What Is Rage?

In everyday usage we have found that anger and rage are used interchangeably, despite the fact that the latter is a deeper and more powerful expression of the former. We have specifically chosen to use rage in this Element because it most accurately maps the emotions and actions of the women protagonists in Bruised Hibiscus and Negra. Anger has a relatively simple etymological history: it denotes “a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility” and derives from Old Norse “angr” meaning grief and “angra” meaning vex (Pearsall, Reference Pearsall and Pearsall1999: s.v.‚ “Anger”). The primary definitions of rage are also unambiguous and state that it is a type of “violent and uncontrollable anger,” and “violent anger arising from a particular context” and, as a verb, “to rage” is to “feel or express rage” and “to continue violently or with great force” (Pearsall, Reference Pearsall and Pearsall1999: s.v.‚ “Rage”). Unlike anger, therefore, rage signifies feelings as well as actions and violence is a component of its expression. The secondary definition of rage introduces further complexity as “a vehement desire or passion,” thus moving the general “feelings” into the realm of intimate relations. When we investigate the etymology of rage, we find that it derives from a variation of the Latin “rabies” – “a dangerous viral disease of dogs and other mammals,” which when transferred to humans causes “madness and convulsions.” This range of meanings inherent within rage captures the intricacies of key characters’ behaviors in our two novels in reaction to their experiences of misogynistic emotional and physical violence in a way that “anger” does not and that at the same time, perhaps unsurprisingly, attracts censure: Women who rage in Bruised Hibiscus and Negra are also considered mad or dangerous. Further dictionary definitions list “hysteria” and “fury” as synonyms for rage, both of which are words with histories connected to women (Merriam Webster Online, s.v. “Rage”) (Merriam Webster Online; Concise Oxford Dictionary). Exploring such relational definitions, we find that the primary and secondary definitions of “hysteria,” an emotion originally thought to be associated with the womb, overlap with “rage” and are also relevant: (1) “a psychological disorder whose symptoms include selective amnesia, volatile emotions, and attention-seeking behavior” and (2) “exaggerated or uncontrollable emotion or excitement” (Merriam Webster Online, s.v. “Hysteria”). There are telling similarities between English and Spanish etymologies of rage. The Spanish word “rabia” also derives from the Latin “rabies,” but has several synonyms, that is, “ira,” “enojo,” “enfado,” “coraje,” “cólera,” “furia,” “furor,” “exasperación,” “irritación,” and so on (DLE RAE). These synonyms describe varying levels of “anger” or “rage,” but interestingly, the Official Dictionary of the Spanish Language of the Royal Spanish Academy (Diccionario de la lengua española (DLE), Real Academia Española (RAE)) does not currently include any of the gendered aspects we notice in the English dictionaries. However, the term “rabia” has political connotations that are relevant to this Element, mainly decolonial and feminist. The Mexican decolonial indigenous movement, Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), emerged in 1994 as an armed uprising against the neoliberal economic agreement NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement, 1992) that disproportionately favors the US and Canada and practically reinstates Mexico’s neocolonial dependence on its northern neighbors. The EZLN transcended its status as an armed guerrilla organization and gained political autonomy within the Mexican state of Chiapas, and developed a contemporary philosophical tradition, derived from Mayan and Marxist thought. This tradition has, in the past three decades, become one of the foundational political philosophies in Latin America, known as zapatismo, and impacted, among others, decolonial theory. One of the pillars of zapatismo is “digna rabia,” “dignified rage.” It is an anticolonial understanding of rage and encourages the oppressed to embrace their rage against their oppressors as a transformative tool instead of suppressing the rage (Poma & Gravante, Reference Poma and Gravante2019). More recently, feminist activists and scholars in Spain and Latin America have employed the term “rabia feminista” (“feminist rage”) in a similarly political way, albeit in an explicitly feminist fashion. These philosophical and political conceptualizations of “rabia” are highly relevant for the Hispanophone Caribbean, as our analysis of Negra demonstrates.

Using these etymological intersections, which link rage, women, and women’s bodies as a point of departure, we theorize how rage and feminist solidarity are deployed by Nunez and Guerra. Each author strategically positions rage and feminist solidarity as mechanisms of speaking back to the intersecting violence of patriarchy, racism, and colonialism as practiced in the Caribbean. Our analysis traces how Nunez and Guerra contest who gets to rage and with what consequences in Caribbean contexts. Whilst an examination of the contours of rage revealed in its dictionary definitions and as presented in our selected novels is fundamental to our purpose, we must highlight the conundrum that many of the secondary materials we use reference “anger” rather than rage and we will aim to reduce any confusion such varied terminology might produce by consistently returning our analysis to “rage.” We note that “anger” is powerful and, like rage, it is frequently denied to women as legitimate emotional territory (Gay, Reference Gay2016), and is therefore embraced by feminists, but nevertheless, exactly because of its etymological complexity, we hope to encourage the more specific and widespread usage of “rage” when it is contextually appropriate. The scholars we reference in this Element who use “anger” are Sara Ahmed, Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, and Roxane Gay. In Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her (Reference Chemaly2018) and Brittany Cooper’s Eloquent Rage (Reference Cooper2018), “anger” and “rage” are used interchangeably to a degree, although increasingly “rage” is the preferred term, particularly by these and other (Black) feminist scholars, including Jennifer C. Nash, Samantha Pinto, and Marisol LeBrón. Kaplan et al. remind us that, “[t]he links between women and anger, feminism and rage, are long standing” (Reference Kaplan, Haley and Mitra2021: 785), however, it is fair to say that a linguistic shift has occurred that demonstrates a preference for “rage” rather than “anger” to accompany the scholarly emphasis on the productive and transformative aspects of this affect. In Ugly Feelings (Reference Ngai2005), Sianne Ngai addresses this transformative power of rage and underscores that one always knows what causes one’s rage (27). As our close readings of Bruised Hibiscus and Negra show, this cognitive component is one of substantial relevance to our theorization of feminist rage.

Overall, feminists recognize the problematic gendered connotations of “anger” and the pathologization of rage (Kaplan et al., Reference Kaplan, Haley and Mitra2021: 785) when it is connected to women. What we find notable about the 2021 Signs special issue on rage is that it addresses the ubiquity of feminist rage in the contemporary moment and delineates its transformative components. It is concerned with social movements and activism in the analogue and digital realms, the Global North and the Global South, and expands feminist theory on rage. However, it is less attentive to representations of rage in the visual arts, music, and fiction. We have chosen to examine novelistic representations of rage and feminism because fiction so effectively and eloquently theorizes and shows that feminist rage can be “personal and social, affective and political” (Reference Kaplan, Haley and Mitra2021: 787). Furthermore, fiction attends “to questions of privilege, diverse rages, queer rage, and the rage of people of color; that explored rage as a conundrum, or double agent” (Reference Kaplan, Haley and Mitra2021: 787).

Our analysis in this Element draws upon Black feminist thought, as does the contemporary feminist debate on rage generally. There is a scholarly consensus that Audre Lorde’s essay “The Uses of Anger: Women responding to racism” (Reference Lorde and Lorde1984) constitutes the foundational theorization of feminist rage. As a case in point, every essay in the abovementioned Signs special issue on rage quotes this essay. Lorde considers anger a legitimate and necessary political resource for confronting systems of oppression, particularly racism and Black women’s affective responses to it. She emphasizes how:

Lorde also challenges racial categories and calls for solidarity. As part of the Signs special issue, Nash and Pinto use “the history of Black feminist rage and its attention to the ‘problem’ of white women [to chart] a path toward different political feeling and narrativization – and toward a model of structural critique that values feeling as a window into critical desires and structures that do not yet exist” (885) and we too aim to expand the remit of feminist rage by examining instances where such rage facilitates feminist solidarity across boundaries of class, ethnicity and race in the Caribbean. Whilst Nash and Pinto are attentive to Black feminist rage as public and as performative, we seize on the opportunity presented in Bruised Hibiscus and Negra to examine feminist rage in private as well as public articulations between women and men and in defiance of colonial and heteropatriarchal structures.

