Dominicana: A Tale of Oscillated Identities of Diasporic Existence

 

 

As the evening invade the avenue in James Joyce’s Eveline; a ravenous world waits outside for Ana Cancion in Angie Cruz’s Dominicana –a multiply rejected novel by the editors turned into celebrated universally and shortlisted for the 2020 Women Prize for Fiction in competition with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, Hilary Mantle’s The Mirror and the Light, Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, Jenny Offill’s Weather. Ms Cruz, in an interview with PEN, admitted her fascination she borrowed the impact of Evline’s ‘a wholly undesirable life, to Ana’s a transactional life, similarly, when I read ‘...a good country girl is what a man needs...’ and when Ana’s mama said, ‘may be with Juan we can all get the hell out’, the line first hit in my mind is ‘it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in a possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’ from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

The novel is a coming-of-age story of ‘a curious beauty to be possessed’, a fifteen years old Dominican teen-girl who being trapped into poverty & patriarchy compelled to marry an abusive man 'with pockets full of dollars, & double of her age (32) in pursuit of bringing heavens & happiness for her family and immigrated to the USA leaving everything behind on the first day in 1965. There she got encamped in an apartment in Washington Heights, New York city without a key to open the doors & windows and accompanied by a Dominican doll without a face to see & speak and lived an unwanted conjugal life with a tyrant husband. With a great depression she was passing her day looking out the windows witnessing the happenings of assassination of Malcolm X, civil rights movements & Vietnam war effects which were all incomprehensible to her as a whole, with a feeling of loneliness she planned to run away from the apartment but fortunately or unfortunately she met with Cesar, her brother-in-laws, at the station; and being convinced by him she stayed.

After the killing of Trujillo that left the country in ‘a tremendous mess’ and the capital ‘in chaos’ and people in vigil, after the celebration of the military coup & falling of Boch government, people started to open the book of complains against Balaguer failure and inconsistency, when American occupied the country with conflicted promises to prevent the establishment of Cuban communism and opened the fury & cry, Juan returned to Dominican Republic for two months left Ana in the custody of Cesar. She started to consume her newly found freedom  full of English learning, foods at Coney Island, music & dance at the Audubon Ballroom and excursions  at the beach. Her loveless, opportunistic marriage, stoned and immigrant life became a life of free-spirit, marital betrayal, a life to choose love.

The title of the book Dominicana itself depicts that this is not only a story of migrated Dominican girl’s experiences in the midst of trouble times but also a subtle, precise, and allegorical snippets of a island country with colonial burden on its shoulder and racial scandals on its face, moreover, it is also a archival presentation of migration crisis and struggles and how the great America has been shaped its glorious history by brick by brick of  immigrant generations but failed to eradicate the scars of racism.

At the last page of the book in the acknowledgement, Cruz disclosed that the first generation female immigrant’s story originally rooted in her own mother experiences who married her father twice of her age like Ana. When she told her mother about this book, she thought at first these incidents are found in many parts of the world, are very common and typical and asked who will care for them but after reading it she praised that it is her best book yet. This is also an archival novel for which on Instagram she launched a visual archive of Dominican issues @dominicanasnyc.  she has also founded  Aster(ix), a feminist literary journal publishing the writings only by the women of colour.

This is the story of the feeling of women disappointment and disempowerment by the injustice of patriarchy and machismo and the intoxicating cultures of colonialism, immigration and citizenship. It is rooted deeply under the anguish of Spanish settlement, African enslavement and Dominican dispersion in America. The characters went through the false papers and transnational identities to pass the citizenship process, however, it is also a story about the act of women empowerment and freedom, you will know when Ana’s mother took her to the tailor for making her bridal dress so desperately she taught some life lessons when they were returning from. She told Ana that she should ‘learn to pretend’ in every situation as good as it demands like ‘debone a fish’ and ’whatever you do stay strong’ as like as a coconut.

Angie Cruz so sublimely and so simply shows us how a typical country girl’s life experience turns into a representation of a nation. She also portrays astonishingly the duality of exiled existence. At the first reading you will feel a very typical narrative but the more you go deep through the pages you will start to listen to the lyrical sounds of Ana’s song.