The Limit of Political Possibilities in Corporeal Translations: Achy Obejas’s Translation of Rita Indiana’s La Mucama de Omicunlé

Abstract

In just under 200 pages, Rita Indiana masterfully interweaves dystopian, magical, and queer elements in her 2015 novel, La mucama de Omicunlé. Indiana offers a grim commentary on past, present, and future life in the Dominican Republic and on the political and environmental forces that threaten to destroy the archipelago. Given La mucama de Omicunlé’s complex form and content—revolving around a transgender character and former sex worker named Acilde—Achy Obejas faced a particularly challenging task as the Spanish-intoEnglish translator. Uncommon among other literary translators, Obejas translates literature both from Spanish into English and from English into Spanish and has therefore been described as a “bitextual translator.” In her most recent translation projects, Obejas aims to bring the timely works of Rita Indiana, a queer feminist Dominican writer and musician, to the Anglophone reader’s attention. Indiana and Obejas’s working relationship began in 2016 with the translation of Papi, Indiana’s third novel. Tentacle (2018, translation of La mucama de Omicunlé, 2015) marks Obejas’s second collaborative project with Indiana. When looking at the scope of Rita Indiana and Achy Obejas’s respective creative work, it is fitting that the pair would decide to collaborate as author and translator on two separate occasions. Indiana and Obejas’s relationship can be contextualized through Sonia Álvarez’s ideas on “translocas,” the cross-disciplinary and cross-border group of Latina and Latin American feminists who seek to disrupt heteronormative patriarchal racisms and sexisms across the Americas. Álvarez defines “translocas” as “women trans/dislocated in a physical sense and the (resulting) conceptual madness linked to attempts to understand unfamiliar scenarios with familiar categories: women and categories out of place.” As queer and diasporic Caribbean women, Indiana and Obejas work together, across the Caribbean Sea, to challenge the cisheteropatriarchy and its racist and sexist ideals, all while affirming their rightful place in the largely homogenized world literature canon. Indiana’s literary text has received significant critical attention, but translation scholars have yet to evaluate Obejas’s Tentacle, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award. Although Obejas’s translation hews closely to the original Spanish, there are some striking differences between the two texts, especially in relation to descriptions of the protagonist and his trans body. Specifically, although Acilde is misgendered in both versions, its effect is most apparent in Obejas’s translation because of her consistent use of gender pronouns. I argue, however, that Obejas’s translation exposes ideas of corporality and gender identity that are inherently more ambiguous in the original, primarily because of the nature of the Spanish language and its ability to omit gendered subject pronouns. Obejas’s decision recalls, then, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s view of translation as an intimate act of reading, thus calling for the queer feminist translator to surrender themselves to the original text. As Spivak argues, “[The queer feminist translator] must be able to confront the idea that what seems resistant in the space of English may be reactionary in the space of the original language.” Indeed, Obejas respects Indiana’s creative discourse to adhere to the gender binary, even if that means that the protagonist will be misgendered. Furthermore, Obejas’s version sheds light on the painful and universal reality of misgendering. For this reason, I see the translator’s decision as a critical exposition of the transphobia and homophobia that both Hispanophone and Anglophone readerships encounter. Beyond Spivak’s queer feminist perspective, my reading of Tentacle enters into dialogue with intersectional critique within transgender studies. Over TRANSLATION REVIEW 2022, VOL. 113, NO. 1, 22–32 https://doi.org/10.1080/07374836.2022.2068712