The connections between collective rage and solidarity are particularly pronounced in Caribbean contexts. Moreover, Caribbean women’s rage and the work of Caribbean women writers in the twenty-first century teach us to consider the connections between rage, feminism, and solidarity, thus allowing us to broaden current conversations on feminist rage. Bruised Hibiscus and Negra particularly encourage us to consider acts of feminist solidarity on individual, small-scale levels, not only at collective, large-scale levels. As our close readings suggest, a rage that entails acts of solidarity at an individual level can aim for collective transformation by tackling systems of oppression that shape societies. These novels also suggest, we argue, that often the large-scale level of collective transformation can fail, while transformation on individual levels is achieved. Fiction is, consequently, a necessary political intervention on a small scale, and we regard it as a particularly relevant intervention in times and contexts that exclude women from public discourse and political leadership. Paula Morgan and Valerie Youssef’s Writing Rage (Reference Morgan and Youssef2006) identifies patriarchal rage expressed violently as a cultural phenomenon introduced via centuries of colonialism and one that remains a virulent component of contemporary Caribbean societies. We do not disagree, but whereas Morgan and Youssef focus on acts of enraged violence and the interplay between literary and linguistic discourses as applied to the lived experience of Caribbean peoples, we are motivated by the gap that exists between expressions of rage in Caribbean literature and the theorization of how that rage is expressed. In our analysis of Bruised Hibiscus and Negra we engage with the following questions: How and why does rage sometimes facilitate feminist solidarity? Whilst male rage against women is commonly rendered through the depiction of rape and femicide, beyond a specific eruption of violence to what extent is rage narratable? How do female characters express rage, and how do authors write women’s rage? How do literary texts focus upon and give voice to the rage that is stimulated within women in response to gender-based violence? Our approach is both intersectional feminist and decolonial, and as such, we aim to broaden the scholarship on affect theory and the Caribbean by introducing rage as a vector of feminist solidarity. The particular relevance of rage as a driver of decolonial thought was established by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (Reference Fanon1963). He hints at the political implications of this emotion, but also moves on from that assertion quite quickly. Marisol LeBrón is committed to bringing the Caribbean into the contemporary (North American) feminist conversation on rage. In her Signs article “Policing Coraje in the Colony. Toward a Decolonial Feminist Politics of Rage in Puerto Rico” (2021), she positions rage (or coraje, in Spanish) within anticolonial movements, directly drawing on Fanon and examining social movements in Puerto Rico since 2019 protesting the island’s debt exploitation by the US within the frame of colonial dependency. She identifies rage as “an essential political emotion” (802) that mobilizes resistance against this “deadly colonial relationship” (803). She highlights the contributions of Puerto Rican feminists in “conjuring antidebt futures” and emphasizes that “[f]or these feminists, coraje has been key to the decolonial praxis that this historical conjuncture requires.” (822). We find ourselves lingering on LeBrón’s idea of “conjuring” because of its resonance with the political and imaginative work of Caribbean women novelists, particularly those, like Nunez and Guerra, who write new and dissenting narratives focalized through expressions of rage and solidarity. Another aspect of LeBrón’s study sticks with us: her emphasis on rage as a collective affect rather than one contained in individuals. Sara Ahmed in The Cultural Politics of Emotion specifies how emotions have the potential to create bonds and not division within oppressed groups (Reference Ahmed2014: 174–176) and even that some emotions “undo … the separation of the individual from others” (174). In alignment with Ahmed, we argue that rage is one of these emotions that can create bonds, which is an important first step for political transformation. However, as we observe at work in Caribbean women’s literature, bonds can be fragile and do not necessarily lead to action. We suggest that active communication about the causes of rage, when shared, leads to a realization of the necessity of transformative action through solidarity.

Before rage can facilitate solidarity, communication is necessary; more specifically, a conversation about the feelings of rage and its causes, and a relationship that facilitates such a conversation are required. Friendship can be such a relationship, as our novels propose. Both Bruised Hibiscus and Negra center friendships, specifically female friendships, and advance their plots around them. Rosa and Zuela in Bruised Hibiscus and Nina and Lu in Negra share their feelings of rage and, through conversations, learn to identify the structures that enrage them. Our analyses trace the development of these conversations and friendships to understand the varied acts of solidarity and their functions in the two texts. The question of community-building relationships within feminist movements and as part of feminist activism and life are integral to feminist projects. “Solidarity” and “friendship” but also “sisterhood” are some of the related key terms used, debated, and, occasionally, dismissed within feminist activism, arts, and academia. In a recent article titled “Sisterhood is X: On Feminist Solidarity Then and Now” (Reference Mitra2023), Durba Mitra traces the discussions of feminist solidarity through the concept of sisterhood from the 1970s to the twenty-first century. Amidst the anti-imperial internationalism of the 1970s and 1980s, transnational feminist solidarity experienced a boom, and a new vocabulary emerged. “Sisterhood” surfaced as one of the popular terms of the period. According to Mitra, in the term “women allied the feminist movement with larger politics of collective action and claimed an essential place in the global political family” (434). Despite its initial popularity, white Western feminists’ focus on the universality of the concept sparked debates predominantly among Black feminists and feminists of color, as they understood how “[t]he history of sisterhood had long been entrenched in troubling colonial imaginary that utilized the language of kinship to fortify racial domination and the gender policing project of empire” (434). The emphasis on solidarity did not diminish and the term “sisterhood” was not rejected, as Mitra further argues. In the 1980s, sisterhood was reimagined, most prominently by Audre Lorde (“The Uses of Anger”) and bell hooks (“Sisterhood: Political Solidarity Between Women,” 1986) who pointed out the need for communication among feminists across racial and class boundaries with the objective to overcome the notion of common oppression as the sole viable factor for solidarity among feminists. The following decades witnessed the rejection of the term in key contributions by Maria Lugones and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí in the 1990s and early 2000s, respectively. In “Sisterhood and Friendship as Feminist Models” (Reference Lugones, Alake Rosezella, Weiss and Friedman1995), written by María Lugones in collaboration with Pat Alake Rosezella, they reject the idealized definition of sisterhood across racial boundaries precisely because white feminism does not, according to the authors, succeed in “including egalitarianism across differences” (137). They pinpoint the notion of unconditionality as the principal obstacle to the concept

As an alternative to “sisterhood,” Lugones proposes “friendship” and values its political character: “I find friendship interesting in the building of a feminist ethos because I am interested in bonding among women across differences” (141). She defines friendship as a commitment to act in ways that take the other’s well-being into account and, unlike sisterhood, does not imply unconditionality but embraces plurality (141–143). Thus, friendship, as proposed by Lugones, overcomes the issues of sisterhood that bell hooks and Audre Lorde identified. In the early 2000s, Oyěwùmí declared feminist sisterhood, particularly in its global approach, a failed project, as its conceptualization is rooted in the Anglo–American nuclear family and imposed by white feminism on Black women and women of color. The close bonds between sisters, as understood in the Anglo–American nuclear family and African American feminists like hooks and Lorde alike, are not reflective of kinship and bonds in African societies. Additionally, Oyěwùmí rejects the notion of gender as constitutive of political alliance (Reference Oyewumi2003: 10–19).

More recently, feminist debates about sisterhood and friendship have become less polarized, with some scholars like Durba Mitra wondering if sisterhood might be relevant again but failing to provide a definitive answer to the question. Others embrace the concept of friendship and develop it. For instance, in the introduction to their edited collection Dissident Friendships (2016), Elora Halim Chowdhury and Liz Philipose define friendship as

For them, friendship has a transformative potential and is rooted in the affective. Furthermore, they consider it an indispensable foundation for feminist solidarity (10–11). Chowdhury and Philipose focus on feminist friendship and transnational solidarity, and friendships that develop in a political or activist context. The idea of solidarity in and through friendship is also discernible in other contexts. In her essay The Radical Potential of Female Friendship (Reference Behrooz2023), Anahit Behrooz encourages us to reconsider understanding (female) friendship as rooted in solidarity as opposed to family. She reminds us that solidarity in its political sense stems from the left and is “used to describe a state of perpetual willingness to act that braces the relationship between political comrades, by collectivising subjugation and the response towards it” (58). She proceeds to explain that the leftist idea of camaraderie and solidarity should not be conflated with solidarity in relation to friendship but emphasizes “a marked and beguiling slippage between the two that points to the inherently radical possibilities of both – their latent insubordination, the liberation they locate within human connection” (58). Turning to Bruised Hibiscus and Negra, we see the application of these ideas on solidarity that emerges in friendships, with the affective, specifically rage, at their core.

Thus far, we have highlighted the need to engage with affect, specifically rage, in the linked contexts of feminist scholarship and the Caribbean. After providing an etymology of rage, we have positioned it within intersectional feminist and decolonial discourse. In our translinguistic close readings, we explore the intertwining of rage and solidarity, and how Nunez and Guerra represent and further complicate these links. After all, rage is all the rage in current feminist scholarship, activism, and art. Bruised Hibiscus and Negra, published in 2000 and 2013, respectively, are salient examples of the significance of feminist rage in the Caribbean that emerges much earlier than the current historical moment. In the two following sections, we do more than answer the question to what extent friendships can be political. We also show how protagonists gain an understanding of shared oppressions and of differences in their experiences. Our analyses suggest how solidarity develops from the acknowledgment, demonstration, and engagement with feminist expressions of rage.

“Man–Woman Business” That Enrages

Beginning with Zuela, her acts of feminist solidarity enable her to finally act against the physical and psychological violence she suffers at the hands of her husband, Ho Sang Chin, whom she refers to as “the Chinaman,” referencing his birthplace. Calling him the Chinaman, even just in her own thoughts, is an act of micro-resistance as it denies him individuality and is also a retaliation against his renaming of her (Nunez, Reference Nunez2000: 143). Zuela’s father named her “Hija,” which Ho Sang first translates and changes to “Daughter” before choosing to call her “Zuela,” a reference to the homeland he steals her from, Venezuela (83, 155). Naming is one of Nunez’s consistent narrative acts of doubling. Zuela and Ho Sang’s names gender and locate them geographically whilst also signaling the traumas they have suffered or perpetrated. Emboldened by feminist solidarity and friendship, by the end of the novel and as a grown woman, Zuela reclaims “Daughter” and discards “Zuela” as a part of her movement toward self-determination (285). Prior to that, however, Zuela’s rage toward Ho Sang builds slowly. Several decades her senior, Ho Sang, a survivor of the Opium WarsFootnote ² in China that obliterated his family, including a wife and daughter, recreates himself in Trinidad as a shopkeeper and opium trader. On a buying trip to neighboring Venezuela, he “sails up the Orinoco” river (154) and takes the child Zuela from her widower father. He first rapes her at age eleven and then marries her at age fourteen. Ho Sang is a textual representation of the power and violence of the global web of British colonialism. The violence he does to Zuela can also be read as a metaphor of the colonial project: he rapes her over and over, asserting her submission as wifely duty once he marries her; in other words, he obscures the violence using the frameworks of social norms. A habitual opium smoker, the narrative reveals, he experiences hallucinations that merge Zuela with his dead Chinese wife and daughter. He also concocts a mirage of negotiation, a notion that Zuela has some agency and benefits from his violence by granting her sovereignty over their children, thereby ensuring her putative consent to his assaults. His manipulation comes to the fore in one of Zuela’s interior monologues as follows:

By presenting Ho Sang’s violent sexual assaults from Zuela’s perspective, Nunez conveys both rage and the absence of its articulation. Harnessing the narrative intensity of repetition, a technique repeated throughout the text, Nunez uses the nine yeses in this passage to evacuate the word of its affirmative meaning and presents the power of suppressed rage building toward a moment of explosion: By the age of twenty-nine, when the novel opens, Zuela has borne ten children, and Ho Sang is an old man. Her rage gradually takes shape as she grows into an understanding of the violence that has been done to her and which, despite their tacit agreement, daily threatens her children. In her delimited world, which is bounded by work in Ho Sang’s shop and keeping her children safe, Zuela’s rage is rarely expressed aloud, but it gathers momentum from her feeling of solidarity with other women who are victims of their husbands. Her rage is eventually released when she inadvertently fails to protect her eldest daughter, Agnes, from Ho Sang.

