Coloring the Poetic Voice in the Dominican Republic: Aída Cartagena's Yania Tierra

Abstract

The assassination of the dictator Rafael Trujillo in 1961 and the civil war of 1965 sparked a revision of the symbolic categories of their cultural heritage among Dominican writers throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Themes that once were silenced or disregarded, such as the subordination of women and the contribution of non-European elements to Dominican culture, were now portrayed in literary works. This essay explores how, in its attention to the overlooked, Aída Cartagena's epic poem Yania Tierra opens up the possibility of rethinking the study of gender and race in Latin American literature. I argue that this hybrid text, which combines pictures, fragments of other poems, street signs, advertising slogans, prose sections, as well as verses of varying meters and typographies, assumes a paradoxical stance: it both works to counter the conventional portrayal of racial and gender differences, and recycles paradigms formulated by prior Dominican authors, such as Manuel de Jesús Galvún and Salomé Ureña de Henríquez.