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3. Desiring the Racial Other: Rosario Ferré’s Feminist Reconstructions of Danza and Plena
- Wesleyan University Press
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c h a p t e r t h r e e Desiring the Racial Other Rosario Ferré’s Feminist Reconstructions of Danza and Plena Nosotras, tu querida y tu mujer, siempre hemos sabido que debajo de cada dama de sociedad se oculta una prostituta . . . siempre hemos sabido que cada prostituta es una dama en potencia. —Rosario Ferré, “Cuando las mujeres quieren a los hombres” We, your lover and your wife, have always known that every lady hides a prostitute under her skin. . . . A prostitute, on the other hand, will go to similar extremes to hide the lady under her skin. —Rosario Ferré, “When Women Love Men” (translated by Rosario Ferré and Cindy Ventura) As a woman writing from the same class location as that of Manuel Alonso, Salvador Brau, Antonio Pedreira, and Tomás Blanco, Rosario Ferré appropriates the discursive tradition on music, race, and gender analyzed above, rewriting and subverting it from her own multiply inflected subject position . This is achieved in her controversial short story, “When Women Love Men.” “When Women Love Men” is not so much a short story as a portrayal, a dialogic text constituted by two female voices that have been socially antagonistic and opposed. Isabel Luberza is the literary embodiment of the lady, the dama or señora, Ambrosio’s widow and is a white aristocrat who lives confined within the boundaries of her white mansion and submits herself wholeheartedly to the social tenets of the perfect wife. As this chapter proposes, Isabel is also, implicitly, a literary embodiment of the Puerto Rican danza. Isabel la Negra (Isabel the Black), Ambrosio’s mujer and corteja (lover), a fictional rendering of the well-known prostitute in Ponce, is associated in the text with eroticism, sex, and concupiscence. Isabel La Negra embodies the Puerto Rican plena, as the epithets used to describe Desiring the Racial Other / 45 her are evidently generated in the untranslatable puns, sounds, and rhythms of an Afro-Antillean language mediated by the works of Luis Palés Matos: “la Rumba Macumba Candombé Bámbula: Isabel La Tembandumba de la Quimbamba, contoneando su carne de Guingambó por la encendida calle antillana”1 [the Rumba, Macumba, Candombé, Bámbula, Isabel the Tembandumba de la Quimbamba, swaying her okra hips through the sun-swilled Antillean streets]. Isabel the wife and Isabel the lover exemplify a split of the female subjectivity , according to Hispanic marianista tradition, into virgin (wife) and whore. These two literary characters bring to the fore the patriarchal gender dynamics at play in Puerto Rican urban society (although not exclusively there, as patriarchal traditions of “casa chica” in Mexico and other Latin countries continue to attest) by which men extract sexuality and pleasure from the marital relationship and displace it onto the affair. In “Respeten , que hay damas” [Be respectful around the ladies], Edgardo Rodr íguez Juliá probes this gender construct through verbal recreations of photography: En el reverso de la señora, la mujer, aquella es mujer de su casa, a veces adorno del santuario puertorriqueño burgués; ésta es mujer de la calle, amenaza del sacro hogar. El hombre puertorriqueño apenas se decide: la señora es algo así como un testaferro sexual de la madre, la mujer es la negación de tanta pureza, laberinto de variantes que en su último extremo conduce al Club Riviera. Cuando la señora es más obligación que sensualidad, se busca la mujer, me echo la corteja, le pongo casa a una querida, ya me oíste. En esta madeja de inclinaciones y gustos amamantados desde la más tierna infancia , se debate la sexualidad del hombre puertorriqueño, casi siempre herida, casi siempre confusa hasta el límite de la infidelidad o el ridículo. Hay una fisura fundamental en este inquieto y envanecido varón: una vez edificada la pureza de la esposa como garantía de fidelidad (los cuernos son el bochorno máximo para ese honor hispánico que confunde la honra con la obstetricia) desfallecen los ardores del sexo, el amor se amansa en hábito, conveniencia doméstica sazonada con la responsabilidad de educar a los hijos.2 [On the inside of the wife is the woman, the former is the woman of her home, sometimes adorning the burgeois Puerto Rican sanctuary; the latter is the woman of the street, a threat to the sacred home. The Puerto Rican man hardly makes up his mind: the wife is something like the sexual container...