(Poster for the exhibit made by Carol Rossetti, found @caribbeanlitstudiesuprm)
The University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez was host to multiple simultaneous events on Tuesday, March 6, 2018. One of them was the beginning of the “VII Coloquio ¿Del Otro Lao? Perspectivas y Debates Sobre Lo Cuir, Trans, Inter y otras rutas urgentes para el devenir cuir,” which lasted until Thursday, March 8, 2018. The colloquium itself offered different activities to meet the academic and creative interest of the student population. Experiencing the opening ceremony of it, I saw students thinking of which panels and workshops to attend as they waited in line to register for the conference, while ushers and association committees finished prepping their tables filled with infographics of different information about gender expression and identities. As I walked to witness the diversity of materials each table had, I stopped and gazed on a wall of posters with images of different Caribbean women writers and an eye-catching poster of the unity of these women and their importance in the Caribbean.
(picture found on instagram @problematicshopaholic)
As I gazed at the exhibit, I realized that it contained images of different women writers from the Caribbean. Each image contained biographical information about a different writer, a description of their experience being women, migrating constantly to different locations from their homeland to the mainland, and pieces of their literary works on the wall. As I was taking my time reading each of the posters on the wall, I recognized some of the writers on the exhibit, such as Julia de Burgos and Judith Ortiz Cofer, who are Puerto Rican women writers whose work opens the conversation on independence and intersectionality, and Mariposa Fernandez, a Nuyorican poet who expresses her experience in the Puerto Rican Diaspora. I was able to recognize these women writers due to previous courses that touched upon some of their work. However, I didn’t know who the other writers were or what their contribution was in our Caribbean heritage and culture.
(From left to right, Dr. Ricia Chansky, Celia M. Ayala, Iris A. Soto, Lourdes Rosado, and Joe A. Centeno)
The main purpose of this exhibition was to demonstrate to the public and student community the importance of identity, heritage, and culture through the literature of these Caribbean women writers. This project represents an outgrowth from Dr. Chansky’s Caribbean Literature course, where she dedicates a semester to opening conversations on the importance of having representation in the Caribbean and having stories told through literature. After the course, a group of students from the Department of English took interest in studying further Anglophone Caribbean literature and developed different projects on it. These are students who are alumni, undergraduate, and graduate students from the department who are interested in pursuing Caribbean Literature as a research interest. Some of the members of this group expressed their personal and academic reasons of why this exhibition is important to inform the public about women writers in the Caribbean.
Iris, a recently-graduated student from the Department of English, returned to her alma mater to take part of this exhibition. For her, this project was a chance to be able to express her love and interests of the Caribbean. She feels that, “it is important for students to know about Caribbean writers, especially women writers, and what they have contributed to our culture and heritage.” Similarly, an undergraduate student, Lourdes, envisions the exhibition as, “an inspiration for many students in our island” because “these women had the power to keep our culture and traditions alive with their poetry, music, and children’s books.”
Taking a closer look at the exhibition, the design of it gave the feeling as if a person was walking into an art gallery or collection. When students looked up the different Caribbean women writers, I saw that they would get excited as they recognized a few of them, but at the same time astonished, as they realized the many Caribbean women writers that are in the world. This is the reaction another current undergraduate student, Joe, had as he explained the different perspectives one can have when studying Caribbean literature, “especially exposing the existence of new writers to the public.” Joe explains that he “likes the way how [he] can identify with the writing and culture of these different women writers, as if [he] was feeling their experience through their writing.”
Graduate student, Celia, being a bilingual Caribbean female writer herself, feels interest and fascination towards these powerful women writers. She believes that “representation is very important for our Hispanic, Latinx, and Caribbean community because these women writers represent part of our narrative in which we can identify with.” Celia also expresses how this project has helped her with her own inspirations as a writer, where she “envisions herself as the different Caribbean women writers where each of them had to pass through different situations to find a safe space for them to be able to have a voice and tell their stories.”
Dr. Chansky explains that as part of the colloquium, the exhibition itself invites the public to open conversations about the multiple ways gender expression and identity can be seen through the lens of Caribbean literature, for these women also expressed in their writing how they performed their gender differently depending on the locality and sociocultural space they were in. For instance, women in the diaspora would focus on how they would explore their gender identity and sexuality and how these were affected in moving to different spaces. Dr. Chansky adds how “the multiple ways in which these writers explore gender identity helps us to understand that there are diverse ways to present the self and that we are allowed to construct our own genders. There’s little space to talk about these topics in our communities, and these writers serve this purpose of opening conversation of gender identities. ‘Queer,’ for example, is not a term that represents one meaning or idea; it transcends static definitions and its meaning depends upon how people view and interpret the term.”
This and more the exhibition of Women Writing for the Caribbean offers to our university and public community, where we are able to talk about our rich Caribbean heritage and culture, while at the same time open conversation about our own gender expressions and identities. This exhibition represents just one project that the Caribbean literature studies groups has worked on. They hope to accomplish more during the semester. If you are interested to know more of this group, you can find their official Facebook page @caribbeanlitstudiesuprm and Instagram caribbeanlitstudiesuprm.