As an indigenous woman disconnected from her original community with no social or economic independence, it initially appears that Zuela is positioned on the periphery of society. And yet, as a mother and as a woman subject to the violence, sexual whims, and anxieties of her abusive husband, Zuela is linked to all the women in the text, even those who are educated and in possession of some independence or functioning social networks. The agency of Zuela’s character, including her feelings of rage and connection to other women, is consistently and strongly communicated through her thoughts. Occasionally, her feelings of rage are communicated through direct interaction with Rosa or Mary Christophe. The latter is an Afro–Caribbean woman whose own knowledge and experience of racism and violent patriarchy add a further dimension to Nunez’s depiction of Trinidad. Allowing herself to feel rage and reflect upon its origins is the first step of Zuela’s political awakening. The emotion enables her to recognize the intersecting systems of oppression that authorize Ho Sang’s dominant and violent behavior toward her. Through conversations, Zuela, Rosa, and Mary Christophe gain a profound understanding of the differences in their experiences while simultaneously realizing that some forms of oppression are shared. Eventually, this understanding will foster feminist solidarity. This process commences at the beginning of the novel with Zuela’s internal and solitary reaction to news of the violent murder and decapitation of a woman by her spouse. This woman, Paula Inge, an upper class, Scandinavian, who is a doctor, is murdered by her Indo–Trinidadian husband, Dalip Singh, who is also a doctor. Her murder confounds the island community’s overtly classed and racialized ontology as this passage precisely records:

To her own surprise, Zuela is outraged by the news, as she is alerted to the possibility of suffering a similar violent death at the hands of Ho Sang. This exposition about Paula Inge from the omniscient narrator introduces three intertwined ideas which are central to the novel: a desperate desire to glean meaning from atrocity as we observed in the exposition of Ho Sang’s early life; the objectification of women also already noted in Ho Sang’s literal acquisition of Zuela; and the vivid and powerful afterlife of colonialism, plantation slavery and indenture in the Caribbean including the fetishization of whiteness and the inverse demonization of blackness and brownness. Each of these ideas deserves closer examination as a means of elucidating Zuela’s rage and the feminist solidarity that develops around her.

The communal insistence on the symbolism of Paula Inge’s murder (“there must be some meaning”) is shared by Zuela and the meaning she arrives at is connected to the specifically feminist rage which she feels. By focalizing much of the text through Zuela’s experiences and point of view, Nunez asserts power and significance for this putatively lowly character. We propose that Zuela’s significance as a member of the fictional Trinidadian society is manifested through her expression of rage and the recognition of her rage as legitimate. Whilst Nunez is careful to map rage as endemic to the world of the text, some rage, whilst understandable, is targeted at the wrong people and therefore hurts or destroys them. However, the meaning that Zuela derives from Paula Inge’s murder is presented as legitimate in part because it is independently interpreted the same way, across town, by Rosa, and in part because Zuela’s interpretation introduces the theme of feminist solidarity. When she learns of the femicide, Zuela’s rage at her husband’s abuse and objectification awakens a desire for his destruction and a renewed passion for self-preservation. She is motivated to resist becoming a “dead lump of flesh” (6) and instead to project (and protect) herself differently via new “meaning” and self-definition. This is what Rebecca Traister calls “transformative moments of rage” that ultimately “remake the geography of possibility” (Traister, Reference Traister2018: xxx). Zuela’s rage is figured as a living thing, originally “a germ lodged in her soul, that broke loose and sprouted roots” when her husband attempts to explain and thereby dismiss Inge’s murder as merely “man-woman business” (Nunez, Reference Nunez2000: 8). That dismissal fuels a quiet rage and murderous thoughts in her where before she had passively wished that the elderly and infirm Ho Sang might simply die sooner rather than later thereby ending the torment that began when he transported her from Venezuela. Whilst others try to fathom what would lead a man to decapitate his wife, white or otherwise, the omniscient narrator reveals that Zuela’s pent-up rage enables a precise and deep understanding of what motivates so-called “man-woman business” and this rage and understanding is expressed in imagery that brings to the fore how she has been both silenced and sexually abused in her own home:

The repetition and word choice in these two sentences delineate the elements of Zuela’s rage against gender-based violence, including but not limited to the idea of “stuffing” a body into a bag like a haul of rubbish. The phrase “even a white woman” alerts the reader to Zuela’s recognition of the privilege and protection whiteness sometimes confers on people like Paula Inge. Furthermore, and perhaps more radically, Zuela’s thoughts suggest that any woman might herself stuff “a man into a coconut burlap bag.” As such, the reader becomes aware of Zuela’s conviction that all women are capable of acting upon rage at the gender-based violence they are subjected to. This quotation lays the groundwork for our analysis of the cross-racial, cross-class, and cross-ethnic feminist solidarity between Zuela, Rosa, and Mary Christophe, facilitated by rage. As the phrase “gouge out her eyes and feast in her mouth” suggests, Zuela and other characters learn to resist their silencing and strive for clearer vision and a louder voice in the face of gender-based violence. The focal point of Zuela’s rage, signaled by the phrase “swallow his balls and chew up his cock” are the very tools of violent masculinity and objectification that Ho Sang repeatedly uses against her. What is notable here is the graphic and bold reversal of imagery and power that Zuela’s rage enables her to express. Her desire is to destroy the body parts that symbolize patriarchy.

The novel’s references to and considerations of the buying and re-naming of people, the social and cultural subjugation of women, and the reproductive violence against Black and indigenous women make it impossible to ignore how this fictional Trinidad, not unlike locations across the world, is still bound to its slaveholding and settler colonial past, whose afterlives shape the present. As such, there is a specific politics undergirding the articulation of Zuela’s rage. Nunez’s text, like Zuela herself, quietly seethes with recognition of historical and contemporary entanglements, alerting us to an additional violence, “the violence of forgetting” (Lowe, Reference Lowe2015: 41). As Lisa Lowe states‚

Bruised Hibiscus engages in a specific decolonial discourse that refuses “the obfuscations of the dominant” in pursuit of illuminating the “residual” and thereby positioning the voices of Caribbean women, enraged and otherwise, as central to an understanding of the present as well as the past. Zuela’s understanding of the complexity of “man-woman business” breaks her feeling of isolation within Ho Sang’s orbit and feeds her rage. Whilst Ho Sang may presume that she is residual and adjunct to his actions of commerce and conquest, her legibility only increases. The two sentences quoted in the previous paragraph from her perspective reveal how the presumed private nature of “man-woman business” is but a symptom and expression of ongoing patriarchal and colonial cultural norms, quite often played out in public. Zuela’s rage, developed but suppressed over many years, bolsters her understanding of gender-based violence and how to cripple it. Following Lowe (Reference Lowe2015) and Stoler (Reference Stoler2002), we note that Nunez gives voice to domestic, individual realms of violence. She exposes how these are overtly connected to public and collective forms of violence and subjugation introduced through practices of enslavement, indenture, and colonialism, and which persist into the late twentieth century. Lucy Evans (Reference Evans2024) discusses Trinidad and Tobago’s 1986 Sexual Offences Bill as a key “reference point in scenes of marital rape in Bruised Hibiscus” (162). The bill was amended and weakened in 1994 and 2000 to such an extent that it confined the definition of nonconsensual intercourse between husband and wife only to parties that were divorced or separated (162), and in none of its iterations did the bill protect male victims of rape and sexual violence (163). (One might also look to the US for a similar trajectory of sexual offenses legislation. Worryingly, current discussions in the US on AI-generated deepfakes of sexually explicit images demonstrate a reluctance to criminalize them.) Evans notes how the nation’s “late twentieth-century sexual offenses legislation draws upon a moral framework rooted in colonialism” (163) whilst Nunez extracts these contexts to suggest “the invisibility of same sex coercive intimacies within Trinidad’s legal discourse” at the same time that it “facilitates sexual violence committed by men against their wives and sexual partners” (164). Evans is right to emphasize the important work accomplished by Nunez by narrativizing gender-based violence in the Caribbean. We agree that there is particular value in Nunez’s depiction of intimate relations, which “cut across racial, ethnic, and class divides” (167) not least because the novel surfaces a shared decolonial rage that offers some survival strategies for Rosa and Zuela where the law fails them. Given its thematic emphasis on gender-based violence, Evans analyzes Bruised Hibiscus as part of the domestic noir genre of crime fiction. However, this is not an exact positioning as domestic noir has been most successful depicting white, suburban North American spaces whilst Nunez’s “distinct Caribbean aesthetic … explores, from a gendered perspective, the region’s traumatic histories of colonialism, slavery and … indenture” (2024: 178).

