María Ignacia Schulz is an Afro-Colombian-German author and translator. Her research interests include Hispanic Afro-Caribbean literatures and Black and Afro-Caribbean feminisms.

The last two decades have seen a growing number of literary works written by black women in the Hispanic Caribbean in which the racialized black female body is placed at the centre of the narrative. These narratives run counter to the existing dominant hegemonic discourse on the symbolic construction of the feminine. The authors offer ways in which the body can be considered beyond that of the exotic or sexualized discourse, by restoring to it an agency denied by centuries of enslavement and colonization. By placing the body centre stage, they reveal the effects of the marginalization and expropriation to which these bodies have been subjected, while simultaneously creating a space of resistance, struggle and proclamation of new ways of understanding. The narrativisation of the black body - where, in the context of the Hispanic Caribbean, marked by slavery and colonization, the body was merely an object of exchange - is of unparalleled liberating power.

Mayra Santos-Febres | Nuestra senora de la noche (Spanish) | Rayo | 368 | pages | 14,99 USD

One of the most consistent writers to discursively highlight the experiences and marks of the black body is Puerto Rican Mayra Santos Febres (1966). She is one of the most high-profile writers, academics and intellectuals on the island of Puerto Rico. In her work, the awareness of the body, at first marginal and located in a peripheral space, leads to the development of strategies that enable the alteration and redefinition of the power relations that make the body solely an object of desire. Racialised female bodies learn to negotiate their sexuality in order to achieve their goals. They also learn to subvert patriarchal codes in order to repopulate them with new meanings. By explicitly naming the black body, and consequently deconstructing the discourse of the exotic, this body is once again placed as the centre of resistance in literature. This can be seen in one of the most symbolic passages of the novel Our Lady of the Night (2006) in which the main character, Isabel Luberza Oppenheimer, makes her first appearance. Isabel is the Madame of the largest and most powerful brothel in the region, frequented by the ruling political class and men of high society. In this scene, Isabel steps out of the car that has taken her to the gala held at the most prestigious social club in Puerto Rico, a place reserved for the exclusive use of the Ponce elite.

Mayra Santos-Febres | Our Lady of the Night (English) | Kindle | 370 pages | 9,99 USD

The reaction generated by the presence of a black body in a space of white privilege can be seen in the stupefaction of the bellboy, who has to take Isabel's hand as he helps her from the car. His gaze slowly travels along her arms to her whole body, confirming with astonishment that they are indeed those of a black woman. The fact that he is so shocked tells us that the entrance of this character is not fully accepted. The very appearance  of Isabel is an act of rebellion and empowerment, considering the state of oppression under which enslaved black women were kept, which prevented any exercise of autonomy over their bodies. Both sexuality and reproduction were controlled by the white master.

The exercise of narrative resistance carried out by Mayra Santos Febres is based, on the one hand, on the presentation of complex, contradictory and fractured racialized female character. Characters who reject all exoticism or phantom-like discursive existences. She elaborates a narrative that declares a different and continuously evolving agency of the female body; a stance that is not predetermined by an external normative. Her female figures learn to transgress the spatial and socially constructed boundaries, and although they do not succeed in eliminating them, they manage to unseat them (such as the disturbing image, mentioned above, of the black woman who enters the club, or that of a lover unashamedly declaring what gives her sexual pleasure).

The great contribution made by racialised Latina and Caribbean women writers, among them Mayra Santos Febres, is to reclaim and rewrite the experience and history of so many other women who have been banished or erased from literature. We propose calling this act of recovery a "narrative maronnage" - in connection with the black history of the Caribbean- in order to acknowledge the libertarian nature of contemporary Afro-Caribbean literature written by racialized women. Referring to a  "cimarronaje narrativo"  (or marronage) is here initially associated with the literary output of Afro-descendant women writers of the Hispanic Caribbean, but it should not focus exclusively on this - there are other texts from the English and French-speaking Caribbean that, on the basis of their claims and characteristics, could well fall within this "cimarronaje" : examples of this can be found in the works of Jamaica Kincaid or Maryse Condé. Santos Febres' novel proposes new ways of reading racialized bodies and the agencies they posit: the starting points for her acts of resistance.
 

*This article presents one of the central aspects worked on in my master's thesis for the degree of Master in Advanced Studies in Spanish and Latin American Literature at the International University of La Rioja. Here I develop the construction of new black feminine agencies, from the narrative of black bodies, in contemporary literature written by women in the Hispanic Caribbean.