By calling this extreme weather event “La Llorona,” environmental crisis is associated with the demise of indigenous peoples after the arrival of the Spanish in the 15th century, as well as by implication with more recent neo-imperial activity in the region. La Llorona - the weeping woman - is the name given to La Malinche, Hernan Cortés’s Nahua interpreter and mistress, often reviled for her key role in facilitating the Spanish conquest. With the help of the anemone she is first able to take on the body of a man and then fulfil a prophecy, which allows her to travel back in time and save the Caribbean Sea.īecause Acilde’s present is an age of “acid rains and epidemics in which prison s preferable to the outside.” It is an age of unbearable heat and of La Llorona, with its two years of rain. Uncomfortable in her own body, Acilde is desperate to get her hands on some Rainbowbrite, a prohibitively expensive drug that promises a complete sex change without surgery. It’s this anemone that sets off the chain of events driving the novel’s plot. Omicunlé watches carefully over a sacred sea anemone so rare that it could fetch up to $60,000. Acilde leaves life as a sex worker when one of her clients gets her a job as a maid for Omicunlé, an old woman who is religious advisor to the president of the Dominican Republic and is devoted to the Yoruba goddess of the ocean, Yemayá. The narrative follows Acilde, the young “mucama” of the original title, between the years 20, but there are numerous other temporal tentacles reaching back as far as 1606, when buccaneers were landing on the coasts of Hispaniola.

It’s hard to say exactly when the novel is set. The contamination is spreading from the Caribbean Sea to the Atlantic. Readers learn that three successive ecological disasters have finished off “practically every living thing under the sea.” One of these catastrophes was a biological weapons spill caused by an earthquake off the island’s coastline. This is a Caribbean in which the sea has turned to chocolate-colored sludge, devoid of all life forms. Tentacle is set in the Caribbean, but not the Caribbean of tranquil waters and white sand beaches so sought-after by Western holiday-makers. Tentacle reaches back and forward through the ages, harnessing the fluidity of time, gender, and the natural world to reflect on colonial history and imagine a deeply disturbing future. The new title is apt: sufficiently sinister for a book that imagines an age of hyper-capitalism and environmental collapse, evoking the insidious spread of control and disease. A review by Ellen Jones for The Los Angeles Review of Books.ĪCHY OBEJAS has chosen Tentacle as the English title for Dominican writer and musician Rita Indiana’s latest novel, originally published in Spanish as La mucama de Omicunlé.

Tentacle by Rita Indiana