Rage and Solidarity

The notion of rage as productive and catalyzed through feminist solidarity is an example of how Lorde’s theories of rage illuminate Bruised Hibiscus. Female solidarity and rage are the means by which Zuela eventually halts the abuses she suffers and also begins to create a different narrative for her family. As Lorde states, “The anger of women can transform difference through insight into power. For anger between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth” (Lorde, Reference Lorde and Lorde1984: 131). A specific urge to both claim and shape her own future and that of her ten children motivates Zuela. She learns to use her own rage with “precision” as revealed in her conviction that,

As suggested by “fend for themselves” and “livelihoods,” Zuela is alert to the economics of racial capitalism and is concerned with the practical steps she can take to protect her children and their futures. At the same time, the way in which Ho Sang’s particular cruelty also trapped her emotionally and psychologically are vulnerabilities that she wishes to avoid passing on. She achieves these insights by giving her own rage an outlet, the final outward physical expression of which is as transformative as it is violent. When Ho Sang rapes Agnes, a daughter who Zuela had thus far protected by sending her away to a convent school, and who is her mother’s sometimes protector, Zuela’s rage is fully unleashed and is fortified by the memory of the furious spirits of other women:

Zuela kills Ho Sang by suffocating him with the “ganga smoke” he has coerced her and their children to blow into his lungs, when he was too weak to inhale it himself. He uses the drug to dim his nightmares about his crimes, including his crimes against women and girls. But, in a diversion from Lorde’s theory, Zuela’s fortified rage both destroys and “births change,” it is actually “fatal” for Ho Sang and yet transformative for Zuela and her family. After the fact, as if to underscore the magnitude of what finally drives Zuela to act, Nunez recasts Zuela’s actions in passively constructed sentences that further emphasize the constraint of Zuela’s rage over two decades: “For years she had plotted to make the Chinaman pay for stealing her childhood … She had not made life hell for the Chinaman. No matter what she had not harmed him. Not until he forgot that Agnes was his daughter” (285). Thus, although he had made life hell for Zuela, her rage becomes transformative when paired with her maternal guilt that Agnes has been harmed. Her action is facilitated through a perceived feminist solidarity with Ho Sang’s first wife and daughter – the ghosts mentioned in the passage above who “force him to face her.”

Nunez presents Zuela’s mistreatment at the hands of Ho Sang in parallel to the mistreatment suffered by her friend Rosa at the hands of her husband, Cedric Des Vignes. Zuela and Rosa’s narratives are frequently conveyed in alternating chapters and reveal events experienced separately but in tandem. Most significantly, in terms of rage, they learn about Paula Inge’s murder at the same time, and it pushes to the surface a repressed memory that Zuela and Rosa share of having witnessed, as twelve-year-olds, the sexual assault of an even younger girl, from behind the titular hibiscus bush, which happens to be red. Furthermore, their “husbands’ impassioned reaction” to the Inge murder (5) jolts both of them out of years of “numb passivity” (5), a lingering effect, we learn, of the assault they witnessed in childhood. In addition to such intersections however, Rosa’s story offers an important counterpoint to Zuela’s: Rosa does not go on to cultivate her own form of rage but instead works her way out of a web of self-hate and shame (and, rather than hastening her husband’s death, she goes to great lengths to preserve his life when he falls ill). Nevertheless, she is aided in each of these transformative actions by the feminist solidarity offered by Zuela and Mary Christophe. The latter “was a better mother to [Rosa] than her mother was” claims Zuela, and teaches Rosa “how to free herself” (285). Zuela and Mary Christophe, and the specifically female bonds that connect them to Rosa, are fundamental to Rosa’s efforts at self-determination and eventual liberation from her husband’s relentless bullying and rage. When Rosa hears of Zuela’s maltreatment, she imbibes a sense of possibility and inverts Zuela’s “yeses” to Ho Sang into her own ultimatum “never again”:

Through the representation of rage and feminist solidarity, Nunez’s parallel narratives showcase the power of shifting ontological and epistemological frameworks for Rosa and Zuela. Their understanding of themselves, their world, and of paradigms of friendship and love are expanded and transformed once they are able to move beyond the circumscribed contexts controlled by their husbands, Cedric and Ho Sang, and instead build friendship and solidarity with each other, Mary Christophe and, eventually, Zuela’s new male feminist friend, Tong Lee. It is important to analyze Rosa’s characterization more attentively for three reasons: First, a closer look at her character adds further dimensions to Nunez’s representation of racialized, classed, and sexual identities and to our understanding of the links between rage and solidarity. Second, Rosa’s fraught relationship with Cedric highlights other important dimensions to the afterlives of Caribbean coloniality and enslavement, beyond those suggested by Zuela (indigeneity) and Ho Sang (indenture). Third, after establishing Rosa as a character who the reader might initially align with Paula Inge, because of the shared class status and the privileges that accompany whiteness, Nunez topples such racial certainties when Rosa discovers her father is not Thomas Appleton, but rather an unnamed Black man, and a former worker on the Appleton plantation. In a shift that is analogous to Zuela’s eventual sense of empowerment, Rosa’s eventual self-understanding, including as a mixed-race woman, enables her to take a series of actions unconstrained by the expectations of her husband and other men. However, this becomes a tragically inconsequential threat to established hierarchies of power that have heretofore shaped her life according to heteronormative circuits of white masculinity and capitalism. Read alongside Zuela’s narrative, Rosa’s story charts a similar, sometimes identical release of repressed memories that become an empowering force for her. Although she benefits from her friendship with Zuela and Mary Christophe, her brutal murder toward the end of the novel emphasizes the seemingly limitless capacity of destructive male rage to perpetuate itself and stymie feminist solidarity.

As our discussion pivots from Zuela to both Zuela and Rosa, we find E. Serna-Martinez’s approach to the literary representation of rage and feminist solidarity in Caribbean women’s literature to be an especially useful frame for our analysis of Rosa’s character. As we have been arguing, shared experiences of violent patriarchy help to fuel rage in Bruised Hibiscus. Although Nunez uses Trinidad as her primary setting, the central antagonisms that focus the plot also suggest how feminist rage can be read in a broader Caribbean context. Addressing the feminist “knee-scraper” figure that Jamaican author Opal Palmer Adisa writes about, Serna-Martinez analyzes this figure as “an outraged, refractory female subject located in her native Caribbean, a decolonizing force, yet oftentimes unacknowledged” and further, that the knee-scraper is a “contesting presence,” “a wounded woman figure that conveys her nonconformity in spite of the shame projected onto her body by a patriarchal society that judges her, condemns her, and discredits her” (Serna-Martinez, Reference Serna-Martínez2018: 12). Serna-Martinez references an essay by Adisa where she coins the phrase “knee-scraper” to describe herself as well as the impetus for her work as a Caribbean woman writer. She states:

Rosa and Zuela both fit this knee-scraper paradigm: they are each “outraged,” “wounded women,” and nonconformists, have shame projected onto them, are judged by the patriarchal society in which they live, and at various stages of the narrative, they are condemned and discredited. Serna-Martinez suggests that an additional characteristic of “knee-scrapers” is that their stories are suppressed. Bruised Hibiscus revolves around the hidden stories of both male and female characters, but Rosa and Zuela’s stories are able to emerge through recollections of their girlhood friendship, mutual recognition as adult women, and their feminist solidarity as adults. Their recognition and validation of each other’s stories and rage allows a narration of the lived experience of feminist solidarity to emerge. The stories they tell one another give shape to their solidarity (Serna-Martinez, Reference Serna-Martínez2018: 17). Nunez’s female protagonists, like those in Adisa’s work, are disruptive and nonconformist in their embodiment of their sexual identities and in their responses to their abuse, all of which begins in girlhood. We find it significant that the novel culminates in both Zuela and Rosa’s ability to confront their abusive husbands. We also find it significant that in Zuela’s case, her ability to act is aided by feminist solidarity and rage. Rosa, on the other hand, is enabled by the rage that her friend shares with her and by the self-fashioned, non-biological acts of caring that she receives from Mary Christophe. Like Zuela, Rosa evolves into a knee-scraper identity and this evolution is facilitated by the surfacing of repressed stories.

