Giving you the slip: Joiri Minaya’s Evasive Scions

Ashleigh Deosaran

Sailing into Caribbean waters in 1899, the mood aboard the Scythian was dour. Anchored at her yacht’s first port of entry, Susan de Forest Day, an American tourist, despondently reports:

Perhaps those bare, barren, rugged mountains, whose counterparts we had seen time and again in our own everyday America, did not come up to the ideal we had formed of the wealth and luxuriance of tropical vegetation– an ideal almost unconsciously derived from the old geographies of our childish days.[1]

With surprising candor, Day reveals that she has been betrayed by her expectations of the island landscape, “an ideal” that was cast onto the region during colonial expropriation and projected through Western epistemological schema. Misinformed by “the old geographies,” she anticipated that the isles would perform dutifully as the ontological other of “[her] own everyday America,” recalling historian David Arnold’s observation that at the height of its colonization, “the tropics existed only in mental juxtaposition to something else—the perceived normality of the temperate lands.”[2] Ironically, the “wealth and luxuriance of tropical vegetation” for which Day and her fellow travelers pined had long been supplanted with homogeneous plantation environments under the very same imperial networks through which they were able to traverse the islands as tourists. Despite her reservations, the Scythian scrambles across the Caribbean archipelago in the two hundred pages of text that follow, ensnared by the irresistible lure of the tropics. Punctuated by photographs of rolling hills, wide open seas, straw-thatched structures, and laboring locals, Day’s publication, The cruise of the Scythian in the West Indies (1899), provides apt source material for investigating the interlocked interests of empire, tourism, art, and racial capitalism in the geographic regions historically labeled “tropical.” Today, a page from the text is on view at the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation’s gallery, The 8th Floor, embedded in a print by contemporary artist Joiri Minaya.

The exhibition, Geographic Bodies, curated by George Bolster and Anjuli Nanda Diamond, spans over a decade of the artist’s multimedia practice, which plumbs the legacies of exotification and commodification wrought by global imperialism. This essay broches the slip/slippage/slipperiness of Caribbean figures as they appear and vanish across Minaya’s work, invoking the term “slip” in all its senses. Twentieth-century tourism adverts attempt to freeze femme subjects into beguiling poses, yet Minaya either fully or partially slips them into camouflage, obscuring them from prowling eyes. Her collaged figures interact across myriad archives and media, slipping between two or more pages. Likewise, her interventions evoke a spatial slipperiness, as she samples materials and symbols from contexts in and beyond the Caribbean. Like slipknots, Minaya’s seemingly bound figures loosen with the slightest tug. Whether grafted with vegetal veils or shrouded in pixelation, her island scions skitter in and out of sight, toggling between indulgence and evasion, meeting your gaze while giving you the slip.

The fungibility of the tropics

The interspecies fusions exhibited throughout Geographic Bodies invoke a visual and material slippage that evades the pleasurable and scenic island spectacles coveted by travelers like Day. In the above-mentioned print, The upkeepers (2021), Minaya sloughs off the skin of a contemporary postcard’s beaming subject to reveal Day’s grayscale image below (Fig. 1). Contemporary intervention aside, the latter image is bizarre in its own right (Fig. 2). A group of black men and women appear on a sugar plantation in various states of coerced idleness, a figure in the center reposing uneasily on a propped elbow. Warily, some of the sitters lift pieces of cane to their mouths, ostensibly at the behest of the expectant tourist who observed children “chewing it with feverish devotion” nearby.[3] While it is not difficult to imagine Day eagerly directing the laborers to mime this consumption, the scene’s pretense extends even further, as she plagiarized the image from another photographer altogether.

This image of cane cutters originates amid what art historian Krista Thompson has contextualized as the New Jamaica period, during which plantation benefactors weaponized photography to maintain racial subjugation in the wake of slavery’s abolition.[4] Following critical race theorist Saidiya Hartman, Thompson notes that late-nineteenth-century photographers in post-Emancipation Jamaica sought to choreograph a “performance of tropicality.”[5] The resulting scenes demonstrated to would-be investors and tourists that racial hierarchies would be maintained after Emancipation, as evidenced by the minstrel-adjacent performances of passivity (if not enjoyment) of laborers in cane fields.[6] Thompson analyzes the photograph, captured and circulated in postcards by a local photography firm called A. Duperly and Sons, as one example of an infinitely reproducible and readily interchangeable cadre of images portraying places deemed “tropical” circulated in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (Fig. 3).[7] Other tourists availed themselves of the Duperly photograph’s apparent universality; three years after Day, the self-styled “Well-known Geologist and Scientific Writer,” John Randolph Whitney, reproduced the image again, claiming that it was a “cutting sugar-cane scene in Martinique.”[8]

