All Tentacle Lecture PDF

Rita Indiana Hernández Sánchez, b. 1977, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic  BRIEF HISTORY of the DOMINICAN REPUBLIC with and against HAITI … - Precolonial land of Taíno peoples (like Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other Caribbean, S. American areas) - Columbus lands in 1492 and names the island...

Rita Indiana Hernández Sánchez, b. 1977, in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic  BRIEF HISTORY of the DOMINICAN REPUBLIC with and against HAITI … - Precolonial land of Taíno peoples (like Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other Caribbean, S. American areas) - Columbus lands in 1492 and names the island “La Españiola,” latinized to Hispaniola - Site of first permanent European settlement in the Americas - Spanish Empire controls entire island from 1490s until 17th Century - British and French pirates begin establishing bases on Western side of the Island - Island divided in 1697, with Spain controlling East, France controlling West - France establishes lucrative plantation slavery economy, importing 10x as many enslaved Africans and amplifying the ethnic, cultural, and racial divisions between the two colonies - In the 1790s, massive uprisings among enslaved people in French St. Domingue led to Revolution, (intersecting the French Revolution); the French expelled, Republic/Empire of Hayti (Taíno name) established in 1804. - 1821, Spanish Santo Domingo wins “Ephemeral Independence” from Spain, founding of the “Independent Republic of Spanish Haiti” - 1822-1844 Annexed by Haiti - 1844, Independence from Haiti, founding of The Dominican Republic; launches 70 years of Civil War, failed invasion attempts by Haiti, brief return to Spanish colonial status, many short-lived governments - 1916-22 United States Occupation of Dominican Republic (trained future dictator, Trujillo) - 1930-1961 General Rafael Trujillo Dictatorship; notorious 1937 massacre of 10,000s of Haitians living near the border - 1966-78, 1986-1996 Joaquín Balaguer Dictatorship The doorbell at Esther Escudero’s house has been programmed to sound like a wave. Acilde, her maid, engaged in the day’s first tasks, listens while downstairs somebody at the door of the building pushes the button to its limit and unleashes the sound over and over, canceling out the beach-like effect of the bell. Bringing her thumb and index finger together, Acilde positions her What do we eye and activates the security camera that faces the street, where she sees one of the many already know Haitians who’ve crossed the border, fleeing from the quarantine declared on the other half of the about this island. world, the Recognizing the virus in the black man, the security mechanism in the tower releases a lethal 2027 D.R.? gas and simultaneously informs the neighbors, who will now avoid the building’s entrance until the automatic collectors patrolling the streets and avenues pick up the body and disintegrate it. Acilde waits until the man stops moving to disconnect and return to cleaning the windowpanes, Loading… encrusted on a daily basis with sticky soot. As she smears the windows with Windex, she sees a collector across the street hunt down another illegal, a woman who tries to hide behind a dumpster, unsuccessfully. The machine picks her up with its mechanized arm and deposits her in its main container with all the diligence of a gluttonous child picking up candy from the floor. A few blocks up, two other collectors work ceaselessly; from this distance Acilde cannot make out the men they’re chasing. The yellow machines look like bulldozers at a construction site. She touches her left wrist with her right thumb to activate the PriceSpy. The app tells her the brand and price of the robots in her field of vision. The brand is Zhengli, and there’s a translation, To clean up, which appears below, next to the news and images. China’s communist government donated the collectors ‘to help ease the terrible circumstances affecting the islands of the Caribbean after the March 19 disaster.”  Afro-Diasporic Religion in the Caribbean and in Tentacle Santeria / Regla de Ocha – arose in 19th Century Cuba, syncretizing West African Yoruba religion, Roman Catholicism, and modern Euro-American spiritualisms/spiritism Dominican Vudú / Las 21 Divisiones – draws on the Vodún practiced by Aye, Ewe, Fon peoples of W. Africa: “President Bona had declared the 21 Divisions, with its blend of African deities and Catholic saints, as the official religion.” Veneration of Orisha / Santos { initial coordination with Catholic saints as means of concealment during enslavement “Yemayá, the goddess of the sea, to whom Omincunlé [Esther] was Devoted” (19); water and fertility spirit, mother of all life and the orishas, owner of the oceans and seas; deity to whom the anemone altar is devoted Olokun, the Ocean “Master of the Unknown,” Parent of Ayé, “Lord of the Deep,” prosperity Divination/Oracle: Esther pays homage to the overarching Creator trinity (Olofin, Olodumare, Olorun), to specific ancestors, to those who initiated her, and to 15 orishas by name ESTHER: “Omidina named me [Esther] Omincunlé, after the cloak that covers the sea, because it was also prophesied that my followers would protect the house of Yemayá. Omidina, baba mi, it is a good thing you died and didn’t have to see this” (18) ERIC: Loading… “In the prophecy delivered at his initiation, it was revealed that he would be the one to find Olokun’s legitimate son, the one with the seven perfections, the Lord of the Deep. That’s why his godfather called him Omioloyu, the Eyes of Yemayá, convinced that one day this clever young boy would discover in the flesh the one who knew what lies at the bottom of the sea.” (50) Earlier gloss of Olokun as “Master of the Unknown” “[Esther] lifted her face and added the sign’s refrain: ‘Nobody knows what’s at the bottom of the ocean’” (19) “In the old woman’s collection, marine motifs predominate: fish, ships, sirens, and shells, Proximity to gifts from her clients, in-laws, and terminal patients for whom the powers of Esther POLITICAL Escudero are a last hope. According to the media, President Bona’s victory and POWER continued power via the presidency are the work of this gray-haired woman who shuffles along in her blue silk slippers into the kitchen and pours herself a cup of the coffee Acilde has prepared for her moments before.” (10) Esther was “ashamed of being so close to a regime the foreign press—still—did