The key story which binds Rosa and Zuela is their earliest shared experience of gender-based violence: As girls they witness a graphic assault and abuse of power in which another girl, who is costumed as a woman wearing rouge, lipstick, high heels and pearls, is forced to fellate an adult man, who orders her to simultaneously “beg” for his penis (Nunez, Reference Nunez2000: 47). Horrifyingly, with a casualness that astounds us readers, young Zuela says to Rosa, from their vantage point hidden behind the red hibiscus bush, “That is nothing. I see that already. Chinaman do that to me already” (Nunez, Reference Nunez2000: 41). The reader apprehends this scene as a suppressed memory belonging to adult Rosa that slowly comes to the surface of her consciousness. Traumatized by her abusive married life with Cedric in which he too demands her unwavering sexual compliance and then cruelly belittles her for providing it, her memory of witnessing the abuse of the little girl with Zuela, enables Rosa to connect events and emotions in her life. Her girlhood memory, which she shares with her friend Zuela, facilitates the emergence of a parallel adult memory: during her very first sexual encounter with Cedric he had demanded, “Beg for it, white lady” (Nunez, Reference Nunez2000: 43). In Nunez’s crafting, everyone’s story has layers and obscured origins. Thus, Cedric’s shaming and abuse of Rosa is shown to derive in part from his own shame about the sexual coercion suffered by his father at the hands of a white male plantation owner. Rosa’s memory of what she and Zuela witnessed as girls is retrieved after the jolt of seeing Zuela again. It allows her to recognize important parallel experiences and to eventually move toward self-understanding. While Zuela remembers this incident with rage, Rosa lacks rage but has other affective responses, such as shock. In the memory, young Zuela also recognizes the horrific scene of abuse and aims to decrease its power and the abject positioning of the unnamed girl by speaking it aloud and assuming a central role for herself. Indeed, the narrative suggests that at this young age, Zuela is already pregnant for the first of ten times by Ho Sang. Nunez implies that Zuela and Rosa’s eventual ability to disrupt their own abject positioning is inherent not in the women as individuals but in the power derived from friendship and solidarity with each other and Mary Christophe. It further derives from their willingness to disrupt the silence expected of them as girls and as women and, finally, to speak, to hear, and to recognize each other’s rage and each other’s stories. These incremental disruptions gradually enable more significant conscious acts of nonconformity in Rosa, including trading the social conformity of marriage for her own individual freedom.

Rage and Racism

Racism is a focal point of both Bruised Hibiscus and Negra and both texts depict it as grounded in the history of colonialism and plantation slavery and as inextricable from the sexism, colorism, and gender-based violence suffered by male and female characters alike. Nunez highlights the different forms which racism takes – anti-Black, anti-indigenous, anti-white Creole, anti-Chinese. Nunez also makes the deceptive optics of “race” and racialization a key aspect of the plot by emphasizing the prejudiced attitudes people inherit and espouse because of their belief that “race” is natural and fixed and corresponds to types of behavior, social status, and rights. As such, she uses Rosa’s character to deconstruct and interrogate privileges accorded to whiteness by making her a character who does not abide by the precepts of “true womanhood” but is confined by them, nonetheless. This ideology, which dominated nineteenth-century conceptualizations of white femininity in the Americas, celebrates piety, chastity, domesticity, and motherhood. It privileges white women because non-white women, in the US as well as in the Caribbean, fell outside of “the parameters of virtuous possibilities” and femininity itself (Carby, Reference Carby1987: 27). Rosa, despite her elevated position as a member of the planter class in colonial Trinidad, troubles this ideology since, as Hazel V. Carby observes, “in order to qualify as a paragon of virtue it was necessary to repress all overt sexuality” (26), which Rosa does not do. In Rosa and each of her other female characters, Nunez rejects the idea that a woman’s feminine worth can be or should be equated to expressions of sexuality, motherhood, or piety. She develops her plot and characterizations to critique how racism and gender-based violence are deployed to undermine and demonize female sexuality and same-sex desire; in so doing she also depicts resistance to the twinned legacies of slavery and colonialism. Rosa sometimes has an overwhelming sexual appetite and her inability to free herself of the expectations of her caste and gender contributes to her tormented existence prior to and during her marriage. A new way of seeing herself and her world, beyond the denigrations and emotional abuse meted out by her husband, is unlocked by the solidarity provided by Zuela and Mary Christophe.

Nunez is careful to delineate the humiliations and abuses that shape Cedric, without flattening the aggression he perpetrates against Rosa. For instance, the colonial racism and sexual exploitation suffered by Cedric’s Indo–Trinidadian father result in his suicide and condemn Cedric’s Afro–Trinidadian mother to an impoverished existence. This knowledge consumes Cedric and informs his drive to humiliate and subjugate Rosa, who appears to emblematize whiteness and effortless privilege, in addition to possessing what he perceives as a damning sexual capacity. His rage against the racial and sexual oppression of colonialism transforms into a specific hatred and violent abuse of Rosa, which, Nunez suggests, wounds Rosa. However, it also destroys Cedric himself because of the web of relationality demanded by the codependent concepts of whiteness and blackness, rich and poor, privileged and oppressed. Whilst he convinces himself that “she was incapable of virtue” he paradoxically believes in the “clammy whiteness of her skin” (Nunez, Reference Nunez2000: 123). Tragically, he cannot break the structural and psychological violence of racism and patriarchy; he only extends it. Whilst Rosa escapes Cedric, she still falls victim to similar binary thinking and violent patriarchal violence: she is gang raped and murdered. No group of men delineated by race, ethnicity, or class escapes Nunez’s representations of patriarchy and gender-based violence. However, she is careful to contextualize their acts within histories of coloniality that rely upon and reward violent patriarchy. Thus, Rosa’s rape and murder become an occasion for Nunez to consider Trinidad’s brief Black Power revolution in 1977. In death, Rosa is targeted because of the same attributes that reduce her to a symbol of oppression by Cedric: her whiteness and privilege. As Nunez shares in her Author’s Notes,

Nunez caustically demonstrates how the core attributes of colonialism and patriarchy infect all people and, in the world of the text, seem to indict all men, across every social stratum. Rosa’s character dismantles idealized notions of Caribbeanness, whiteness and femininity through her alliances with other women, and as such is reminiscent of other Caribbean women characters who trouble notions of racial and sexual categorization including Clare in Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven (Reference Carby1987), Antoinette Cosway in Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (Reference Rhys1966) and Lowe in Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda (Reference Powell1998). As Belinda Edmondson has observed, the “transformation of the meaning of whiteness into something indistinguishable from the Caribbean itself,” as enacted in Cliff’s novel, is part of a discursive resistance and revolutionary discourse that is a familiar feature of Caribbean literature (Edmondson, Reference Edmondson1999: 138). Such a transformation is not a romanticized panacea, but it is integral to the friendship and solidarity that Rosa forges with Zuela and Mary Christophe. Bruised Hibiscus and Negra share a discursive as well as a thematic commitment to deconstructing embedded narratives of Caribbean identities. Using the feminist rage prompted by racism, racial hierarchies, and fixed notions of identity, both texts, like the novels listed above, suggest the need to transform (or disregard) the meanings attributed to race generally, although they are simultaneously committed to showing how racialization and gender and their intersection have and continue to equate to positions of social status in Caribbean societies.

Rage and Gender-Based Violence

Bruised Hibiscus asserts the real hazards women present to gender-based violence through “unnatural” rage. The female friendships are not idealized; Nunez does not simply announce the differences of class, race, ethnicity, and age between Rosa, Zuela, and Mary Christophe. Instead, the narrative reveals the consequences of the characters’ relative willingness to acknowledge and understand their differences and how this affects their ability to act or not act on the rage they feel. At the same time, Nunez is at pains to depict the potentiality of feminist solidarity when mobilized against the ongoing effects of the violence and specifically gender-based violence that functions as an enraged expression of colonialism and patriarchy. She suggests a form of citizenship or personhood that is centered on creating spaces free of gender-based violence enacted against women. We argue that Nunez’s consistent efforts to make visible the different class, ethnic, and gendered positions of her Trinidadian cast of characters create important links between feminist solidarity, Caribbean rage, and a different vision of political transformation, though it is not one without its own casualties. We are mindful of Donnette Francis’ assertion regarding the vital importance of reading Caribbean women’s literature through paradigms of “sex and the body” as this “insures that their literature is not simply read as a national allegory, but instead centers how sexual power and citizenship are often brutally marked and exercised on Caribbean women’s bodies” (Francis, Reference Francis2004: 79). Nunez does not shy away from such demarcation: By the end of the text three women, including Rosa, are brutally murdered and as girls Zuela and Rosa witness an unnamed girl’s rape, Zuela is serially raped, Rosa is raped, and Agnes is raped. The text unravels secret histories and desires, propelling key characters toward feminist solidarity that enables them to “imagine otherwise”; that is, imagine themselves as subjects unbounded by patriarchal discourse and able to embrace and express rage as and when needed (Gordon, 1997: 4). The creolized, multiethnic world of Trinidad is itself a character in the novel. Nunez writes Trinidad as an embodiment of Albert Memmi’s (1957) theory of interdependency between colonizer and colonized and mirrors that interdependency in aspects of the abusive relationships which Rosa and Zuela experience.

