Tentacle Lecture 1 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 “La Españ...

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 17 th 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 eye and activates the security camera that faces the street, where she sees one of the many we already Haitians who’ve crossed the border, fleeing from the quarantine declared on the other half of the know island. about this Recognizing the virus in the black man, the security mechanism in the tower releases a world, the lethal gas and simultaneously informs the neighbors, who will now avoid the building’s entrance 2027 D.R.? 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, 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: “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 Escudero POLITICAL are a last hope. According to the media, President Bona’s victory and continued power 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) “For her boss, a black butterfly meant a dark death; a burnt-out bulb, Changó needing to talk; Parallel a car alarm going off at the end of a prayer was a sign that her petition had been heard. COSMOLOGY, Before she worked at Esther’s house, Acilde sucked dicks at El Mirador, without ever SEMIOTICS taking off her clothes …” (11) (system of signs) “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 her mammary glands consumed themselves, leaving a wrinkled organically and for 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 masculine skin. Her cells reconfigured themselves like worker regeneration that the drug unleashes and bees around her jaw, her pectorals, her neck, her forearms, and her accelerates, rather than imparts back, filling up to become hard where before there were just soft curves. It was daybreak when the body, confronted with the total  The female body uses its last powers to giv annihilation of the female reproductive system, convulsed again. birth to itself as male With contractions that made her lower abdomen rise and fall, she expelled what had been her uterus through her vagina. Her  Eric midwifes into being the man he raped 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 beautiful, there are so many fish, and it’s super relaxing, isn’t it?’ she speech/thought: asked Billy, who barked in response. ‘What do you say?’ she asked Argenis directly. Instead of taking the gesture as a friendly invitation to 1. Direct discourse. Uses try to bring a melancholy and distant character into the group, Argenis quotation marks to deliver, began to put things together: She’s mine! She’s not gonna give it away verbatim, what was said from to the n----- and Iván must be a faggot. She wants me to fuck her.” (42) speaker to receiver. 2. Indirect discourse. Reports on the speech or thought without direct quotation, using “Then there was Yeyo, the moneylender, a black girl six feet tall expressions like he said, she and weighing in at two hundred pounds. He hated the fucking asked, they wondered cunt.” (25) 3. Free indirect discourse (FID) delivers the 1st person voice  The sentence uses “he” (3rd person), not “I,” as and perspective of the if describing Argenis from the outside, yet the character within the 3rd person word-choice (the slur) is unmistakably the grammar of the narrator, language of Argenis’s own thought. creating a kind of fusion that nonetheless maintains a distance between the two. 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)