Abstract
Quince Duncan is a third-generation Afro-Costa Rican of West Indian heritage and he is the first novelist of African descent to tell the story of Jamaican migration to Costa Rica. This translation brings two of his major novels to English-speaking audiences for the first time, Weathered Men and The Four Mirrors. Both of these “novels of identity” dismantle the myth that to be Costa Rican means being white, of European descent, Spanish-speaking, and Catholic. These novels also bring to the forefront greater awareness of the contradictions and idiosyncrasies of exclusionary notions of national belonging when it comes to blackness, Costa Rican history, and democracy. The translation captures experiences of characters who are West Indian English and Creole speakers from a text written in Spanish into English.
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Notes
- 1.
“DACA has shielded nearly 790,000 young unauthorized immigrants from deportation,” Pew Research Center, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/01/unauthorized-immigrants-covered-by-daca-face-uncertain-future/.
- 2.
“There’s no such thing as a pure Costa Rican,” Tico Times, http://www.ticotimes.net/Immigrationcr/.
- 3.
Mosby, “Novels of identity: Hombres curtidos and Los cuatro espejos,” Quince Duncan: Writing Afro-Costa Rican and Caribbean Identity (2014): 50–103.
- 4.
Personal interview with the author. For a more detailed explanation, see ibid., 5–6.
- 5.
The Guanacaste province is located in the northwest of Costa Rica and borders Nicaragua. During the colonial period, this region used enslaved African labor primarily in cattle production. Mestizo means “racially-mixed,” generally Spanish and indigenous. Cholo is sometimes used to describe people from rural areas with darker skin. It is typically seen as a pejorative term because it is also used to describe individuals or groups as “backward” or “uncultured”.
- 6.
Marcus M. Garvey (1887–1940) was an important Jamaican visionary. His sojourn in Costa Rica (1911–1912) was brief but impactful. His denouncement of working conditions in a self-published tabloid lead to the termination of his employment as a timekeeper for United Fruit and eventually his expulsion from Costa Rica. However, Garvey’s experience in Costa Rica provided significant fodder for the founding of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in 1914. The organization amassed a following in the USA, England, Canada, Jamaica, Cuba, and Central America.
- 7.
Quince Duncan, “El afrorealismo: Una dimension nueva de la literatura latinoamericana,” Istmo (January–June), http://istmo.denison.edu/n10/articulos/afrorealismo.html.
- 8.
DuBois, The souls of black folk (New York: Pocket Books, [1903]/2005), 7.
- 9.
Jerome Branche, Colonialism and race in Luso-Hispanic literature (2006), 2.
- 10.
Ibid.
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Mosby, D. (2018). Introduction. In: Quince Duncan's Weathered Men and The Four Mirrors. Afro-Latin@ Diasporas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97535-1_1
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