not dare call a dictatorship” (17) Parallel “For her boss, a black butterfly meant a dark death; a burnt-out bulb, Changó needing to COSMOLOGY, talk; a car alarm going off at the end of a prayer was a sign that her petition had been heard. SEMIOTICS Before she worked at Esther’s house, Acilde sucked dicks at El Mirador, without ever (system of signs) taking off her clothes …” (11) “Esther had brought her a blue bead necklace from Brasil: it was consecrated to Olokun, the oldest deity in the world, the sea itself. ‘Master of the unknown,’ Esther explained … Parallel meaning Wear it always because, even if you don’t believe, it will protect you. One day you are of “house”/ going to inherit my house. You won’t understand this now but, in time, you will.” (22) “inheritance” CONDYLACTIS GIGANTEA / Giant Carribean Sea Anemone “Esther had told her never to open the jar, that whoever looked inside without being initiated ACILDE’s into the sect would go blind, or some other crazy thing like that. But inside, perfectly skepticism, illuminated and oxygenated by a mechanism adapted to the jar, Acilde saw a live sea debunking anemone… That’s what the old lady was doing when she ‘attended’ to these saints: monitoring the salt levels in the tank where she kept an illegal and very valuable specimen alive. When Acilde tried to use the PriceSpy on the animal, it just loaded endlessly.” (20) “Eric got the message: Acilde was in Villa Mella, in deeper than the Titanic, she had the The anemone sea creature with her, and she would return it to him in exchange for Rainbow Brite.” as commodity for exchange … OR AS AGENT OF TRANSFORMATION: Their evangelical neighbors grew even more strident. The new Acilde, still dazed, asked Eric what he was doing when he saw him, with a sporadic pulse, writing symbols on the floors and walls. Startled with a sudden fervor, Eric brought the anemone out of the jar: Acilde was still strapped to the bed and asked for a mirror. Eric didn’t have time to explain and knelt by the head of the bed, the anemone’s tentacles pointing to Acilde’s shaved head. Acilde had a crown of moles, dark spots that made a circle all the way around his head. Eric had noticed it when the girl, now finally in the male form she so desired, had knelt before him to suck him off that night at the Mirador. Acting as a priest now, Eric began to pray in a sharp and nasal voice: ‘Iba Olokun fe mi lo’re …’ As he prayed, he joined the tentacles to the moles on “ ‘Olokun, here is your child, Eric Vitier, Omioloyu … Acilde’s head. A weak Acilde whimpered and cursed, paying homage and asking for a blessing.’ He got even unable to move. The tentacles stayed put, as though closer to the ear of this newborn man and used his last with Velcro … the marine creature’s smell … breath to let him know: “Esther knew what was going to transporting Eric back to Matanzas Bay … and a strong happen. I’m done for. We gave you the body you wanted smell of iodine and algae that infused him with the and now you’ve given us the body we needed.” (51) vigor he needed to finish the ritual.” (51) The metamorphosis / transition: “At midnight her small breasts began to fill with smoky bubbles as Sex change as a thing a body can do organically and fo her mammary glands consumed themselves, leaving a wrinkled itself web that looked like gum around her nipple, which Eric removed with pincers so it wouldn’t get infected. Underneath grew a a cellular potency for annihilation and regeneration tha masculine skin. Her cells reconfigured themselves like worker the drug unleashes and accelerates, rather than imparts bees around her jaw, her pectorals, her neck, her forearms, and her back, filling up to become hard where before there were just soft The female body uses its last powers to give birth to its curves. It was daybreak when the body, confronted with the total as male annihilation of the female reproductive system, convulsed again. With contractions that made her lower abdomen rise and fall, Eric midwifes into being the man he raped she expelled what had been her uterus through her vagina. Her labia sealed in a cellular fizz and quickly formed a scrotum, which would give birth to the testicles, while her clitoris grew, “This, his last act of caring for a patient, seemed making her stretching skin bleed. Eric removed the old skin as he straight out of the mission statement of the Latin had done around her nipples, sterilizing as he went along, as the American School of Medicine in Cuba, where he’d makers of Rainbow Brite advised. At noon the next day, Acilde graduated. ‘Science and conscience’ was the mantra Figueroa was wholly a man. Eric protected his designer body, still at the school, which had been founded to create an encased in raw flesh, with layers of antiseptics and cotton.” (49) army of white-robed doctors in service to the most needy, and whose Third World missions the Castros had used to excuse everything that had gone wrong with the revolution.” (49) PSYCHIC GOYA (2001): Argenis, bigoted art-school grad, coke addict, call-center employee; technically masterful classical painter struggling to make contemporary art; anemone-stung! “Argenis talked for ten minutes straight about the card with all the eloquence his training as a visual artist allowed.” (27) “In the Rider-Waite deck, [The Page of Cups] was a beautiful card: an androgynous young man in a blue turban and flowered robe contemplates the fish in his cup while in the background, on the horizon, the sea tries to disguise the coming storm with an all-encompassing gray that’s neither calm nor agitated. Franky had drawn several sailboats on the water and covered the page’s hairless chin with a beard. On the upper left-hand corner, he’d drawn a heart traversed by a dagger bleeding straight into the cup. Argenis was surprised there weren’t any hairy dicks, Franky’s specialty.” (26) Debased, corporate, off-shored and phony mirror-image of the santera’s sincere(?) prophecies … also, Argenis is a jerk, and yet … It’s all here / his artist’s eye unwittingly grasps it all: Esther/ “Omincunlé, after the cloak that covers the sea” The androgynous young man (Acilde) with a sea creature in his vessel; the beard (and bleeding heart) he may yet grow… What narrative techniques distantiate Argenis’ racism, sexism, homophobia, misogyny from the perspective of the novel? “Linda asked if they wanted to go snorkeling later that afternoon. ‘It’s Modes of narrating speech/thought: beautiful, there are so many