Dr. Aída Cartagena Portalatín

Dr. Aída Cartagena Portalatín (1918-1994), Dominican writer. Aída Cartagena was born in the town of Moca. Two years before her birth, the United States Marines had seized control of her country and placed it under a military government, and although they left in 1924, in 1930 an American-supported general named Rafael Trujillo began a violent, racially fueled thirty-one year reign as military dictator. Despite these circumstances, she completed high school and college in Moca, then earned a Ph.D. in humanities at UASD (Autonomous University of Santo Domingo) and did post-graduate work in music and theory at the Louvre in Paris. She and other Dominican writers had to find ways to express themselves under a government that jailed or murdered anyone who criticized it or its conservative values. In the mid-1940s she helped create the poesía sorprendida (“surprised poetry”) movement, which featured surrealistic poems that indirectly addressed the problems of society. Her 1945 poem “Como llorar la muerte de una rosa” (“How to Cry the Death of a Rose”), for instance, appears to be about the passing beauty of a rose but on a deeper level asks why people do not show pain at the deaths of others. Many of her works were published in the journal Poesía Sorprendida, which lasted from 1943 to 1948.

Cartagena Portalatín faced criticism not only from the government but also both from fellow writers who thought that women should not publish literature. In her writing, she challenged the common views of women as submissive, confined to the home, and defined only by their physical attractiveness and domestic skills. In “Una mujer está sola” (“A woman is alone”), the first openly feminist poem in Dominican history, she declares: “A woman is alone/Alone with her stature./With her eyes open./With her arms open./With her heart open like a wide silence.” She also criticized racism in her country and in the United States through works like La tierra escrita (The Written Land, 1967) and the short story La llamaban Aurora (“They Called Her Aurora,” 1992). The latter work is written from the point of view of a Dominican schoolgirl and au pair in New York; in it, the main character states, “I try to put up my hair, kinky, stiff, if that’s what I was born with, that’s the way it’ll stay. What doesn’t make sense is how they can put me down while at the same time they brag about my smarts…They filled my head with ideas about this being the Free World, and I find myself here exploited.” By writing about and celebrating black identity, she challenged the national myth that the Dominican Republic was a white country. In 1961, she founded the journal Brigadas Dominicanas (Dominican Brigades) which helped local authors get published. Her Escalera para Electra (Stairs for Electra, 1969) was the first Dominican novel to explore the issue of national identity after Trujillo’s death, and it was awarded a prize as one of the best Spanish-language novels in the world that year. She further explored Dominican identity in her 1981 poem collection Yania Tierra, in which the title character is a female representation of the country; this is also one of her only works to be translated into English. Cartagena Portalatín’s more than twenty other books include Víspera del sueño (Dream’s eve, 1945), La voz destaca (The unleashed voice, 1961), and the essay collection Culturas africanas: Rebeldes concausa (African Cultures: Rebels with a Cause, 1985). She also taught at UASD, worked with the United Nations’ cultural branch in Paris, and served as director of the Museo de Antropología (Anthropological Museum). She remained active in literary and cultural activities until her death from heart disease in 1994.

©David Brodnax, Sr.