Thompson has theorized this paradigm as “tropicalization,” describing the proliferation of a genre of place-images established during the rise of colonial-era tourism to Jamaica and the Bahamas, which have since ossified into rigid templates by which the region as a whole has been measured and modified accordingly.[9] Amid monocrop Caribbean landscapes, photographers made picturesque props of black and brown locals; laborers posing passively in fields, market vendors offering baskets of ripe fruit, bedecked “belles” of all ethnicities in studios across the region. Tourism promoters circulated these images throughout Britain and the United States, attempting to corroborate the fantastical myths of tropicality that Day’s “old geographies” had long manufactured. Tropicalized tropes catalyzed radical reconfigurations of Caribbean landscapes, violently homogenized by the co-constitutive ecocides of the plantation and tourist economies. Day’s caption, “it is sugar everywhere” alludes to this eco-visual fungibility, as sugarcane plantations were indeed littered across most islands at which the Scythian came to port, making it feasible to source and reprint ersatz images of supposedly interchangeable landscapes to furnish her narrative. By the time her text was published in 1899, centuries of colonization had reduced fields, towns, ports, and other built environments across the Atlantic archipelago into a series of visuo-spatial tropes, indistinguishable under the ecological, material, and aesthetic burdens of the colonizer’s crop and the tourist’s gaze.

If New Jamaica photographers sought to orchestrate performances of tropicality on plantations to assure white patrons that the racial status quo would be maintained after Emancipation, the contemporary Caribbean postcard that Minaya appropriates in The upkeepers suggests the continuity of their commission into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While the print’s title alludes to the parallels between the Duperly photograph and the contemporary postcard, Minaya’s collage effectively exceeds the sum of its parts, constituting what critical theorist Zakiyyah Iman Jackson has termed “mise-en-abyme.”[10] For Jackson, the medium of collage catalyzes “indeterminate feedback loops” that translate, in the case of Minaya’s pastiche, into the uncanny.[11] The postcard sitter’s bright-red bikini cages the cane cutters into the contours of her excised flesh. The poolside scene is garnished with varieties of bright, “tropical” flora, throwing into stark relief the grainy plantation at its center. The postcard subject’s mouth, the only facial feature left visible, hovers aimlessly above the rubescent beverage she serves, a white straw unblemished by her crimson lipstick. A nearby figure in the field, on the other hand, is tethered to the glass by a protruding cane stalk, as if obliged to take a sip (Fig. 4).

In The upkeepers, ambivalent moments of interface between the two compositions disturb the signifiers of accommodation and ease that the original portraits were intended to convey: a floating grin stretches to Cheshire proportions next to a cane cutter’s scowl; magenta bougainvillea becomes maudlin beside greyscale cane stalks; a golden necklace snakes menacingly between laborers’ folded arms. Although Minaya’s interventions sample old and new tropicalized clichés from plantation to poolside, her palimpsests disturb the uncomplicated, libidinal viewing experience for which such images were created. Armed with Thompson’s historicization of stifling colonial-visual regimes, Minaya dissects these ecological, architectural, and aesthetic icons before redeploying them in the form of misshapen damsels splaying awkwardly on wet sand or errant silhouettes overlaid with kitschy prints. These splintered, digitally manipulated, and reassembled subjects slip from the moorings of history-laden tropicalized frames, revealing and refuting the continuation of the touristic gaze and posing a significant threat to colonial spatial order, access, and hypervisibility. Minaya exploits the fungibility of the tropics, appropriating its paradoxically nondescript and ultra-opulent affordances to smuggle historically hyper-visible figures from decipherment.