fish, and it’s super relaxing, isn’t it?’ she asked Billy, who barked in response. ‘What do you say?’ she asked 1. Direct discourse. Uses quotation Argenis directly. Instead of taking the gesture as a friendly invitation marks to deliver, verbatim, what was to try to bring a melancholy and distant character into the group, said from speaker to receiver. Argenis began to put things together: She’s mine! She’s not gonna give 2. Indirect discourse. Reports on the it away to the n----- and Iván must be a faggot. She wants me to fuck speech or thought without direct her.” (42) Loading… quotation, using expressions like he said, she asked, they wondered 3. Free indirect discourse (FID) “Then there was Yeyo, the moneylender, a black girl six feet tall delivers the 1st person voice and and weighing in at two hundred pounds. He hated the fucking perspective of the character within the cunt.” (25) 3rd person grammar of the narrator, creating a kind of fusion that The sentence uses “he” (3rd person), not “I,” as if describing nonetheless maintains a distance Argenis from the outside, yet the word-choice (the slur) is between the two. unmistakably the language of Argenis’s own thought. Race, Gender, and Power in the Trujillo Regime: “Trujillo drew on a traditional genre of masculinity “[The Truillato was] the period when the Dominican State in which his self-aggrandizement was based on the became most emphatically committed to promoting sheer number of women he could lay claim to— Eurocentric and white supremacist views of women who highlighted his prowess as lover, Dominicanness” (Silvio Torres-Saillant, 21). father, husband...Trujillo was the quintessential... macho [who] expresses the values of activity, “The regime used archetypes of creole racial identity along dominance and violence, penetrating and with Dominican “manhood” as a response to a political metaphorically consuming by possessing both climate of chaos fabricated by external forces. The regime clients and women. Trujillo’s power was based as used these archetypes with the ambition that passing as white much on the consumption of women through would be symbolic of progress in a context in which sexual conquest as it was on the consumption of imperial power was shifting from the Spanish to the enemies through state violence” Anglo-Saxon model. Eventually, the state’s promotion of —Robin (Lauren) Derby, Dictator’s Seduction these racial and gender models in the development of Dominican identity equally contributed to the perpetuation of “Afro-Dominican religious and cultural the dictatorship through a culture of fear and racism.” practices were persecuted and banned” during the Trujillo dictatorship” (Lorca García Peña, Translating Blackness). --Yairamaren Maldonado HOW TO BE CONTEMPORARY … “[At the] School of Design at Altos de Chavón, it was a different story. His fluency with perspective and proportion wasn’t worth a dime. His classmates were rich kids with Macs and digital cameras who talked about Fluxus, video art, video action, and contemporary art. They had Hello Kitty backpacks and talked in English and French; it was impossible to tell if they were queer. … He was sure his Renaissance virgins and archangels would dazzle them … [But] the next day, during the first art history class, Professor Herman decided to begin with what had happened in the last ten years, the nineties. Marina Abromoviç, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Santiago Serra, Damien Hirst, Piplotti Rist. She explained everything very well, including the price of the works … Argenis’s blood sugar tanked. He had to excuse himself, walking with blurry eyes to the mini-mart. Where the hell had he been? He felt poor, ignorant, and, above all else, confused. The works he had seen, even if sometimes they’d been made not by the artist but by a toy factory in China, belonged in form and vitality to their time, just as the works of Velázquez and Goya had belonged to theirs. He remembered the squalid cafeteria where he’d spent hours as an alienated young man, listening to painters with black teeth share the secrets of Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Dürer. What utter bullshit.” (29)  TIMELINE OVERVIEW: When are we? 1606: The Buccaneers 2027: Acilde Argenis “Côte de Fer” 2001: Argenis 1991: Nenuco, Ananí - Novel’s dystopian - Buccaneers led by Roque Acilde “Giorgio” opening - Fired from the call-center where he fish lone survivor of a works due to failed career as an artist shipwreck from the water - Taíno owners of Playa - Acilde works as a Bo secretly await and maid for Esther - Invited by wealthy neighbor, - ”Roque’s Men”:“One- tend the body of male Escudero restauranteur, arts patron to join armed man,” Engombe, “envoy” retrieved from artists’ colony and eco-restoration “Little French Guy,” “the the hole in the reef - Undergoes non- project at Playa Bo Taíno” surgical sex-change - Acilde gradually (and initiation as - Hosts: Linda Goldman and Giorgio - Slay abandoned cattle after recognizes himself in/as Omo Olokun) by Menicucci “Osorio’s Devastations,” this figure, the “clone Eric Vitier - Other Artists: Malagueta (ex-baller, sell to French and English there whom he [2027 performance artist), Elizabeth (rich smugglers Acilde] maneuvered by - Consensually kid video artist) remote control.” imprisoned by - Curator/Professor: Iván - Argenis adopts name “Côte President Said Bona- Staff: Nenuco & Ananí de Fer”; engraves in blood; - Takes the name while he tries out his sex with Roque “Giorgio Menicucci,” new “powers” - Argenis is stung by anemones while fake ID (87) snorkeling, begins having visions “I can see the past” (59)…  “THE GARDENER”: Taíno Erasure, Presence, & Power in Tentacle Ananí: As with Afro-Caribbean Santéria, Taíno power is not The gifts would be accompanied by a card marginal, mythical, fanciful or past addressed to Princess Ananí and signed by his Excellency [President Balaguer], asking The strongmen who manage to rule in the D.R. continue to for her blessing. Her response was always court, appease, pay fealty to Taíno royalty {“Princess the same: she’d tear the card and throw the Ananí” pieces in the latrine before ordering Nenuco … Loading… to distribute everything among the neighbors Ananí’s father was “disappeared” under Trujillo: She didn’t accept the gifts because she “who wanted to take his land and add them to those he believed Balaguer was complicit in her was giving the Jews whom he’d offered refuge during father’s death, and she