Rita Indiana’s Fluid Temporalities and the Queering of Bodies, Time, and Place

Abstract

“SOUND THE SIRENS”, RITA INDIANA INSTRUCTS AT the beginning of her song “Como un dragón” (Like a dragon).1 In this lead single to the album Mandinga Times (2020),2 which marks her return to the musical stage, the Dominican author and singer-songwriter embodies the mandinga, a “queerly gendered creature”3 who serves as the titular inspiration for the album. Choosing the term mandinga for its multiple meanings, which encompass ethnicity, skin complexion, sexual and gender identity, as well as denoting the “end times”, “La Montra” – as Rita Indiana is known – appears as a trickster figure who develops lethal technology and lures individuals to their lab, combining folklore from the region with a queer and dystopian futurist aesthetic.4 The intertwining of Rita Indiana’s music and literary works is well documented and “Como un dragón” continues this trend, exploring themes from environmental destruction, the many forms of trafficking, and technology in the Caribbean, to Afrodiasporic spiritualities and the politics of race, gender, sexuality, and queerness across the region. Indeed, the exhortation to “sound the sirens”, prefaced by the mandinga’s own haunting call, plays on the dual meaning in the original Spanish; “suena la sirena” can mean both “sound the sirens” and “the siren sounds”, thereby invoking popular belief systems and broader folklore that have associated the siren of the seas with ensnarement, ecstasy, and death. Born from death, the genderqueer mandinga reinforces this link with the waters in numerous ways, two of which are particularly notable in this context.5 First, it invokes the ever-present history of the Middle Passage and the trafficking of millions of enslaved Africans to and between the Americas, during which physical and living death were omnipresent, the legacy of which continues today. Second, with regard to spirituality, the shared associations with death and queerness, as