Resisting patriarchy via the assertion of sexual agency is central to Rosa’s narrative and one which is frankly discussed in conversation with Mary Christophe (Nunez, Reference Nunez2000: 236–237). Mary Christophe uses the opportunity of her encounter with the adult Rosa, not only to help Rosa understand her past and her position in her family, but also to help Rosa navigate her violent and oppressive relationship with Cedric. Whilst Cedric seizes on Rosa’s saint name “Nympha” to explain her enjoyment of sex as a type of preordained mania, Mary Christophe goes to great lengths to reassure the adult Rosa that to have sexual appetites as a woman is not a mental illness. The narrativization of Rosa’s sexual pleasure which she initially achieves through masturbation, and later experiences with Cedric, but she then ceases to experience with Cedric, all form part of the radical feminist discourse of the novel and we suggest make the early reference to Rosa as a “zami” and “unnatural” especially significant despite the fact that Nunez does not develop the narrative using female same-sex relationships (Nunez, Reference Nunez2000: 18). Zuela’s character, who is forced to birth her first children whilst she is still a child herself, similarly demythologizes motherhood, when she contemplates murdering Ho Sang. Rosa’s ability to “talk” secures for herself feminist solidarity and dismantles the shaming, violent, patriarchal reaction to her sexual appetite that Cedric imparts, and which circulates within the wider Trinidadian community as the crux of the problem with any “man-woman business.” Rosa and Zuela’s rage builds, but they also cultivate solidarity with each other, Mary Christophe, and Tong Lee, in order to escape their confinement within their marriages. Their escapes, although quite distinct, are also transformative inasmuch as they simultaneously reject the patriarchal function of marriage, reject god as authoritative, and reject the idea that their own knowledge is less worthy than a man’s. We see this as significant because it is also a rejection of authoritative knowledge, specifically the colonial heteronormative and patriarchal structure that colonial Trinidadian society is expected to adhere to in the world of the novel. Instead, in an embrace of postcolonial conceptualization, Nunez provides shifting ontological and epistemological frameworks for Rosa and Zuela and demonstrates how their knowledge and all knowledge is contingent. In other words, their understanding of themselves, their world, and the paradigms of friendship and love are transformed once they are able to move beyond the circumscribed contexts controlled by Cedric and Ho Sang and instead build friendship and solidarity with one another, Mary Christophe, and Tong Lee. Rage is a facilitating aspect of this transformation. They each become knee-scrapers.

Rosa’s character does highlight some of the constraints of the argument we are making in this Element. Whilst Rosa’s lived experience draws strength from Zuela and Mary Christophe, soon thereafter she dies a violent death, one which closely resembles Paula Inge’s murder, and serves to herald the limits of feminist solidarity as a defense against patriarchal violence. As our readings of the text suggest, Zuela helps Rosa to find her voice but, like Paula Inge, who does not get to speak and is only spoken of, Rosa finds her voice only to be silenced permanently. Cedric is not Rosa’s murderer, but when he affirms the Inge murder as just, stating “A man caught his woman in flagrante delicto. And then CRACK … ” (13, italics in original) it confirms just how deeply Nunez saturates the world of the text with gender-based violence: While Paula Inge’s whiteness is perceived by some as a symbol of elevated status, and even other worldliness, that should have shielded her from such a horrific death, her murder and then Rosa’s murder caution against such presumptions. Using such portrayals of feminist solidarity and Caribbean rage, Nunez relentlessly invites a critical evaluation of gender-based violence against women of different ethnicities and social standing and the responsive solidarity that it evokes in women characters and their friends.

This notion of rage as transformative amongst women and catalyzed through feminist solidarity is another example of how Lorde’s theories of rage are illuminating for Bruised Hibiscus. Female solidarity and transformative rage are the means by which Zuela eventually halts the abuses she suffers and also begins to create a different life narrative for herself. What Lorde observes as discomfort, loss, and simultaneously a sign of growth is devastatingly captured in the metaphor of Nunez’s title. The “bruised” hibiscus bush may initially be understood as passive in the wake of its petals being crushed, or merely as a landscape marker. However, as the site of the sexual assault of the little girl, which Zuela and Rosa witness as girls themselves, and as a memorial to Rosa, which Zuela includes in her garden at the close of the text, the hibiscus embodies the simultaneity of abuse, rage, and solidarity which Nunez develops in her novel. The hibiscus, like each of the characters, has more than one visage and multiple significations. It is a flower that holds meaning across the Caribbean and is sometimes known as Sorrel. Beyond these significations, however, Nunez includes others: a red hibiscus bush changes to blue when bruised or crushed. When Rosa is murdered, the bruising around her neck is described in terms of the flower and from the perspective of and in the reported speech of the investigating police officer:

The hibiscus is the abiding metaphor of the text, encompassing violence, repetition and transformation, and the Caribbean region itself. First, the fact and the circumstances of Rosa’s murder are a repetition: they broadly mirror the fact and circumstances of Paula Inge’s murder and as such provide a neat structural parallel: Rosa’s death occurs in the penultimate chapter of the novel, whilst Inge’s is first discussed in the opening chapter. Second, parallels aside, Nunez’s text consistently repels straightforward connections, relationality, and labels and shows how easily names and labels shift (red becomes blue). A variety of instances of patriarchal violence deeply interwoven with the colonial and capitalist structures position her fictionalized Trinidad as emblematic of a wider Caribbean context and the hibiscus too is a plant form common throughout the Caribbean. Similarly, the ability to articulate and have their rage recognized by others transforms Zuela and Mary Christophe and does not, ultimately, destroy them.

Bruised Hibiscus allows us to make two salient points about the politics of cultural discourse. To borrow a formulation from Carole Boyce Davies, Nunez reaches for the “submerged discourses of feminism in non-Western contexts” (Boyce Davies, Reference Boyce Davies1994: 88). By giving us stories such as Zuela’s which are othered by whiteness and coloniality, but that are not entirely superseded by them, the text surfaces other colonialities and forms of oppressions (e.g., Ho Sang’s excavation of goods and people in Venezuela). Nunez effects a “decentering of the former and current colonial paradigms” of her fictionalized Trinidad (85), which allows a more complex narrative of colonialism and postcolonialism to emerge. Crucially, such self-determination is registered through female solidarity symbolized at the close of the text: The final lines are reserved for Zuela and Mary Christophe, who recall their solidarity, love and friendship with Rosa, their shared rage, and how it helped to banish any sense of shame in, abject endurance of, or even the human primacy of “man-woman business.” The parallel narratives that permeate Bruised Hibiscus are fundamental to how Nunez establishes the symbiotic importance of the personal and the political in relation to colonialism and the afterlives of slavery and indenture. Whilst negotiating overt and insidious cruelties, Nunez’s characters confront arbitrary yet powerful constructs of race, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age, class, and status. By threading each of the concentric narratives through Zuela, Nunez elevates the story of the character with the least power and presents it as an allegory of the ongoing carnage of colonialism and slavery: Any presumed “past” remains a part of each character’s “present” and facilitates a genealogy of rage understood from multiple perspectives. In our discussion of Negra, we explore how feminist solidarity manifests in friendships we read as transgressive in the political context of socialist Cuba. Such friendships are constituted through women’s rage and, as in Bruised Hibiscus, they offer a sustaining and encouraging framework for the expression of the rage that racism and patriarchy tirelessly try to silence.

A Friendship That Defies Boundaries

Crossing and defying invisible boundaries runs like a common thread through Negra. Early in the novel, the narrative traces the racial boundaries of Havana as we readers follow Nina’s movement through the city. She sets off in the elitist neighborhood of Siboney, in Jorge’s house. From there, Nina moves to the similarly exclusive Miramar before driving through the Barrio Chino (Chinese Quarter) to the center of Habana Vieja (Old Havana), where she resides with her grandmother Cuca. The demographic of the urban space changes notably from purely white to predominantly Black; Nina’s experiences and presence in the neighborhoods shift accordingly. In Siboney, she encounters overt racism, and as readers, we witness the first outburst of female rage there. (We will return to this scene momentarily.) During this trajectory, we are introduced to Lu, as she and Nina meet in Miramar to drive together to the Barrio Chino, where they share a meal in Lu’s paternal grandparents’ restaurant. The further they advance into Habana Vieja, the more dilapidated, impoverished, and racially minoritized it gets – and the less visible Nina feels. The racial boundary introduced through descriptions of the urban space aligns with the racial boundaries between the protagonists: Jorge, still Nina’s lover at this stage, resides in Siboney and represents its main demographic. Lu, a mixed-race woman of white and Chinese Cuban heritage, fits both in Miramar and Barrio Chino, and Nina, the Afro–Cuban protagonist, represents the average inhabitant of Habana Vieja. Racial and spatial boundaries are also reflected in the protagonists’ relationships and addressed in their dialogues. Whereas we encounter Nina and Jorge predominantly in closed, private spaces, more specifically their respective bedrooms, Nina and Lu share various spaces and move around Havana, and beyond, together.

Nina and Lu’s friendship goes back to their childhood and can be considered hereditary, as their mothers were close friends and Nina’s mother eventually assumed the role of Lu’s second mother. In their adulthood, their friendship has turned into a strong, almost unbreakable bond. Both acknowledge their shared experiences and oppressions, as well as their differences. The first conversation between Nina and Lu that we witness centers, precisely, on the constructed and oppressive character of the social construct of race. Nina openly rejects the homogenous notion of “Black woman,” albeit acknowledging in the same breath that society consistently places her into that racial category, thus depriving her of her individuality: “He sido negra, negra, negra para todos, menos para mí. Yo siempre fui Nirvana” (46).Footnote ³ Frustration, exasperation and, at this point in the narration, a still contained rage are the emotions conveyed in this paragraph. The rejection of the homogeneous notion of what it means to be Afro–Cuban is accompanied, in Nina’s case, by the rejection of Afro–Cuban religions and beliefs (46–49). Nina openly addresses the issue of spatial boundaries that draw unacknowledged but palpable lines between Afro–Cubans and all other sectors of the population: “[Nina a Lu:] Bueno, y esta misma entrevista ya es un modo de separarnos. Tú a un lado de la cama, la rubia preguntando a la negra … que te contesta obediente” (47–48).Footnote ⁴ The entire interview, or rather conversation, is emotionally charged; rage underscores the indignation palpable in Nina and Lu’s words: “que ironía” (“how ironic”), “reeditamos la historia” (“we revised history”), “aguantamos como esclavos para ser libres” (“we suffered like slaves to be free”), “no seas racista. Tú no” (“don’t be racist, not you”) (46–48). They testify to feelings of discrimination, exclusion, and the double oppression Nina experiences as a Black woman in Cuba, and which Lu frequently witnesses but does not always understand.