tore up the cards the great war. In the end, something made Trujillo because she didn’t want anything to do reconsider and he left them with a quarter of what they with letters; Ananí always said they were had once had including Playa Bo.” (74) pure lies, trash. (74) Connection to Linda in 2001 story (privileged marine biologist, descended from Holocaust survivors) creating artist colony/marine sanctuary in Playa Bo with her husband Georgio  (ANTI)COLONIAL EDUCATION: HOW (not to) READ A HISTORY BOOK “When she was little and it became compulsory to go to school, Ananí learned her letters and numbers. She loved to “Nenuco had look at the images of her ancestors in the illustrated history made it to books, hunting, sowing, fishing, and dancing the areito, eighth grade; though she knew what was written in those books wasn’t true. his parents had The books said there were fewer than six hundred Taínos by said that to 1531 and that, a little later, they had completely disappeared. deal with those Her family, descended from caciques [chiefs] and behíques who were [shamans], had survived, like many others in the Republic sleeping, you they’d stayed in contact with to marry their young people and had to know enact their rituals. The books said nothing of the men from what they were the water, who came every so often to help them, nor of the Spanish, who’d stolen power from the Arawaks to conquer thinking.” (75) the other tribes of the continent. Ananí had been taught never to speak of these things with anyone, and she had always complied with that order. She left school in fourth grade.” To learn to read is immediately to learn of your supposed “disappearance” Can images tell a different story? How to look without seeing “primitive” life How to (like the colonial history books) to say nothing … and retain power  Nenuco Enriquillo: Taíno cacique who led 13- “Nenuco was born in Barahona, on the southern part of the island, where his year uprising against father, Ananí’s uncle, had gone on to marry a descendent of Enriquillo.” (75) the Spanish, 1519-33 “Fonso [the policeman] had never liked Nenuco. To his mind, Nenuco might have been the owner of the land at Playa Bo but water was nobody’s property. In spite of Terra preta/ “Indian black that, his supervisors had made it crystal clear that Nenuco had people in earth”: hyper-fertile, government and Fonso couldn’t mess with him. Nenuco’s property had three anthropogenic “dark earth” parcels of land on the coast. They were partly fertile black earth, where his soils made by intermixture of family grew plaintains, cassava, squash, and avocados, and partly red dirt and reef pottery, charcoal, and bones. owner of the land was Ananí …” (71) Loading… with an abundance of almond trees, sea grapes, and coconut trees. In fact, the real Found in Amazon basin; descended from as early as “The first thing he did when he got to Playa Bo was plant flowers in the front of 450BCE the house, red, yellow, and white blooms that grew with the health and beauty of everything Nenuco planted in the earth. He didn’t speak directly, only through Mama Guama [Ananí’s mother], and only about the garden, which he slowly Political challenge of brought to life all around the house." indigenous “water protectors” (think Speaking, courting through care of the land – BIOSEMIOTICS Standing Rock resistance to Dakota “GARDENING” as best available Western translation/role of Indigenous ecosystem Access Pipeline) management, neither agriculture nor wilderness  TAINO SEXUALITY / cosmology “Even amidst the dryness of the beach, the garden blossomed in the shade of the almond trees, roses, bromeliads, dwarf palms, and ferns, which Nenuco brought from the gardens he tended so beautifully in the houses and hotels where he found work. When she was ready to be in love, Ananí gave him a clay potiza in the shape of a heart, from whose breasts emerged a penis as symbol of their union: they would cease being male and female to become one single beating orgasm.” “[D]uring an opening at the Chavón Archeology Museum, Argenis had found [Linda and Giorgio] admiring a Taino pot; the heart shaped piece with a phallic growth emerging between two breasts was the inspiration for a lot of jokes at school… ‘A very sophisticated notion of sexuality, no?’ he’d said, repeating one of Professor Hernan’s phrases. ‘I would have made a bigger penis,’ Georgio said.” (35) Also, in this novel, an ICON of a transsexual transformation, in which the female body can birth a male one; desire & becoming in the novel’s vein of metamorphosis – a figure for fertility/love/sexuality whose sex is not permanently decided or decidable? (A corollary in Western 1990’s avant-garde art: Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 2, being discussed in the artist colony as Argenis’s personality splits … “Iván explained that the cremaster is the muscle that lifts and lowers the testicles and responds to changes in temperature; the narrative thread that runs through all five films in the cycle is the process of sexual differentiation in the embryo. In Cremaster 2, the organism resists differentiation, resulting in a drama that, according to Iván, plays out like a surreal western while creating a poetic biography of the American killer Gary Gilmore” (62).  MODERN TAINO COSMOLOGY, cont. “Beyond their love and their children, what united them was taking care of the Great Lord, Playa Bo, where the most precious and sacred creature on the island dwelled, the portal to the land of the beginning, through which the men of the water would come, the big heads, whenever they were needed.” (75) Meaningful GRAMMATICAL AMBIGUITIES between person (who) + place (where), as well as between human / animal / thing / god “Great Lord” = “Playa Bo” where the most precious creature [anemone] dwelled Does “portal to the land of the beginning” refer back to “the sacred creature” [anemone] or to the hole in the reef, both vaginal/birth-canal like openings “through which the men of the water would come”  4 WAYS OF LOOKING AT PLAYA BO & its “CONSERVATION” Linda & her Father (Jewish Taíno custodians of Playa Bo, partially Poor local fishers: expropriated by Trujillo’s action refugees, beneficiaries of Trujillo’s “The pool formed by the reefs land re-allocation “What united [Ananí + Nenuco] was taking care of on Playa Bo was full of “[Linda’s] father, Saul Goldman, [had] the Great Lord, Playa Bo, where the most precious animal life because, unlike the arrived on the island as