experiences her non-whiteness vis-à-vis the white-presenting elite that surround her” (Ramírez 2015, 53). As related to the massacre in particular, these two historical narratives differ from Haitian American Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones or René Philoctète’s Massacre River, that both detail the 1937 Massacre and Dominican–Haitian relations during the Trujillo Era.4

On the whole, when compared to trujillista narratives, literature related to the 2013 Tribunal Court ruling in the Dominican Republic is much less developed. Unlike the vast analyses that explore what has been deemed by some scholars “Trujillo narrative,” literature that responds in both overt and subtle ways to the 2013 sentence is diverse and interdisciplinary, but not as recognized or critically acclaimed as the vast body of Dominican texts that examines what scholar Rita De Maeseneer (2006) refers to as “la brega con el pasado” (23).5 Furthermore, the works that are in dialogue with the 2013 sentence and respond to the ongoing institutionalized racism and oppression against Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic represent a variety of genres and media forms. Examples include the collection of testimonies Nos Cambió la Vida6 and two recent documentaries Hasta la Raíz (Down to the Root, 2017) and Apátrida (Stateless, 2019). While these three examples center on Dominicans of Haitian descent living in the Dominican Republic, much of the public outcry and outward criticism in the wake of the sentence stemmed from the US diaspora, led by campaigns such as We Are All Dominican or the solidarity-building organization In Cultured Company.7 How do consciousness-raising, community-building initiatives, then, resonate in literature from Hispaniola’s diaspora? Building on Pouchet Paquet’s nomadic subjectivity and reflecting on (im)migration and nationalism understood via Rigney’s acts of sovereignty, the remainder of this essay critically examines a model of in transit narrative. Further, this chapter reads Alvarez’s Afterlife as reflective of such themes and as a new way to conceptualize interpretations of and conscious reconciliations with the meaning of in transit in literature.

TC-0168 of the Dominican Republic’s Constitutional Court uses this exact term, in transit, to deny Dominican nationality to Haitian migrants and their Dominican-born descendants. The ruling states, with regard to “in transit foreigners,” that such individuals are “not considered to be in an unlawful situation, but instead lack the right to a Dominican nationality” (Sentencia 2013). To clarify the use of this term, the 2013 ruling reverts back to—and reinterprets—the 1929 constitution that established the right of jus soli, or birthright citizenship. La sentencia considers Haitian workers as nonimmigrants who were granted only “temporary admission” into the country and thus classifies them as in transit. How, then, can we read “temporary admission” in Alvarez’s Afterlife? What other meaning can a term like in transit engender when moving beyond the term’s political classification? Or rather, how do the characters in Alvarez’s novel experience and move through space and time and understand the contested notion of belonging?

Afterlife as In Transit Narrative

The first classification of in transit narrative, related to an interest in geography and intranational spaces, builds on Pouchet Paquet’s understanding of Gilles Deleuze’s “nomadic subjectivity” (1973, 82) as well as on Edouard Glissant’s errantry as defined in Poetics of Relation to address and problematize how Caribbean diasporic writers might appear (im)mobilized within mobilized and constantly shifting spaces. My interest in a nomadic subjectivity of characters in narratives such as Afterlife considers the wanderlust of nomadic thought as a repeated element of Caribbean literature for the ways “that it highlights the networks of negotiation and association that characterize Caribbean consciousness as an ongoing and contradictory process” (Pouchet Paquet 2010, 68). The second category of in transit narrative is the most straightforward in the sense that it reflects a tangible interest on the authors’ part to infuse the often-cited political nomenclature surrounding la sentencia or similar examples of denationalization into their works. Zien articulates sovereignty by discussing the multiple players in the enactment of a sovereign act, building on the idea that sovereignty “functions as a norm of political life that, like any norm, requires continuous affirmation through rituals and theatricality in order to sustain its prescriptive force” (Zien 2017, 5). This definition is a useful jumping point as it helps to formulate, albeit from a Panamanian perspective, how individuals become in transit, stateless, or denationalized.

There are sometimes conflicting terms employed as synonyms of in transit and, relatedly, to describe TC-0168. Haitian Canadian novelist and scholar Myriam J.A. Chancy comments on “the variety of ways that language has done us a disservice in explicating the gravity of the situation” with regard to la sentencia and she confirms that:

Some reports have placed the accent on the fact that the ruling appears to designate all progeny of undocumented/“in transit” people, of various nationalities, when it is clear that the targeted population are primarily of Haitian descent. As the Dominican government touts its project of “naturalization” for those affected, eligibility criteria is, at best, murky. It isn’t just a question of whether or not a Dominican citizen is an offspring of undocumented or “in transit” Haitian laborers (“in transit” meaning that they may have legal working papers but not legal residency), it is also a question of whether or not the individual is seen as a desirable citizen of the State. The hallmark of desirability is thus to be measured in terms of middle-class status via education and occupation. The working poor need not apply. (2014, n.p.)