The conversations between the two women reveal the major dilemma concerning racism and sexism in Cuba: its silencing and negation. Even though racial and gender inequalities were debated in Cuba during the wars of independence and the Republic, and Afro Cubans fought for their rights as did women, still, as Colón Pichardo indicates, anti-racist and feminist demands were never unified (2016: 187). Therefore, the double oppression Afro–Cuban women had to endure was not acknowledged. Guerra does not shy away from explicitly engaging with the complex philosophical deliberations on the coloniality of power and racism in Cuba. And more interestingly, she does not put these words in Lu’s mouth but in Nina’s. It is Nina who explains the following to Lu:

As mentioned above, the first conversation about racism ends with Nina and Lu’s expression of frustration and an igniting rage that fortifies throughout the novel. They share experiences and engage in critical reflection, allowing space for emotions to develop and to be discussed. These are, we argue, characteristics of what Nguyen et al. (Reference Nguyen, Nastasi, Mejia, Chowdhury and Philipose2016) call “epistemic friendship”: a “collective knowledge making” based on a collective struggle rather than on shared oppression. In Negra, epistemic friendship and female rage are characterized by their potential political power and as tools rooted in community, which aim at transformation, not destruction. Even while Lu interviews Nina for her research, she refuses to keep the accustomed distance between researcher and informant, thus breaking the established hierarchy. Nina becomes more of a collaborator than an informant; She possesses her own knowledge and her ways of sharing that knowledge. She also retains her agency and power, which allows her to question and challenge Lu’s points of view as much as Lu questions and challenges hers. Throughout the novel, their friendship solidifies, becoming increasingly transgressive, and both of them embrace their rage; ultimately, their friendship turns into feminist solidarity. This theme is deeply embedded within the novel; it is not limited to the level of the content but shapes the novel’s form and structure, as we have briefly hinted at earlier in this section.

Nina and Lu’s perspectives and voices become so intertwined that it is hard to discern which of them narrates the novel, and the narrator is only revealed in the final pages. Lu is the narrator, but the story’s point of view is Nina’s, and as such, Lu tells the last months of her friend’s life, her brutal murder, and its immediate aftermath. Lu and Nina’s voices fuse into one, so that as readers we assume the first-person narrative perspective to be truly Nina’s. We find out that Oya, the keeper of the cemeteries, orders Lu to persevere with the solidarity by telling Nina’s story and rescuing it from oblivion. This order emphasizes the significance of female friendships and solidarity in Negra: “-¡Hola y adiós! -respondió [Oya] risueña-. ¡Ah!, y no olvides que eres tú el negro que escribirá esta historia -dijo” (Guerra, Reference Guerra2013: 320).Footnote ⁶ Thus, the narrative urges us readers to pay close attention; we have to address the complexities of speaking for another. We realize we have read not only Nina’s implicit rage throughout the narration but Lu’s as well, whose rage is deepened by her friend’s brutal killing. It is necessary to point out that Lu does not obscure or silence Nina to speak for her; instead, she uses her voice and privileged positionality to save her friend’s story from oblivion and silencing, in a true act of solidarity. The friendship and solidarity between Nina and Lu transcend personal and affective lines, as they cross boundaries of race and class, which profoundly shape Caribbean societies, and, thus, become a political category. Like Bruised Hibiscus, Guerra’s novel focuses consciously on friendships between women with different ethnic and class backgrounds, simultaneously portrays the potential and challenges that accompany such differences and explores the role of female and feminist rage.

Racism That Enrages

Racism is one of the main causes of the rage expressed by the female protagonists in Negra. As with Bruised Hibiscus, Guerra’s novel foregrounds the intersection of race and gender. It is a recurrent theme, introduced in the first pages of the novel, revealing the everyday brutality of oppressive systems and their prevalence in Cuban society. This is most flagrantly represented in the first interactions between Nina and Jorge that we as readers witness. Jorge openly displays his racist views about Afro–Cubans in general and the hypersexualization of Nina as a Black woman. He does not consider her an individual and a person worth his respect and affection; she is a negra; in fact, he does not address her by her first name but only by negra. This encounter occurs in Nina’s bedroom, “esta habitación colonial” (22), a colonial room, as the narrator points out, thus setting the frame in which the relationship between Nina and Jorge should be understood: A relationship that reproduces colonial power structures, biases, and oppressions. Initially, we perceive Nina as rather naively enamored of Jorge and quietly obeying his (sexual) whims. For Jorge, his needs and pleasure alone matter; Nina is just an object that helps him satisfy his needs. In the first encounter, Nina demonstrates an understanding of Jorge’s prioritizing his pleasure over hers. In the second encounter, set in Jorge’s bedroom, she finally understands the scale of his racist views and this realization leads to her first outburst of rage. The revelation is accompanied by Nina sharing the news of her pregnancy and Jorge’s prompt and firm rejection of the possibility of raising a child together. In fact, he immediately insists on an abortion. Jorge expresses his racist views as follows, and refers to societal issues and covert racial boundaries between white and Black Cubans:

Jorge’s racist outburst does not end here. Instead, he tells Nina that to him, she is merely a sexual object and emphasizes that there is no true racial equality in Cuban society:

He laughs maliciously during this outburst; we sense underlying hatred and rage in his demeanor. Throughout the novel, these emotions deepen further and, ultimately, they turn into destructive physical violence directed against Nina. We shall return to this momentarily, but for now we focus on Nina’s affective response to Jorge’s first openly racist outburst. It is rage, a rage that Guerra names explicitly; it is a rage that empowers her and helps her realize the falsehood of Jorge’s description of her:

These interactions between Nina and Jorge illustrate the novel’s focus: A critical revelation of the persistence of coloniality of power and racism and sexism in contemporary societies, including the Cuban, despite the official claims of having eradicated all forms of inequality through socialism.

The incident would have been quite different if Nina were not an Afro–Cuban woman. The suggestion that an Afro–Cuban woman can ever only achieve success in her life by using her sexuality to her advantage reproduces the racist stereotype of the hypersexualized Black woman but also reflects the harsh reality of women’s everyday lives in Cuba since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Cuba’s economic struggles. For many women, the hustle for survival includes engaging in so-called jineterismo, a form of offering themselves as temporary partners and potential wives to foreigners in exchange for money and goods (Fusco, Reference Fusco, Kempadoo and Doezema1998). Jorge’s suggestion that Afro–Cuban women in general, and Nina in particular only serve for the purpose of jineterismo, thus reinforces a prejudice commonly found in contemporary Cuban society. The prevalence of this bias is reflected in the scene that follows Nina’s flight from Jorge’s house in Siboney, which also causes the next outburst of feminist rage in the novel. As mentioned previously, Siboney is a predominantly white area of Havana. Nina is conscious of her visibility, particularly as she is running around, semiclad in the middle of the night (Guerra, Reference Guerra2013: 31). Within minutes of having left Jorge’s house, she is stopped by a police patrol and temporarily arrested on suspicion of prostitution, which is criminalized in Cuba. In her cell, Nina realizes, for the first time, the propagation of racial profiling among Havana’s police forces:

Eventually, Cuca, Nina’s grandmother, arrives, outraged at the discriminatory and unjust arrest of her granddaughter. Unlike Nina’s quiet rage against Jorge earlier, Cuca’s rage is loud and expressive. She shouts at the policemen, accusing them of racism and demanding Nina’s immediate release. However, her rage is ineffective. Nina is only released after Jorge comes to the station and corroborates her story. Nonetheless, the policemen open an official record and caution Nina not to return to the neighborhood.

These two consecutive obviously racist incidents in Nina’s life have several effects on the protagonist and the subsequent plot development that we consider relevant to understand the representation and potential of feminist rage. First, Nina’s and Cuca’s affective response to racist acts perpetuated by men (Jorge, the policemen) is rage. More than a response, this rage is an emotion that incites critical reflection and the production of new knowledge. By engaging with their rage, Cuca and especially Nina learn to decipher the subtle but ubiquitous racism that determines their social roles and lives as Black women in Cuba. Later, Nina shares these reflections and realizations with others, mostly female characters, thus solidifying their bonds and, ultimately, enabling acts of solidarity. The nuanced and critical exchanges enter her conversations with Lu and impact the decision to accompany Lu on her trip to France. The latter decision is taken after Nina miscarries. The miscarriage is provoked by an assault on her that initially seems like a robbery, although later in the novel it is revealed that Jorge solicited this attack precisely with the intent of provoking a miscarriage.