a young boy fleeing and sacred creature on the island dwelled, the others, it had a madman with a concentration camps and had made his portal to the land of the beginning, through which shotgun who wouldn’t let fortune from scratch with a dairy … Linda the men of the water would come, the big heads, anyone near” came home with the idea of starting a whenever they were needed.” (75) foundation to protect the coral reefs in “Nenuco would sleep on the beach with a shotgun “Nanuco was a real bastard, Sosúa and, later, the entire island. Her father on his shoulder to protect the nest from the boys with more fish in his waters said no, that it would mean risking the who hoped to sneak in to fish at first light; their than he or his family could livelihoods of the local fisherman, who had hooks and harpoons could hurt the envoy, as possibly eat or sell” (70) families just like he did. Linda tried to fragile as an embryo in the water.” (76) explain, in a language that was perhaps too Santeria Priestess of scientific, that we were headed toward the complete extermination of all our marine “If you’re seeing this, it means everything’s gone life. ‘Extermination is a strong word, you well,” said the ghost [hologram of Esther], shouldn’t use it when talking about smiling and calm. “Eric initiated you and now animals,’ the old man said.” (37) you know that you are Omo Olokun: the one who knows what lies at the bottom of the sea … use the powers you have begun to discover for the good of humanity. Save the sea” (83). 1610 [Argenis]/ the Buccaneers “Osorio’s devastations”: “In 1606, Governor Osorio had ordered the depopulation of the island’s northern coast to avoid the illegal trade with English, French, and Dutch smugglers. After they were emptied, several towns—among them Puerto Plata, where Sosúa was now— became a refuge for French and English castaways and runaway slaves... They joined forces to survive, hunting the abandoned cattle … to produce leather and smoked meats, which they traded with the smugglers who still made stops on the coasts.” “They’re in Playa Bo. The Menicuccis’ beach is almost unrecognizable, the sea full of shoals, fish swimming in circles in the hundreds, some a meter long that could be pulled from the water by hand. A galleon with its sails furled is anchored a short distance from the coast” (68) Once in power, Said [Bona] had declared himself a socialist, signing a bunch of treaties with the Latin American Bolivarian alliance, which was pursuing its dream of Great Columbia in each of its totalitarian member states. He imprisoned all the corrupt ex-government bureaucrats with real charges, and used false charges against the leaders of the opposition. He expropriated companies and properties, celebrating his first anniversary in power by changing his party’s colors from purple and yellow to read and black, in honor of Legbá, Elegguá, the African deity who ruled his destiny, Lord of the Four Paths and messenger of the gods, and declaring Dominican voodoo and all its mysteries as the official religion. Loading… But now Said Bona was in a tight spot. After he agreed to warehouse Venezuelan biological weapons in Ocoa, the 2024 seaquake had done away with the base where they’d been kept and dispersed their contents into the Caribbean sea. Entire species had vanished in a matter of weeks. The environmental crisis had spread to the Atlantic. … Acilde intuited that the task they wanted him to take on had something to do with the disaster, which had made Esther Escudero cry during her morning prayers. It was because of that disaster that oceanographers and doctors were streaming into the country and the Caribbean was a dark and putrid stew.  UPDATE. “ ‘Esther Escudero was my Because of the discreet and uspecific way in which Esther had referred to his sister, you little faggot,” he powers, he understood that there was no need to reveal the window to the past that said, closing his fist. He had opened in his mind, nor the clone there whom he maneuvered by remote was making Acilde nervous, control. So far, this was his only power, and he wanted to test the reality of the with his voice like past he’d reached with the anemone he’d once thought of selling for mere cents. “I Balaguer’s and his face like need a quiet and private place, because these are the Days of Remembering, in Malcolm X. … ‘I swor to which I will recover the memory of my past lives and of my mission,” said Acilde, her, that no matter what using the ceremonious language of those who had pulled him from the waters in happened we would give 1991 and awakening the president’s curiousity for the first time. you whatever you needed to They came to an agreement: Acilde would go to jail for a few months to calm realize your mission.’” (82) down the followers of Esther who were asking for his head Acilde rested for most of the day now that the man he’d started to become in Sosúa had started to move at his command. He learned many things about that time and its people and what was expected of him. A month after he’d arrived, Nenucao had already shared with him all he knew: the portal with the anemones, the name of all the animals in the pool in both Spanish and Taíno, recipes for cooking them, the purpose and origin of all the herbs in the yard, and the nature of the other world that Acilde was from. Acilde let Nenuco fantasize because, if he realized the other world was a prison cell in 2027, he would have put a bullet in his brain.  “Argenis woke up with the first shot. With a Argenis / GOYA / Cow’s Blood feeling of dismay and excitement, he sat up, watching how the cattle fell to the bullets “ ‘Do you remember your name?’ Roque asks. Engombe was pumping, at close range, into their Argenis doesn’t dare utter a word: he makes a heads. Those that were still alive, stupid and superhuman effort to focus on what Elizabeth is heavy, ran in circles... Engombe and Roque saying now at the table. She complained that if Goya worked on the dead cattle quickly and with was modern, then Velázquez was too. precision, slashing from the throat to the anus While Ananí brings in the coffee pot, Roque the and then from one leg to another. When all the bearded man tells Argenis he is the only survivor of cattle had been opened up, they began to peel the a shipwreck…While Elizabeth puts on a Morcheeba skins, with the help of Argenis, who took notes CD out on the terrace, Roque shows him the modest with a piece of charcoal and a piece of fabric equipment they use to cure the skins from the cattle he’d unrolled on the floor of his workshop. With they hunt inland. While Malagueta digs between his his vision clouded with the hot smell of blood, teeth with a wooden toothpick, Argenis gets a nose which was beginning to clot in a faraway pasture, full of urine, smoke, and flesh in that other place. he reached for the Cadmium Red, squeezing the What the fuck is this? Unlike dreams, with their tube of Winsor & Newton straight onto the brush weird transitions and time portals and stuff like that, like toothpaste.” (69) the story that’s unfolding inside him is coherent and linear.” (56) “The first seven [prints] hang on the wall with rough nails. Lacking ink, Argenis uses cow’s blood, running from the slaughtering with a bucket and applying it immediately, before it can coagulate.” Argenis / GOYA / Cow’s Blood When they closed the curtains, the living room went dark. Iván turned on the projector and there on the wall was print number sixty-six from Los Caprichos. ‘In this series of engravings – besides fusing techniques – Goya presents a subjective satire that cannot be tied to any single reading, destabilizing the sociopolitical paradigms of his time with characters and situations that oscillate between the locally eccentric and the universally mythological.’ A twisted, androgynous body held a flying broomstick above his head, obscuring the more feminine figure behind him, who also held onto the broomstick and sprouted bat wings to facilitate the ride. With Iván still talking in the background, Argenis again closed his eyes. He feels the sun on his skin of that other morning opening up to him. (57) ARGENIS SEXUALITY: Childhood trauma (67) Machismo intact (93) HOW TO BE CONTEMPORARY … “[At the] School of Design at Altos de Chavón, it was a different story. His fluency with perspective and proportion wasn’t worth a dime. His classmates were rich kids with Macs and digital cameras who talked about Fluxus, video art, video action, and contemporary art. They had Hello Kitty backpacks and talked in English and French; it was impossible to tell if they were queer. … He was sure his Renaissance virgins and archangels would dazzle them … [But] the next day, during the first art history class, Professor Herman decided to begin with what had happened in the last ten years, the nineties. Marina Abromoviç, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Santiago Serra, Damien Hirst, Piplotti Rist. She explained everything very well, including the price of the works … Argenis’s blood sugar tanked. He had to excuse himself, walking with blurry eyes to the mini-mart. Where the hell had he been? He felt poor, ignorant, and, above all else, confused. The works he had seen, even if sometimes they’d been made not by the artist but by a toy factory in China, belonged in form and vitality to their time, just as the works of Velázquez and Goya had belonged to theirs. He remembered the squalid cafeteria where he’d spent hours as an alienated young man, listening to painters with black teeth share the secrets of Leonardo, Rembrandt, and Dürer. What utter bullshit.” (29)  ACILDE (2027) A man (consensually) held in prison by Said Bona, current President of the DR Reborn through the aperture in the reef at Playa Bo in 1991 to Taíno custodians of the land (Ananí, Nenuco & Family) Becomes “Giorgio Menicucci” at the end of ”Update” chapter, buying fake ID First name “Giorgio” – after synth/disco “electro-genius” Giorgio Moroder – last name after Acilde’s vanished Italian father I.e, the Giorgio who, by 2021, is the wealthy restauranteur founding the eco-artist colony with his wife, Linda. “[Giorgio Menicuccis had] arrived in 1991, an Italian from Switzerland, without a dime to his name. His talents had helped him get a job as a chef in the kitchen of an all-inclusive hotel called Playa Dorada. Soon he had his own artisanal pizzeria in Cabarete, the Caribbean capital of water sports, where he’d met Linda, back then a rich girl windsurfing champion…going through an I-hate-being- rich phase” (37). I. FRANCISCO de GOYA (1746-1828) and the Art of the Future Vision fantástica/Asmodea, 1819-1823 “[Iván] said that in the coming weeks they’d be studying Goya and would do an exercise at the end based on the work of the maestro from Aragón. The idea was to complicate the notion of contemporaneity in art and and analyze the ways in which Goya, two centuries ago, had articulated his philosophical and formal observations, divorcing himself from the expectations of the work he was commissioned to do and thus inaugurating modern art.” Goya the Court Painter, (c. 1786-1819) … “the work he was expected to do” Loading… Private/experimental work … Los Caprichos (The Caprices), 1797-98 “inaugurating modern art” … but precisely by way of calling into question modernity’s self-image … THE ENLIGHTENMENT Understood as the triumph of REASON, RATIONALITY, PROGRESS … over irrationality, superstition, barbarism, myth “Iván turned on the projector and there on the wall was print number sixty-six from Los Caprichos…” (57)  On the subject of “enlightenment” … “The lantern plays two roles. It is the source of the light by which the truth of these shootings can be seen and so implicitly supports the artist in his role as Loading… witness to the truth. But it is also the light that allows the French regiment to see their target.” -- Anthony J. Cascardi, Francisco de Goya and the Art of Critique “The 3rd of May 1808,” Goya’s 1814 commemoration of Spanish resistance to Napoleon during the Penninsular War (1807-1814) Goya, Los desastres de la guerra / The Disasters of War (1810-1820) - 82 print protest to the Peninsular War of 1808-1814, Napoleon’s invasion of Spain/Portugal - extremely graphic, proto-photographic, sometimes allegorical, with elliptical captions - document atrocities of war, including sexual violence, torture/mutilation, mass execution, famine and poverty - manage to avoid sensationalism, voyeurism, and pornography - not published until 1863, thirty-five years after the artist’s death  In Argenis’ hands, Goya’s searing social protest and act of historical witness is reduced to a personal ARGENIS’ engravings, recovered from his 1610 “treasure rape and revenge fantasy chest”: {His fragile “macho” masculinity externalizes its “The first seven engravings, all signed by a certain Côte de Fer, self-loathing in violent racism, misogyny, and showed buccaneer life in the seventeenth century. The technique homophobia was impeccable, the