Neither Soldier, Sacrifice, nor Savior: Trans*formative Sites, Stages, and Scenes in Rita Indiana’s Tentacle

• In Event: Decolonial Queer and Trans Ecologies Part 2 (HYBRID)

Abstract

“Save the sea.” (83)

Tentacle opens in a near and highly technologized future. A 2024 tidal wave has radically reconfigured the Dominican Republic, and the after-effects of disaster continue to surge through the island’s sociopolitical systems. We meet Acilde, a sex-worker-turned-domestic-worker whose tomboyish looks attracted a very particular clientele, who seeks the Rainbow Brite, a powerful injection that promises a sex change for the user. Acilde’s own transformation is aided by a stolen sea anemone, a creature that has become a black market commodity coveted by wealthy collectors. When the anemone is attached to her shaved head, Acilde emerges, now a man, through a portal in a coral reef into an earlier temporal stage, tasked with intervening in the events of climate change that swell to the tidal wave’s ravaging of the island.

Tentacle, by Rita Indiana, was first published in 2015 as La Mucama de Omicunlé, and subsequently translated into English by Achy Obejas in 2018. As the novel unfolds, we come to understand the central figure as existing in three temporal stages, in three separate bodies, but with a layered and simultaneous consciousness. They are simultaneously experiencing the first colonization of the Dominican Republic, moving within the near past of knotted and crucial events that lead to climate catastrophe, and present for the near future of post-disaster. As these multiple temporal spaces depict a site of continuing coloniality, Tentacle stages a critique of colonial environmentality, where climate catastrophe is attended to only so far as it benefits a capitalist project, as the novel profoundly troubles the concept of the saviour.

In this paper, I engage in a counter/mapping that seeks to hold the simultaneity of the spatiotemporal crosscurrents that Tentacle traverses, and explore how this further invites considerations of the roles of labor, class, and poverty, of gender and masculinity, of alternate, otherwise, and subaltern cosmologies and thought, as they contend with the scope of extractive capital. Acilde’s participation in peripheral economies is sutured to both queerness and unfolding disaster; the mobility afforded to masculinity, and it’s failure, is a key element of Tentacle’s critical outlook; Afro-Orisha cultural traditions and Yoruba practises subtend possible knowledges; these knotted modes simultaneously unfold and constrict through the narrative that, I argue, probes the question of weather we are able to adequately estimate the reach of climate disaster. In this counter/mapping project, I take seriously the specificity of the Dominican Republic as epicenter, rather than elsewhere, as both a site of multiply contending catastrophes, and as a locus in considerations of what might be called ‘tipping points’ in climate change’s acceleration. Through Tentacle, we are probed to radically re-evaluate and critically scrutinize the role, and risk, of man.

Author

• Isaac H. Essex, Brown University