This place was here before our nations: Anacaona’s Jaragua
This place was here before our nations: Anacaona’s Jaragua
This chapter discusses three fictional reconstructions of the life of the Taíno Queen Anacaona, an important figure in early modern Hispaniola, by writers born in the Dominican Republic and Haiti: Salomé Ureña de Henríquez's Anacaona (1880); Jean Métellus's Anacaona (1986); and Edwidge Danticat's Anacaona: Golden Flower: Haiti, 1490 (2005). The chapter puts these texts in dialogue with each other and argues that they dramatise the ongoing tension between national narratives and island history while revisiting Anacaona's complex renegotiations of the ‘border’, which, in her time, was supposed to ring-fence the indigenous population from the Spanish colonists; Anacaona's renegotiations take place in an area which partly overlaps with the current borderland.
Keywords: fiction, Anacaona, Hispaniola, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Salomé Ureña de Henríquez, Jean Métellus, Edwidge Danticat, indigenous population, borderland
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