Abstract:
In “Escribir en dominicano”, a reflective text published in El País on June 3rd, 2019, Dominican writer and musician Rita Indiana (1977) states: “There is no longer a real world and literature, only a democratic and participatory Spanish that we chew with the same teeth with which the creators of Castilian chewed Latin in Hispania.” For the Caribbean author, language is a matter of mouth and teeth, just as literature is a matter of orality. By presenting the multiple evolution of Spanish as yet another chewing in the global history of languages, she warns that the fate of every imperial language is to end up being swallowed from within, from its margins, until it becomes something else. This contribution proposes to consider her poetics as an intrepid aesthetic experimentation on the postcolonial dimension of language, which confronts the formal conflict implied by it. Focusing on three novels representative of her prose style (Papi, Nombres y animales, and La mucama de Omicunlé), I attempt to demonstrate that the playful dynamism of R. Indiana’s narrative lies in a multilingual and delirious popular orality that seems to digest together –not without friction– pre- and postcolonial languages, giving rise to a literature fully “written in Dominican”.
Keywords: Rita Indiana; Dominican literature; orality; coloniality of language; diglossia and plurilingualism; spanglish.