Thus, the Dominican government controls which individuals—based on race, economic status, occupation, and other factors—are “desirable” citizens. Alvarez, in Afterlife, offers her own perspective on desire and what or who is desirable—for a life goal, for a life partner, etc.—but, like desire in the way that Chancy uses it here to describe the underpinnings of la sentencia, the idea of desire in the novel also delves into a commentary on politics and undocumented workers in rural Vermont, the setting of Afterlife. The question that the protagonist, Antonia, herself an immigrant, repeats throughout the novel centers on who or what is most important; while she at first caves to the pleading recommendations of friends and family who stress the essentiality of self-care, her answer is that she is the most important one. Yet, the family tribulations involving her three sisters and a budding relationship with two young Mexican migrant workers shift her perspective toward the novel’s end. While Afterlife postulates that for some individuals in states like Vermont migrant workers are “undesirables,” for Alvarez these two young secondary characters become some of the people who matter most—a relationship that launches the novel not only into themes of migration and internal reflections of a Latina woman in a predominantly white small town, but also on geography and the complexities of place and politics in the United States.

Finally, the third distinction within the in transit narrative classification denotes themes of migration or immigration. In Afterlife, many of the primary characters are in transit, as understood in political-temporal terms or otherwise. Notably, in transit narratives do not necessarily reflect Haitian–Dominican dynamics or relationships (political, social, cultural, or otherwise), and Alvarez’s novel addresses migration from both the perspective of Antonia and that of the undocumented population in Vermont.

A Complex Approach to Geography and Space in Afterlife

The aforementioned compilation, Nos Cambió la Vida—organized by Reconoci.do and funded by Centro Bonó—begins with an introduction by Farah Hallal that outlines the ruling and contextualizes a multi-perspective approach to geography: “¿Qué hace que tu patria sea tu patria? Estas memorias dan descripciones exactas, no solo de una ubicación geográfica: también la geografía de la pobreza y de la violencia queda muy bien descrita” (Hallah 2018, 11). [What makes your homeland your homeland? These memories give precise descriptions, not only of a geographic location, but the geography of poverty and violence are also well-described herein]. These words introduce the testimonies of Dominicans of Haitian descent included in the collection and the portrayal of geography as connected to poverty, violence, and other social status markers, highlighting the complexity of diasporic space in narratives like Afterlife. Pouchet Paquet’s understanding of nomadic subjectivity in postcolonial discourse offers a concrete concept to better decipher the “implied open-endedness” of nomadic thought (Pouchet Paquet 2010, 66). Most helpful to the analysis herein is the scholar’s exploration of spatial mobility as key to nomadic thought, noting that nomadism “highlights the networks of negotiation and association that characterize Caribbean consciousness as an ongoing and contradictory process” and confirming that it necessitates and “inhabits multiple dimensions of time and space” (68).

Alvarez’s Afterlife is a negotiation of space on multiple levels; what first appears as the story of a widowed, Vermont-based English professor quickly shifts to a plot much more global in scope. This international focus does not solely resonate from Antonia’s musings about growing up in the Dominican Republic—noting, for example, that in primary school for her and her sisters “the only geography they were taught as children was of their half island” (Alvarez 2020, 85)—but it also appears as a sense of (immigrant) characters feeling immobilized within moving and changing spaces. The work is a constant reflection on modern society and politics—and how to come to terms with a world, or a country (whether one’s patria or not), that seems to be in an incessant state of suffering and violence. At one time Antonia asks, “The default for most of the world is not happiness. Why then do we feel aggrieved when suffering strikes us?” (171).