Geographic slippage and the tropical international

Raised in the Dominican Republic and based in the United States, Minaya is uniquely attuned to how fungible island idioms ooze across space and time. In Geographic Bodies, this becomes apparent in her I can wear tropical print now series, which evokes over a century of Western-hemisphere-spanning history. Each work in the series features a thrifted button-up shirt patterned in readily recognizable “Hawaiian print.” In I can wear tropical print now #1 (2018), striations of silhouetted tree trunks loom against the empty background of a white shirt (Fig. 5). The lines rocket toward the shirt’s collar, bursting into the unmistakable fronds of the iconic coconut palm, their jagged spurs framing three lines of black text: “Invaders,” “1965,” “Dominican Republic.” In an interview with artist and curator Holly Bynoe, Minaya emphasizes the fraught geo-political context in which these paradoxically leisure-oriented prints were popularized in the mid-twentieth century in tandem with increased American military interventionism around the world.[12]

From the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba to the escalation of the Vietnam War, territories associated with tropicality in and beyond the Caribbean bore the brunt of American military force in the 1960s, as postwar political tensions devolved into volatile occupations across the Global South. Additionally, as historian Megan Raby has noted, scientific research in the tropics –predicated on colonial institutional footholds– were suddenly destabilized by revolutionary and decolonial movements.[13] In response, U.S. scientists levied the perceived ecological value of environments deemed “tropical” on the world stage to further an imperial agenda under the guise of international cooperation.[14] In I can wear tropical print now #1, Minaya’s overt reference to the 1965 U.S. military occupation of the Dominican Republic is framed within ubiquitous symbols of tropicality literally rooted in and routed through colonial-imperial trade and information networks. Black palms spring from unseen, unspecified shores, signaling the existential eco-militaristic threat that loomed over the Global South as a whole. As the shirt’s script suggests, Minaya reveals how historically invasive forces–militia, scientists, tourists, non-native botanicals– are woven into the material and visual contexts that produced these textiles.

Minaya lends critical attention to what she identifies as “the quintessential aesthetic of tropical international,” drawing parallels between the material history of the Hawaiian shirt, the colonial roots of their iconic abstracted botanical motifs, and the imperial networks through which island nations around the world were economically, ecologically, and militarily entangled.[15]The antecedent of the aloha shirt, called the palaka, originated in the early twentieth century and was primarily mass-produced for Japanese and Portuguese laborers on Hawaiian plantations.[16] Although initially made from repurposed kimono fabrics, as fashion historian Linda Arthur notes, traditional Japanese motifs were hastily replaced with more obviously local themes–“palm trees, hula girls, Diamond Head, the Aloha Tower, surfers, and pineapples”–after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.[17]Alongside shifting nationalist symbolism, aloha shirts underwent a transformation in patronage during World War II, as incoming army personnel were drawn to its loose-fitting design.[18] On their return stateside, aloha aficionados would catalyze its explosion in popularity with tourists, which reached its zenith around 1959, as the U.S. occupation of Hawai‘i culminated with its coerced statehood. Epitomizing the socio-spatial slipperiness intrinsic to tropicalized aesthetics, aloha wear would eventually be reappropriated by white collar locals for use in corporate environments. Designated “Operation Liberation,” the Hawaii Fashion Guild presented legislation to the U.S. Senate in 1962 that encouraged the acceptance of aloha wear as business attire.[19]

The kitschy readymades featured in Minaya’s series evoke the Hawaiian shirt’s circuitous history. The fourth shirt in theseries features images of navy boats, cruise ships, colonial galleons, and luxury yachts, alluding to the maritime connections between militarism and leisure (Fig. 6). Minaya applies patches printed with nautical vessels onto the shirt, checkering the original print of sandy shores and swaying palms with steel hulls, billowing sails, and foaming wakes. These symbols are embedded amid depictions of indistinguishable illustrative seascapes through which she alchemizes the visual legacy of Hawaiian print into a global patchwork of pleasure and conquest. The shirt contains explicit historical references, including glimpses of Christopher Columbus’ Santa Maria and the U.S. Navy ship, USS Mahan, named for the renowned nineteenth-century maritime military strategist and historian.[20] Like I can wear tropical print now #1, it conveys the shared historical precarity of archipelagic nations, comprising a geographically slippery mosaic of land and sea from Oceania to the Atlantic.

Slipping the knot

If the brightly colored, tessellated florals that characterize aloha shirts effectively obscure the tense geo-political trajectories underlying the tropicalized international aesthetic, Minaya remaps these prints onto the constrained contours of femme flesh to unsettle their associations with relaxation. For her Containers series (2015-2020), she turns the lens unto herself, bearing the history-laden burden of tropicalized spectacle. By reconfiguring the ostensibly innocuous print into crushing kaleidoscopic cages, the artist parses the connections between the eco-scopic regimes of coloniality and the continued sexual and reproductive exploitation of black and brown women. In these images, Minaya reverses the ease and languor associated with these loose-fitted shirts by applying their prismatic motifs to rigid, full-body spandex suits. She squeezes into the elaborate suits and becomes physically bound into predetermined poses derived from her Google searches for the term “Dominican Women.” She has used the images from this online search term in a number of multimedia artworks, including a series of postcards and a large-scale installation of cut-outs titled #dominicanwomengooglesearch, underscoring how the visual economies of the past have been adapted for contemporary consumption and circulation in the twenty-first century that has culminated in an unbridled access to Caribbean femmes online. However, in Containers, her spandex suits produce a shroud of visual ambiguity behind which figures are invited to loosen their bindings.

