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Novel Insights Sex Work, Secrets, and Depression in Angie Cruz’s Soledad Donette Francis Ultimately, it does not matter what consumption possibilities the media depict and how much individuals fantasize about them: living out fantasies means having access to required resources, particularly the right passport. Otherwise, citizenship trumps transnational desires every time. —Denise Brennan, What’s Love Got to Do with It? An emphasis on the sexual agency of women should not lead to a prematurely romanticized portrayal of resistance and in the process foreclose a discussion of the very real constraints that sex workers face in their daily lives, both on as well as off the job. —Red Thread Women’s Development Programme, “Givin’ Lil’ Bit fuh Lil’ Bit” They had a special on women who sleep through depression. They want to die, but they don’t have the courage to go that far. They said depression is anger turned inward. . . . Olivia never shows anger. She always holds it in, stuffing it inside to the deepest corners. —Angie Cruz, Soledad This essay examines contemporary Caribbean women’s writings to consider their novel insights about sexuality and female citizenship . The ethos of this fiction articulates a feminist poetics that I define as antiromance, which writes beyond the conciliatory happy ending by foregrounding the intimate lives of Caribbean women and girls to underscore that neither familial home, national homeland, nor immigrant nation functions as a safe space of belonging; and female characters therefore often dwell in liminal spaces of vulnerability. Centering the sexed female body, these novels demonstrate that from their very inception Caribbean states, because of not only the constraints of globalized labor demands but also their own naked violence, have exhausted whatever emancipatory promises 54 Donette Francis they imagined. Thus, for many female citizens, the goal has been to craft ways to survive life’s many contingencies and serial setbacks.1 In the world of the novels, these migratory female characters are shaped by their sexual pasts, and despite their best efforts, they cannot simply leave the past behind to chart new futures. Hence these antiromances offer no normative coupling, and coercion, wherever it is located, is vividly marked as violence and sexual abuse. The value of antiromance, then, is its reluctance to offer grand narrative closure, settlement, or any satisfaction derived from other genres, such as tragedy’s “catharsis” or romance’s joy of witnessing eventual agonistic triumph. Antiromance defies reconciliation: it yields no catharsis, no enlightenment, no surety of the path forward. By contrast, it exposes the folly of believing that somehow the national, the diasporic, or the intimate sphere is a privileged space for the reconciliation of otherwise impossible differences. These writers, therefore, foreground an understanding of belonging that simultaneously acknowledges both the failures and the possibilities, the contingencies and the contradictions, of female everyday experiences and thus force a more complex discussion of Caribbean women’s agency. Writers such as Patricia Powell, Nelly Rosario, Edwidge Danticat, and Elizabeth Nunez share this poetic sensibility, which rewrites various imperial , national, and diasporic romance narrative formulas. Each novel begins with a different historical signpost—emancipation, indentureship, or U.S. military intervention in one of three different national contexts—to ask how reading the moment as a crucial intimate juncture enhances our understanding of the centrality of sexual citizenship to imperial or nationbuilding projects, as well as how these novelists reimagine canonical narrative histories through the antiromance. Set during the emancipation period in nineteenth-century Jamaica, Patricia Powell’s book The Pagoda (1998) inserts the traveling Chinese woman to rewrite the romance of escape from old-world imperial China to participate in new-world adventures. Immediately, readers learn that for such women this new-world travel romance is often thwarted at sea with an act of sexual violence. The novel pursues the sexual politics of a Chinese woman’s gender and sexual passing by using the Asian body as bonded laborer to represent the ambiguous terrain between enslavement and freedom. Nelly Rosario’s Song of the Water Saints (2002) rewrites the imperial romance of the American military hero who rescues poor local women from the tyranny of their weak national patriarchs. Rosario’s novel considers the violence implicit in visual images, particularly those produced for export, used to project and to produce a sexualized narrative about the availability of Caribbean people, especially its “exotic” mulatto women. Rosario recuperates visual indices such as the postcard and the photograph as counter-archival sources [3.15.6.77] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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