documentation of the details of domestic life, invaluable. The other engravings were an erotic series in … specifically, a jealous loathing of Linda, who gets to which a woman, most likely a prostitute, was submitted to the be with Giorgio, the one whom Argenis most desires desires of a group of men who joyfully filled all her orifices. The images were extremely graphic and bore some relation to the brutal aesthetic of Goya’s The Disasters of War. The poses … his own violent impulse dissembled/projected were increasingly more violent until they reached the last one, through the old trope of the Black male threat to White femininity in which a black man sodomized her while a one-armed man cut off her head with a scimitar. I should have killed him twice, thought Giorgio, who recognized the victim’s face as Linda’s. Argenis’ artworks valuable as historical artifacts (documentation of buccaneer life in the 17th century) – not in the 2001 show … ‘Imagine, an artist as great as Goya one hundred years earlier, in Hispaniola,’ Giorgio heard the Cuban say.” (127) Original “genius” only when transplanted into a time that precedes the artist of whom they are in fact derivative (Goya)  Do the other artists succeed at “complicating the notion of The flyer for the event, designed by Elizabeth, contemporaneity in art” à la Goya, inaugurating something new out featured Malagueta in a wig, wearing an of historical trauma/witness? eighteenth-century Spanish suit and striking a pose with the palette, paint, and brushes of The Goya photographed What kind of future worth living can be formed from the histories [sic] by Vincente López. of violence that the book has documented? At the bottom of the flyer, in Garamond font, was Transphobic and misogynistic sexual violence and exploitation the name of the event, Spanish colonization, genocide of the Taíno Caprichos. The white of White supremacism via centuries of contrast/conflict with Haiti the white of the wig Trujillo Dictatorship, political disappearances and construction and the gray of the of misogynistic and anti-black machismo Suit contrasted with the blackness of The European Holocaust Malagueta’s hands and furrowed brow, which Ecocide / climate change made for both a comic and sinister impression (111) Elizabeth’s DJ practice: Malagueta’s Performance Art: aural archaeology / remix history in the body “Her aural archaeology didn’t discriminate between “[Iván had] taught him to understand secret voices, use the genres. She’d learned from hip hop how to find nuggets invisible power of the history of his body, and plan a of gold in a Rocío Jurado ballad as well as in a song by strategic attack against the repulsive and cruel mouths on Bobby Timmons, pieces which, loose and looped, everyone …For his performance that night, he’d decided to created a new music, divorced from the original sources. continue using elements from baseball … [but] for the first She stole, without leaving a trace, whole blocks of songs time, he’d confront the theme of race and Dominican completely alien to one another, which she’d seamlessly masculinity head on; he wouldn’t be lacking much in the weave with minor chords from the synthesizers, and way of props.” (122) filled the air with the dark nostalgia of the blues and with Dominican-Haitian gagá, which she loved.” (112) But also, is there any way in which the other artists succeed at keeping alive the novel’s prophecy? - Do their projects in any way carry forward the abandoned Utopian promise of Acilde/Giorgio/Roque? - Do they incarnate a spirit capable of transmuting historical violence into a different(Domincan) future? MALAGUETA : “Every time somebody said [‘Black’] to mean poor, dirty, inferior, or criminal, the word grew; it must have been about to burst … His body was a vessel containing the word, inflated now and again by the odious stares from those Loading… others, the ones who thought they were white.” (120) Goku Super-Sayayín Ana Mendieta, Silueta Series, 1976 Pedro Martínez, 1999 from Dragon Ball  “When he was little, every time somebody called him ‘monkey’ … he’d draw Goku kicking something or using one of his special powers. He’d filled whole notebooks trying to survive the words that would sometimes come out even from his mother’s mouth, or his brothers’, dreaming that, someday, after he’d found a teacher like Mr. Miyagi or Yoda, he’d acquire powers to beat the enemy, that big dirty mouth that hurt him and made him weak. Lacking a sensei, Malagueta had come up with another way out: the foul air of the insults would swell his muscles, pumping his arms endlessly with weights and becoming the gorilla no one dared defy – a batting machine. “The Susúa project had saved him. There he had found his teacher, that skinny Cuban who’d taught him to understand secret voices, use the invisible power of the history of his body, and plan a strategic attack against the repulsive and cruel mouths on everyone …For his performance that night, he’d decided to continue using elements from baseball … The accessories of the sport were beautiful and sterile and brought with a them a solid current of meaning. For the first time, he’d confront the theme of race and Dominican masculinity head on; he wouldn’t be lacking much in the way of props. … He looked at himself in the mirror one last time. He’d stopped drinking water two days ago so his muscles would be more defined. Now his skin was pure plastic.” (121-222) Body as bursting “vessel” bearing every racializing, denigrating usage of “black,” a term that bears so much its verging on total incoherence, meaninglessness A performance that will deploy the denigrated body against the violence of antiblack speech, transmuting its abuse into a super- power/“strategic attack” on the intersection of racism and masculinity Activation of “secret voices,” “the invisible power of the history of his body” Mendieta’s earth-art, Martinez’s athleticism, Goku’s monkey super-heroism ELIZABETH, inspiration & social conscience of her music: “While in Altos de Chavón, Elizabeth had visited friends who lived in La Like Olukun prophecy,a Ceja, a batey [shanty town of migrant cane workers] near La Romana, where logic of incarnation every year during Holy Week, like in all the sugar towns on the island, they celebrated a fertility ritual. Under a canopy of branches, three long drums had Afro-Caribbean music as a kept the beat of an all-encompassing rhythm, unfurling hysteria in the power that “lodges deities polyphonic horns