The first image depicts Minaya lying prone in a stagnant puddle of water, sheathed in a spandex capsule of abstract black, white, brown and yellow palm fronds (Fig. 7). Her legs and feet are bound together, arms pinned to her torso, face and hair completely enveloped. She is literally hedged in on both sides by rows of large, glossy begonias. The begonia is one of several transplants that European imperials conscripted into the epistemological armada of botany before deploying them to the Edenic frontlines of colonial gardens. Its very name epitomizes the discursive-cum-material role of imperial horticulture, derived from that of French colonial administrator, Michel Bégone, who oversaw late-seventeenth-century naturalist expeditions from the metropole to Saint-Domingue and Martinique.[21] As ecological and feminist scholar Wendy Harcourt notes, begonias were later exported to other colonial outposts “as adaptable and cheerful, ideal companions for white settlers who had the time for domestic pleasure.”[22]

This characterization of plant life as willing accomplices to (or at least passive enablers of) the colonial agenda was not exclusive to the begonia. Thompson has historicized the example of the palm tree, which was pictured and described in the nineteenth-century Caribbean as evidence that the island “was a part of the imaginative geography of the tropics.”[23] Men from the Global North who travelled to the Caribbean described their visions of swaying palms with salacious overtones. “In such descriptions,” she writes, “nature is not simply anthropomorphized…but gendered as female and sexualized.”[24] In a similar vein, environmental historian Jill Casid has researched the “extended analogy between plants and human sexuality” that peppered early modern British and French botany, literature, and art.[25] Recounting a personal moment of ambivalent archival voyeurism, she writes:

I recall…when I first unfolded one of the large format plates interleaved perpendicularly into a copy of The Natural History of Jamaica (1725)…and watched a palm tree grow sideways out of the book…To swing open this relatively gigantic plate is to be confronted by the sensation of mixed emotion, the complicity of pleasure and disgust.[26]

Perhaps Casid’s qualms about activating this vegetal projectile were reasonable, given historically libidinous colonial responses to the palm. In Container #1, Minaya embodies “the complicity of pleasure and disgust” conjured in past and present spectacles of tropicalization by putting the symbols of sexualized nature into dialogue with erotically charged poses culled from the internet. Her frond-wreathed suit forces her to recline, recalling the obligatory postures of sedation struck by the Jamaican cane cutters in Duperly’s image. Although the spandex suit entraps her, it also acts as a deflective force-field behind which her body, skin, hair, and other features prone to racialized and gendered stereotypes become indiscernible. She does not merely reverse the semantic turns by which colonials routinely projected sexual fantasies onto tropicalized plant species but also levies their coveted ornamentation to escape them. Like knots that are tied in order to be slipped, Minaya interweaves these containers with opulent fail-safe mechanisms such that she might tug her restraints into collapse at a moment’s notice.

In other works on paper, Minaya takes this contradictory camouflage further, fusing botanical elements and island environments to almost-completely obscure online images of Caribbean women. In Woman-landscape (On opacity) #4, 2020, Minaya places the patterned silhouette of a figure against the backdrop of calm seas (Fig. 8). As with The upkeepers, Minaya lifts the figure from a contemporary photograph, retaining only her grin, cascading hair, and stringy bikini top. In lieu of flesh, the artist cocoons her in a print à la aloha featuring hibiscus flowers, palms, and illustrative seashores. She maximizes the elements of disguisement explored in Containers, marshalling them to shield hyper-visible femmes with an even more paradoxically hyper-visible veil of anonymity.

