Writing Prietica in Quinnehtukqut: Marianela Medrano’s Decolonial Racial and Feminist Negotiations

• In Event: This is America: Re-creating Afro-Diasporic Contemporary Literary and Cultural Discourses

Abstract

Marianela Medrano began her career as a writer in the Dominican Republic in the 1980s, but has written and published most of her works while living in Connecticut, where she has resided since the early 1990s. Medrano was a founder of the Tertulia de Mujeres Escritoras Dominicanas in New York, has been an honored writer at both the Feria Internacional del Libro in Santo Domingo and the Feria del Libro Dominicano en Nueva York, and has read her work throughout Latin America, as well as in other parts of the world. My paper will explore how she has negotiated developing a strong voice of black woman’s affirmation while also exposing the historical implications of the attempted erasure of Dominican women’s indigenous inheritances. I draw on textual analyses as well as interviews with the author, engaging poems such as “El ombligo negro de un bongó” and its translation “The Black Bellybutton of a Bongo,” and her books Curada de espantos, Diosas de la yuca, and Prietica. Feminismo decolonial, as elaborated by thinkers such as Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, helps in unraveling the entangled ways that critics, cultural sponsors, and audiences have responded.

Author

• Isabel Espinal, University of Massachusetts Amherst