Coupled with Antonia’s inner thoughts, the protagonist’s three sisters serve to amplify calls for diversity and inclusion on a (inter)national scale. One sister, Izzy, once shared with her sisters her plans for a Latino arts center in Massachusetts and classified the project as “a way of importing diversity into that part of the state, a model to be copied throughout other white-bread areas of the country. Instead of migrant workers on a farm, a cultural takeover: migrant poets, dancers, and artists” (49–50). While Izzy and her sisters, who immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic, are not in transit in a political sense, such inclusions offer a clear depiction in Afterlife of “the shifting figurations embedded in exile, migration, travel, journey, flight, quest, itinerancy … and so on” (Pouchet Paquet 2010, 69). My insistence on utilizing Pouchet Paquet’s understanding of nomadism to discuss characters’ relation to geography in in transit narratives also builds on the notion of Deleuze that “The nomad is not necessarily one who moves” (Deleuze 1973, 149). While Deleuze offers a philosophical interpretation on nomad thought and what he later refers to as “Nomadology,” his understanding of the concept offers an alternative to an emphasis on set boundaries and he confirms that there is “a completely other distribution, which must be called nomadic, a nomad nomos, without property, enclosure or measure” that does not involve “a division of that which is distributed but rather a division among those who distribute themselves in an open space—a space which is unlimited, or at least without precise limits” (Deleuze 1968, 36). Afterlife functions without set boundaries and the characters challenge political understandings of borders. Estela questions why she won’t have the same rights as her son, born in the United States, and the novel continually questions and challenges the simple freedoms of movement through geographical spaces that are allotted to some, but not to others. Antonia meditates over the fact that she has freedoms Estela does not. For the protagonist, “[t]he cage door is open—Antonia could just fly away” (Alvarez 2020, 157).

Political Consciousness and Im(migration) in Afterlife

While a flexible definition of nomadism bolsters my delineation of the first element of in transit narratives, the second and third categories gesture toward a more politicized understanding of what it means to be in transit, stateless, denationalized, etc. While there is no concrete mention of TC-0168 or the large-scale, discriminatory consequences of la sentencia in Afterlife, there is a clear consciousness throughout the novel directed toward the complexity and waywardness of law enforcement in the United States and a repeated call for immigration reform. One useful way to understand the political underpinnings that might tie Afterlife to the subtle commentary on la sentencia stems from an understanding of sovereignty. Barbadian writer George Lamming, in an interview with David Scott, discusses nomadic consciousness and confirms: “[W]hatever location you have, the one thing I want to hold on to, is that acre of ground because you don’t decide that. That acre of ground is that Caribbean wherever I encounter it; it does not matter how I end myself in Asia, in Africa, or wherever.” Lamming stresses the importance of holding onto that space—a sense of permanency and (Caribbean) rootedness regardless of location—by stating: “[N]o limitation of sovereignty in the political sense can alter that, because that acre is also itself a component of the imagination” (Scott 2002, 162; qtd. in Pouchet Paquet 2010). Lamming’s conceptualization of sovereignty—and its possible limitations—offers an entrance into Zien’s delineation of sovereignty.

While Zien begins by framing what she refers to as “sovereign acts” within the backdrop of the representations of sovereignty in the Canal Zone during the US Occupation, a complexity of the systems of belonging in this context becomes apparent: “The Canal Zone’s vexed sovereignty status influenced which bodies were allowed into, and excluded from, the Zone, and how residents and employees created identities and social networks” (Zien 2017, 5). What pertains most to the analysis at hand is the fact that Zien confirms that the Canal Zone “performed” various styles of sovereignty (6), thus defining sovereignty as freedom from external control or autonomy. This framework can be applied to the plight of Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic and, moreover, an understanding of in transit narrative. Given Zien’s emphasis on the lack of clear frameworks of sovereignty and citizenship in the Panama Canal Zone8; this flexibility of the notion(s) of sovereignty emphasizes, in Zien’s words, how “Sovereignty’s mise-en-scène disparately enfolds spectators into the viewing practices of the (non)citizen subject and that which I am calling the subjunct—a status between citizen and noncitizen. The subjunct, a syntactical term, constitutes an interstitial zone between inclusion and exclusion” (16).9 Hispaniola is an island with dual sovereignty, and it is also an island for which global actors—in particular the US-based Haitian and Dominican diasporas—play an important role. In addition to these off-island communities, global entities like the United Nations and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights also have a role in dictating matters related to social justice and human rights, notwithstanding an individual’s nationality. Eugenio Matibag and Teresa Downing-Matibag (2011) note that in the Dominican Republic “Also among the global actors are the leaders of sender nations”—like Haiti—“who might question how a receiving country enacts its sovereignty when they perceive its leaders and people disrespecting the rights of its citizens-in-transit” (95). The Dominican Republic’s claims to sovereignty are not inclusive, instead the rights of those individuals deemed in transit are nebulous and fluctuating. As Matibag and Downing-Matibag proclaim, “the Dominican government has performed its sovereignty in a manner as unwieldy as a horse held by the reins of multiple masters (97).