As the bracketed title suggests, Minaya turns to the influential Martinican theorist and poet, Édouard Glissant, whose landmark text, Poetics of Relation, proposes “the right to opacity” as a key anticolonial strategy based on non-hegemonic, internally-differentiated relationality.[27] Glissant rejects the colonial schema by which Global Others are coercively exposed, advocating that texts, languages, and cultures be afforded distance, difference, and inscrutability. Figure-ground relations in Woman-landscape (On opacity) #4 provide a visual metonym for Glissant’s contention that opacity can both “bring us together” and “make us permanently distinctive.”[28] The foreground and background ripple into each other with tidal precarity; the nondescript turquoise sea ebbs into the woman’s peacock blue shoulders, striated with white clouds and crests. In turn, her body folds into the cobalt bathing suit, ornate with petals, leaves, and fruit. Whereas, according to Glissant, coloniality urges us “to grasp,” in a “gesture of enclosure,” Minaya’s Woman-landscape (On opacity) #4 slips the knotty binds of scrutiny, consenting only to a “gesture of giving-on-and-with that opens finally on totality.”[29]

Propagative slips

Taking her redeployment of tropicalized aesthetics to its furthest extent, Minaya creates illustrative patterns with plants of her own choosing, curating bespoke botanical designs for her recent Cloaking series.[30] Although deliberately analogous to early modern European naturalist illustrations, Minaya’s figures depose the criteria of the picturesque, highlighting botanicals that were used by native populations for creativity, healing, and combat.[31] She deploys a similar method of textile concealment to her Containers, using patterned spandex sheathes to veil the lionized figures of coloniality. These interventions weaponize the opulence of tropicalization to reorient our attention from panoramic vistas and posing vixens onto violent monumental figures around the world and the botanicals used to resist their invasion.

For example, in Encubrimiento (2021), Minaya staged an unsanctioned public monument intervention in collaboration with independent curator Yina Jiménez Suriel and Mario Sosa (Fig. 9). Central to the city of Santo Domingo, where the artist spent her formative years, is the Parque Colón, dedicated to Christopher Columbus after his remains were allegedly discovered onsite, inside a lead reliquary by Catholic officials in 1877. Historian Christopher Schmidt-Nowara describes the finding as globally divisive; while miraculous for conservative Catholic Dominicans, it sent shockwaves across the Atlantic as it called into question the Spanish narrative that their national hero was buried in Havana.[32] As art historian Jennifer Baez has argued, introducing this controversial competing claim– in the aftermath of the 1865 War of Restoration against Spanish control, no less– was considered by Dominican nationalists to be “an anticolonial and timely statement.”[33]

A representative from Santo Domingo’s City Hall subsequently travelled to Paris to commission the French sculptor, Ernest Guilbert, to depict Columbus in the city square, literally setting Dominican claims in stone and bronze (Fig. 10).[34]Columbus stands atop a massive plinth, pointing northward. Clinging to the stone beneath his boots, a Taíno woman etches a caption into its side. She hoists a pen aloft in one hand as the other steadies her against the stone, bare feet and muscular legs supporting her twisting, nude torso. Identifiable as an indigenous leader of Hispaniola named Anacaona, she transcribes the Castilian elegy found on the metal reliquary that allegedly housed Columbus’ remains in the Dominican Republic– which translates to “Illustrious and Enlightened / gentleman / Christopher Columbus”– in gilded Gothic lettering.

Baez has analyzed the portrayal of this indigenous figure in the context of Catholic Dominican co-optation, contending that Guilbert’s monument reduces Anacaona to a stage prop in the glorified civic spectacle of Columbus. As Baez argues, the monument conscripts her as a “savage” vassal of ethno-nationalist indigenismo ideologies, who is lettered only by the grace of the “enlightened gentleman” towering above. Further, she describes how Anacaona’s Europeanized likeness produces an anti-black, anti-Haitian account, fabricated to “[omit] the African presence from the nation’s genealogy, while privileging a Hispanic heritage.”[35] Thoroughly outlining the various national, racial-ethnic, and gendered relations conveyed by the Columbus-Anacaona monument, Baez emphasizes that the statue was rooted in Dominican claims to authenticity while obscuring the genocidal context in which the cacica was sentenced to death by Spanish colonizers mere blocks away from where her bronze would be erected. Turning to Minaya’s cloaking of the statue, Baez argues that the artist produced an “antimonument” that “[offered] a way for Anacaona to write back.”[36]

Building on Baez’s critical engagement, I want to shift attention to the interspecies relations produced by Encubrimiento. Returning to Glissant, as Minaya so consistently does, we are able to recuperate a means of relationality that exceeds the binaries of masculinity/femininity, savage/civilian, white/black, passive/active, and colonizer/resistor. As we have seen, Minaya wields the concept of opacity in the Containers and Woman-landscape series to liberate Global South subjects from the regimes of interpretation, knowability, and visibility that are imposed onto racialized, colonized, and gendered minorities. Crucially, opacity is neither absence nor obscurity; it is an actively produced interpretive opening, an ethos of radical acceptance, an invitation to embrace slippage despite the colonial-imperial reification of sure-footedness.[37]

Opacity grants us the opportunity to evade the hubris with which colonizers, scientists, and historians have substantiated supremacist myths with the inscriptions, figures, and epistemological forgeries that constitute national monuments.