that sought out a marching movement in everybody’s legs in human bodies” and bellies. With the full moon at its zenith, she’d seen the sacred purple of the midnight sky over the sugar plantation and a firmament littered with stars. moves people, possesses them, and enables them to An an old man possessed by Papá Candelo walked on coals toward her, defy material constraint patiently picking one up to light his pipe. When he stood by her side, she felt and physical laws infused by his presence and discovered, specifically and eloquently, the extreme poverty suffered by Haitian workers, the tragic ties with which this An ancient/tragic “hold” on ancient ceremony held on to the present, the permanency of a kind of slavery the present that now dressed itself up as paid labor, and the power of a music that lodged deities in human bodies, deities powerful enough to swallow the world. Power to “swallow the world” It had all left a huge mark on her soul. Now, its edges took a more tangible form, in the music she remixed so painstakingly, looking for the danceable and mystical effects of that magic formula (112-113).  “The music for the party, a three-hour mix, would trace the flow line from Toña la Negra to the trance music of Goa, and would mine the threatening shadow path and delirious sweetness of minimal tech, deep house and drum ’n’ bass, Afro-Cuban prayers, voice samples from Héctor Lavoe, Martin Luther King Jr., Ed Wood, and Gertrude Stein. As a gift to Linda and Giorgio … during the third hour’s climax and before leaping from a hammering beat to the cyber-hippie ocean of repetitive trance, she’d throw in a little of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” and Jacques Cousteau’s voice from the Haiti: Waters of Sorrow documentary. The effect would be tragic, inspiring, and contradictory: the French explorer’s predictions about the future of the islands marine life would hang in silence for a few seconds until the bass came down again, like a tsunami, over the dance floor.” (113) “aural archaeology” weaves together different genres, places, peoples, times, transits, migrations, “shadow paths” into one irresistible song that invokes/incarnates these ancestral sources Set conjoins novel’s core themes of sexuality/gender liberation, climate crisis, and Afro-diasporic culture, rewriting the history of violence in the key of love and desire But Elizabeth’s “love and theft” (“she stole without leaving a trace…”) suggests a too-familiar history of white appropriation of Black cultural creativity, labor, and invention. “Through Iván, Acilde had come to understand that an artist’s success is a combination of public relations, a bit of talent, and an extremely well-developed sense of opportunism” (105). ACILDE/GIORGIO’S VISION: “Linda danced in a corner of the terrace with a bottle of water in her hand … They exchanged a complicit look, like old friends. He loved her. She was his queen. Suddenly, the idea struck him as real: he was a king, the king of this world, the big head, the one who knew what was at the bottom of the sea. Generally speaking, he usually went on his way, not giving too much thought to any of that so he wouldn’t go crazy, pulling the strings on Giorgio and Roque from his cell in La Victoria as though he were playing a video game, accumulating goods, trophies, experiences, enjoying the view, inexistent in that future of acid rains and epidemics in which prison was preferable to the outside. Thanks to the establishment of this lab, he thought. Said’s government will have something to help regenerate part of what was lost. This lab is the altar I’m going to build for Olukun, in which I’ll turn Omincunlé’s Yoruba prayers into an environmental call to action. His work was finished. (128)” “It was precisely as Acilde watched [in 2027] the pathetic little group the president was celebrating that the bulb lit up. As Giorgio, he’d contact the younger Iván de la Barra to ‘discover’ and ‘promote’ the careers of various Dominican visual artists with whom they’d make a mint through their own art gallery… The project would kill several birds with one stone, especially now that he understood the mission for which he was destined was already aligned with his wife’s mission. With the money made by the art gallery they’d finally be able to make Linda’s dream come true: to build a laboratory at Playa Bo, equipped with all the latest technology, where they’d study and cultivate coral to replant it, whenever it was necessary, in its natural habitat” (105-106). TENTACLES OF INTERSECTIONALITY: The novel takes as its hero a transgender man, working in the service of the Afro-Caribbean orisha Olokun, sanctified and aided by indigenous Water Protectors, to save the Dominican Republic from a climate disaster. Gender expansion and affirmation, racial justice, and climate justice are key concepts animating the political left across the Americas. But what do you make of the novel’s conclusion? When Acilde decides not to prevent the bio-weapons accident that will decimate the Caribbean, when he chooses Giorgio’s life and love story, what happens to the novels intersectional utopianism? Where does the novel’s criticism fall? “Quickly and overwhelmingly, he had before him the real goal of his mission: to give Said Bona a message—as president, to avoid accepting biological weapons from Venezuela…Giorgio had to convince him. But just as quickly, he began to think about the other consequences of that decision…Would Giorgio disappear? He imagined Linda covering her head with her hands, out of her mind when her seas turned to a shit shake, while here, in the past of those seas destined to disappear, she was dancing happily with the prospect of the new lab next a young and charming Iván” (129). “Acilde swallows the last of the pills … the weight of his eyelids closes Giorgio’s access to the cell in which his original body has lived. He feels that someone very dear to him is dying and discovers tears in his eyes…The [Spanish] squad falls on Roque … [and] the shot that takes him down leaves Giorgio completely dark inside… He’d said goodbye to Said without a word about his future. He could sacrifice everything except this life, Giorgio Menicucci’s life, his wife’s company, the gallery, the lab. Linda rests her head on his lap, and with a finger, he moves a strand of wet hair that has fallen on her face. In a little while, he’ll forget about Acilde, about Roque, even about what lives in a hole down there in the reef” (132).