In the case of political entities such as in the Dominican Republic, the underlying concept of legitimate sovereignty is open to contestation not only by citizens but also by these global actors who have an interest in intra-island relations. I argue, then, that in transit narratives written from the diaspora, like Alvarez’s Afterlife, serve as a contestation of sovereignty. They ask: Who is the ultimate authority? The police and local sheriff, for example, play a central role in Afterlife and Antonia is thrust into the job of alerting local migrant workers to the pending arrival of la migra (Alvarez 2020, 18, 49). The two parallel plot lines—one of Antonia’s missing sister and the other of young Mexican migrants Mario and Estela—both face encounters with law enforcement. While a local sheriff and, later, private detectives work to locate Antonia’s sister Izzy, the what-ifs with regard to Mario and Estela related to governmental authorities differ. If pregnant Estela were to arrive at the hospital without an accompaniment to deliver her baby, the hospital would be required to notify the Department of Children and Families (DCF) who would then “notify ICE about an underage undocumented minor, and the likelihood is Estela will be deported before another brown US citizen can be born” (165). The citizenship status of her child, to be born on American soil, is not lost on the seemingly innocent Estela, though. She asks Antonia: “Doñita, why can’t I live here, too? If my child is born here, he will have the right, and I, his mother, won’t?” (188).

Then, at the novel’s end, Antonia is en route to the airport in Boston with Estela, Mario, and their newborn when they get stopped by a sheriff on Route 7 in Vermont who asks for their documents. In this scene—as Estela whispers hail Mary’s from the backseat—there is a clear recognition of laws that need to be changed, a push toward reform. Antonia references Lula, a local Mexican migrant who operates a food truck and serves as a reference point for many migrants in the area, when she offers: “What she wants is the laws changed, Sheriff. She wants to keep cooking her enchiladas and selling them so she can build a house that will not tumble when the next hurricane hits Mexico” (250). The tropes of empowerment and belonging permeate Afterlife and citizenship becomes a constant meditation of the protagonist; as Zien affirms, “Citizenship, after all, is tenuous and gauzy even when legally conferred, capable of being overridden by distinctions like ‘terrorist,’ ‘criminal,’ ‘ex-convict,’ and ‘enemy combatant.’ The permeability of citizenship, and its potential for rupture by a sovereign decision, force us to acknowledge not only the fluidity of the borders between citizen and noncitizen, but also the existence of other statuses beside and within citizenship” (Zien 2017, 16).

Further, it is important to reach a broad conceptualization in Afterlife of how the characters themselves can be understood as in transit and the different ways that this nomenclature can be interpreted within in transit narratives. Antonia and her three sisters—and not just Estela and Mario—are clearly depicted as immigrants. Antonia’s “broken English” (Alvarez 2020, 11), constant code-switching, and struggles with identifying as Dominican American in the United States—often mistaken in Vermont for Mexican or Spanish (13, 176)—permeate the novel in its entirety.10 One of the reasons Afterlife serves as an interesting model of in transit diasporic narrative is because in transit can relate to more than just Alvarez’s conscious decision to include a plot detailing undocumented migrant workers. In transit can also be viewed in Afterlife from a multigenerational perspective, as a possible framework to harness an understanding of life stages that would not have been perceptible for narrators of Alvarez’s earlier novels such as How the García Girls Lost Their Accents or ¡Yo!. Antonia, retired and recently widowed—who still feels the hyphenation of immigration—grieves her old life and the company of her partner; Antonia materializes as a character in transit given that she attempts to find herself while seeking to find her voice. In a similar sense, to reference the Reconoci.do campaign vidas suspendidas, if an individual’s life is suspended or halted due to discriminatory, race-based national policies, what, then, becomes of your “afterlife?” Can an afterlife, in this case, be interpreted as the phase after this transitory status? As proof that she also meditates on the meaning of an afterlife, Antonia offers her own response: “What, if anything, does it mean? An afterlife? All she has come up with is that the only way not to let the people she loves die forever is to embody what she loved about them” (Alvarez 2020, 115).