Following Deleuze and Guattari, Glissant famously cites the ecological model of the rhizome, using it to describe a subterranean, sprawling alternative to essentialized notions of identity. Unlike arborescent unidirectionality, rhizomes are decentralized and nonhierarchical forms that refute conventional colonial taxonomies and their visual culture, which traffics in transparency and teleology. This is the façade of history onto which Minaya sows/sews her intervention in Encubrimiento, offering an opulent “[distraction] from absolute truths.”[38] She hijacks the aesthetics of Eurocentric naturalist taxonomies to design the discrete plant species from which her spandex cloaks are composed. These illustrative fragments are rendered for future reconstitution, thus creating, in Jackson’s apt phrasing, “an interactional field that includes material objects but is not limited to them.”[39]

Minaya’s pair of studies, Bija #1 (2020) (Fig. 11) and Bija #2 (2020) (Fig. 12), depicts the eponymous plant which had several uses in indigenous cultures across the Americas, from coloring ancient Aztec chocolate to painting Mayoruna pottery in the Peruvian Amazon.[40] Historian and geographer Robin Donkin traces the precolonial Western hemispheric cultivation and transplantation of Bixa, noting that it was a highly valued, spiritually resonant plant with vital pigmentary and medicinal qualities.[41] Its earliest known depiction by colonial invaders dates as far back as the very first scientific expedition deployed to the “New World,” spearheaded by Spanish naturalist and physician, Francisco Hernández de Toledo.[42] Three decades before Columbus’ remains would purportedly be discovered in the Dominican Republic, French naturalist and painter, Jean-Théodore Descourtilz would depict the Bixa in Flore pittoresque et médicale des Antilles, vol. 1, which, as the title suggests, links the picturesque with the utilitarian under the banner of colonial exploitation in the Caribbean.[43]

While emulating the style of the botanical sketches that append Hernández’s and Descourtilz’s texts, Minaya’s illustrative plant cuttings ultimately propagate into the spandex veil that enshrouds both botanists’ imperial antecedent, Columbus. Although root cuttings are distinguished from slips in the science of plant propagation– the latter being taken from the aboveground matter of the plant– the stemmy slips that Minaya depicts behave rhizomatically in her ultimate presentation of Encubrimiento. Sprawling and stretching with nonlinear proliferation, the red spandex cloak “flattens” the upright figure of Columbus in a gesture of horizontalization. Additionally, the bright background of the spandex appears stained in a hue not dissimilar to the red dye that indigenous Antilleans used as ceremonial paint.

Returning to Baez’s contention that Minaya’s intervention “[offered] a way for Anacaona to write back,” I turn to a description of this red body dye being applied to the revolutionary figure by her mother, written the consummate Haitian-American writer, Edwidge Danticat.[44] In Anacaona, Golden Flower, Danticat weaves a fictional account of Anacaona’s experiences from her perspective, thus, as Baez argues, “[reconstituting] the cacica’s neglected voice.”[45] On the morning of Anacaona’s initiation into womanhood, during which her hair will be cut for the first time since her birth, her mother adorns her “whole body in red paste made from the crimson-seeded roucou plant.”[46] With this story in mind, Anacaona’s position in the Santo Domingo monument after Minaya’s intervention is not one of mere ontological opposition or coerced assimilation in the presence of the white, male colonizer. Instead, she encounters ecological allies amid the vermillion field of aji, guayacán and bija slips. Concluding her account, Danticat imagines twenty-nine-year-old Anacaona’s notions of knowledge propagation amid colonial invasion:

Yes, I want our victory over the pale men to be a tale that will inspire us when we have other battles to fight, one that reminds us that…we are a strong and powerful people. I do want it to be a story whose veracity the young ones will ask me to confirm when I am an old woman, a story that my [daughter] Higuamota will tell and retell her own children. But I do not want it to become the only story we ever have to share with one another. It cannot be. It must not be.[47]