From the Diaspora, with Love: Centering Global Sites of Sovereignty

Afterlife classifies as a female-led narrative in which Alvarez writes women in transit and models gendered constructions of nation and citizenship in Hispaniola and its growing diaspora. Harnessing the focus on gendered constructions of mobility and nationalism offers an in-depth consideration of the Caribbean tropes of femininity that travel to and in diasporic spaces; Alvarez gives space to female voices to enable or inhibit “sovereign acts” and offers a unique and diverse female-led depiction of Hispaniola’s female in transit subjects. To return to Zien’s sovereign act, it is worthwhile to note that an “act” in itself denotes a conscious decision to react or perform. Does Alvarez do the same? In writing Afterlife with conscious nods to themes of belonging, nationalism, and geography, Alvarez acts upon her own reaction to TC-0168 and ushers in a new era of transnational Hispaniola literature in which authors from both sides of the border write about similar themes from an activist-centered, politicized perspective. Afterlife moves from the past trend in Dominican literature dominated by historical narrative and la sombra of Trujillo to instead place transnational works, activist and anti-racist movements, and calls for solidarity in conversation with one another. Alvarez’s understanding of in transit in the novel speaks not only to individuals displaced in a political sense, but also to an understanding of the stages-of-life and how individuals move through time. The novel complicates a modern notion of one’s lifespan by confirming that lived experiences can alter the passing of time and an individual’s reflection on life and death. Caught in her own web of negotiations with and against time—longing for the past while rebuilding her future—Antonia finds her immigrant-self through her interactions with Mario and Estela and she reconciles her place among her Dominican sisters, too. The delineation of in transit narratives offered herein proffers a different model to think through authors’ responses to contemporary politics/realities—on- or off-island—and a new perspective on Hispaniola (and diaspora)-based literature that responds to TC-0168 (and its aftermath) in subtle ways, offering a radical remapping of the concept of “in transit.”

Notes

  1. 1.

    My decision to represent “in transit” without a hyphen, regardless of the grammatical need when using the expression as a qualifier to a substantive, stems from the use of the term as written in Spanish—“en tránsito”—and also for purposes of consistency with regards to “in transit narrative.”

  2. 2.

    Report can be found here: http://catunescopucmm.org/unesco_files/pdf/Vidas_Suspendidas.pdf

  3. 3.

    See borderoflights.org and The Border of Lights Reader: Bearing Witness to Genocide in the Dominican Republic (2021) for more information.

  4. 4.

    Danticat’s Everything Inside (2019) similarly explores (im)migration as a repeating trope in the collection of eight short stories and the Caribbean and its diaspora serve as the backdrop for the myriad of characters to whom readers are introduced. The stories, in particular “Seven Stories” and “Dosas,” offer various interpretations of Haitian and Haitian American women and relate to gendered constructions of nation and citizenship in Hispaniola and its growing diaspora.

  5. 5.

    For more on Trujillo narrative, see the work of Neil Larsen and Ana Gallego Cuiñas. Gallego Cuiñas (2006), offers multiple terms to identify the literary subgenre that falls within historical narrative responding to the Trujillo Era. She offers the following classifications: novela del trujillato, narrativa de Trujillo, narrativa trujillista, and narrativa trujilloniana (16).

  6. 6.

    For more on these testimonial essays and documentaries, see Mapping Hispaniola. Nos cambió la vida “shares the consequences of the denationalization of Dominicans of Haitian descent brought about by the Tribunal Court’s 2013 ruling. The various authors—from different geographic areas such as El Seibo, San Pedro de Macorís, Barahona, and Santo Domingo—not only reveal their personal experiences with race-based discrimination both before and after TC-0168, but also divulge histories of gender violence and bullying. This collection of testimonies is a traceable model of ‘in transit’ narrative given its clear focus on the political status—or lack thereof—of the Dominican-born Haitian youth” (Myers 2019, 121).

  7. 7.

    Find more information on both of these collectives at their respective websites https://wearealldominicannyc.wordpress.com/ and https://www.inculturedco.org/

  8. 8.

    Zien clarifies: “The subjunctive sovereignty set forth by the Panama Canal Treaty destabilized the treaty as a legal document and a performative utterance and marked the terrain of the Panama Canal Zone for decades to come. In lieu of clear frameworks of sovereignty and citizenship, performances materialized the Canal Zone as a shifting mise-en-scène, opening the Zone’s discursive and physical terrain to competing interpretations and claims by US and Panamanian governments, as well as assertions of belonging by local residents and labor migrants” (2017, 5).

  9. 9.

    See political theorist Wendy Brown’s definition of sovereignty in Walled States. (2010)

  10. 10.

    There is also constant code-switching in Afterlife. Words in Spanish appear un-italicized unlike in previous works of Alvarez. Here, she seamlessly switches between languages without translations: “No hay mal que por bien no venga, Mami would say” (2020, 77). Antonia also insists on her lack of confidence with her English: “The minute they touched ground in DR, a more self-assured self took over. But in English, even after years of education and employment, the worm of self-doubt still eats away at the core of her certainties” (2020, 109). Such characterizations are similar to how Alvarez depicts herself as the “gringa-dominicana” in In the Time of the Butterflies when referencing her limited Spanish skills in opening pages.