In France, Lu reconnects with her mother, Claire, and travels to Marseille to conduct further research. In the meantime, Nina meets the family of her late mother’s former and recently deceased lover, Marie, in Paris. Swiftly, Nina realizes that poverty and racism are not exclusive to Cuba or the so-called Third World; instead, the First World, too, as Nina calls it, exhibits social inequalities and systems of oppression (100). With Philippe, Marie’s widower, and his partner, Aida, Nina travels to Provence. Lu joins her as a guest in Aida’s house, but they leave abruptly after a heated debate with their hosts. This event is significant for our argument, as it is another moment of shared rage that solidifies Nina and Lu’s friendship and their mutual solidarity. A conversation about revolutions and their aftermaths turns into a polarized discussion about prejudices and culminates in a confrontation between Nina and Philippe, at first, where Philippe condescendingly explains to Nina how life in Cuba “actually is.” His notion of life in postrevolutionary Cuba starkly contrasts with her lived experiences, as she points out (141–142). In this discussion, Lu takes Nina’s side and defends her friend. She even points out the irony of her having come to France’s most racist city, Marseille, to study multiculturalism for her thesis, thus lifting another veil of alleged equality in society, this time the French. Aida, a white Frenchwoman, vehemently rejects Lu’s critical perspective on Marseille, and France in general, by firmly stating: “Francia no es un país racista” (143).Footnote ¹¹ However, a few moments later, she inadvertently reveals her racist attitudes, specifically the hypersexualization of Black bodies, by casually sharing one of her sexual fantasies: “Mi fantasia sexual era ver una pareja de negros hacienda el amor” (144).Footnote ¹² The entire debate visibly enrages Nina: “Lo [a Philippe] miré con rabia, no entendía nada. … Salté de la mesa y tomé el camino de salida. Lu me acompañó, sentí sus pasos detrás” (144).Footnote ¹³ Yet again, Nina responds to racist and patriarchal views with rage and an even better understanding of systems of oppression and their intersection. While on this occasion, Lu’s emotional response is not described in detail, we can still note the bond between the two women growing stronger and Lu standing and acting in solidarity with Nina:

Rage brings Nina and Lu closer, but so does their isolation in this foreign country. They are now two immigrants in an unknown place that treats newcomers, particularly those from the Global South, or Third World, as Nina refers to it, harshly, with disdain and an expectation of eternal gratitude:

Nina and Lu’s encounters with racism in Marseille are both direct and indirect, when they become aware of the difficult living conditions for immigrants and political discourses fueled by hatred against immigrants. Likewise, sexist prejudices become plain to the two friends as their neighbors openly accuse them of being prostitutes and warn them against working in the streets of the neighborhood (149). Both women, but especially Nina, are denied space in the French society, and they know it: “Guardar silencio era el modo para sobrevivir. … Pues yo aquí no existo, sin voz ni voto en aquella beca, la negra agregada de la Habana Vieja, sin abolengo ni pasaporte europeo … ” (151).Footnote ¹⁶ Particularly Nina stands for the gendered and racialized immigrant shoved to the margins of French society, into invisibility and voicelessness. Soon, both Nina and Lu learn that their situation is not unique in France. They discover systematic xenophobia and racism and react to it with paralysis and fear as well as rage. As individuals, Nina and Lu feel too overwhelmed to confront the discrimination, but their shared rage empowers and emboldens them. They decide to act upon their rage in a nondestructive but rebellious manner. In what becomes a public, transgressive performance, the two friends drink, dance, and copulate on their roof terrace loudly and openly. The neighbors challenge them for this behavior, for showing their rage openly, and for defying patriarchy by creating bonds that exclude men. Through their friendship and sexual intimacy, they oppose what Adrienne Rich calls compulsory heterosexuality. Neither Nina nor Lu identifies as lesbian or bisexual, their homosexual erotic experiences are limited to each other, and they consider intimacy on all levels a part of their camaraderie. In Negra queerness signifies an act of resistance that only occasionally includes a sexual component but always includes an affective one. The affective component is rage. Nina and Lu’s shared rage enables them to stand up to compulsory heterosexuality and normativity as well as to social injustices, racism, and xenophobia in Marseille and Cuba. We consider this performance an expression of Nina and Lu’s erotic agency, as defined by Mimi Sheller (Reference Sheller2012), particularly in the light of this not being an isolated moment of homosexual sex between the two protagonists in the novel. Sheller, mainly drawing on Audre Lorde and M. Jacqui Alexander, understands erotic agency as a holistic form of agency that includes the liberation from slavery and its aftermaths in sexuality, knowledge, bodily autonomy, and citizenship (243–248). Nina and Lu’s transgressive performance and resistance are not a mere sexual act; it is a political statement and action, a refusal to accept the coloniality of power and succumb to gendered and racialized oppression. They fortify their bonds of friendship through this open resistance to patriarchal and racist structures as their rage seamlessly turns into acts of solidarity. Whilst this solidarity does not lead to immediate societal impact, it does change Nina’s mindset and is a key factor in her decision to return to Havana. As she explains to Philippe:

Even though in this scene Guerra does not use the word “rabia” explicitly, as she has done in previous moments of the novel, we can sense Nina’s rage. It is visible behind every word she utters and constitutes the main driving force of her new consciousness, knowledge, and determination. Halfway through the narrative, we witness these major shifts in the novel’s main protagonist. The seemingly naïve young woman, who trusted at least some of the revolutionary and socialist ideals and their representatives (mainly Jorge), has become a critical thinker determined to pave her way in Cuba and to resist racist and patriarchal structures. Rage, feminist friendship, and solidarity are the empowering factors that facilitate new knowledge and resolution. Upon her return to Havana, Nina is surprised that she is not the only one who has become empowered by rage and feminist solidarity.

Performative Solidarity Versus Feminist Solidarity

Upon arrival, Nina finds her home transformed and suffused by feminist solidarity. During the few weeks Nina spends abroad, Cata, Jorge’s grandmother, moves in with Cuca and the two provide support – and solidarity – to each other during challenging times. In a succinct summary, we readers find out that Jorge sold the house in Siboney, planning to leave Cuba for the US, without consulting his grandmother, and putting her on the streets. When he decided to reverse the sale, it came to a physical altercation in which the middleman ended up dead. Shortly after the incident, Jorge was apprehended by the police. By the time Nina returns to Cuba, he is in prison, awaiting his trial and sentence. We don’t know how Cata felt when she discovered her grandson’s selfish behavior, we don’t know why she turned to Cuca for help, or what Cuca’s affective and verbal responses were. We can only guess that Cata might have been upset, maybe even enraged, or grief-stricken. If she was grieving the loss of her life as she had known it, then she and Cuca found a shared affect that brought them together. In those moments, Cuca was mourning the passing of another friend, Almendrita. As the narration is presented from Nina’s point of view, we the reader are not privy to each character’s inner thoughts and affective responses, we can only infer meaning from the subtexts. However, we are aware of the acts of feminist solidarity between Cuca and Cata, and Cata, Cuca, and Nina.

Solidarity is a constitutive component of Cuban socialism in internal and external affairs (Barrera & Ibáñez, Reference Barrera and Ibáñez2022). Solidarity is often invoked as a moral instance, and acts of solidarity are performed in public ceremonies to evidence the government’s commitment to solidarity. Anyone familiar with everyday life in Cuba might have reservations about accepting this commitment as an unconditional and fully embraced commitment to express solidarity without expecting anything in return. Often, solidarity is a performance designed to maintain power. This is not necessarily limited to the Cuban government but is present across various sectors of the population. In Negra, we find this performative character of solidarity in Cata and contrast it with Cuca, Lu, and Nina’s acts of solidarity. Initially, the solidarity between Cata and Cuca seems to be reciprocal, even though Cata and Cuca could almost be considered as polar opposites within Cuban society. Cata is a white, elite, and elitist woman who is well-connected to realms of power and has the opportunity to consume luxury goods imported to Cuba. As the host of a TV show, she shares her knowledge of cosmetics and the small-scale production of natural cosmetics. Therefore, she is considered a public figure in Cuba. Cuca, on the other hand, is a Black woman of modest economic means but a good reputation within her community. However, she is not privy to the realms of power in Cuba. She practices what in scholarship and outside of Cuba is often referred to as santería, a syncretic religion that blends West-African Yoruba religion, Catholicism, and Spiritualism. At the beginning of the novel, Cata seems to us readers and the other protagonists in the novel to be an atheist, following the official Cuban socialist skepticism of religion, albeit she demonstrates some knowledge of santería practices. By the time Nina returns to Havana from France, Cata has fully embraced santería by actively participating in rituals at Cuca’s. These discrepancies in Cata and Cuca’s lives and attitudes are the reason we consider this particular coalition as unlikely. Regardless, Cata and Cuca seem united in a challenging time for each of them. For Cata, it is the loss of her home and the imprisonment of her grandson; for Cuca, it is the passing of her close friend, Almendrita. They find each other despite their differences and step in where the other needs support, in what seems to Nina an unspoken agreement. Cata assumes the running of Cuca’s household and thus provides the support Cuca needs in this particular moment. This act of solidarity becomes, at least temporarily, an integral part of Cata’s everyday life and identity. She goes so far as to change her nickname from Alina, as we know her in the first part of the novel, to Cata. The novel does not explicitly disclose to us – or Nina, for that matter – what caused this change, but through the playful alliteration of their names, we can see that “Cata” and “Cuca” resonate with each other. The performance of solidarity seems to be completed in this particular act of solidarity between women across boundaries of race and class:

Cuca, too, acts in solidarity with Cata. In addition to welcoming her into her house, she has taken over the care of Jorge, visiting him in prison with food and comfort, as he refuses to see his grandmother. These acts of solidarity between these two women not only seem unlikely and surprising to us as readers and authors of this analysis, but also to Nina. Upon her return to Havana, she has emotionally distanced herself from Jorge. The rage that his racist and misogynistic actions ignited and that erupted in Marseille when confronted with similar racist and misogynistic attitudes has enhanced Nina’s understanding of systems of oppression and their actors. Her rage erupts again; she easily identifies the problems in Cata and Cuca’s alliance of solidarity and calls them out for it:

As with Lu, Nina again shares her knowledge, albeit in this instance in a less reflective, almost detached way. More emotionally, she conveys her rejection of and resistance to racism, classism, and misogyny and invites, or rather, urges, Cuca and Cata, to join her in this critical feminist endeavor, share their knowledge and skills with her, and create bonds of mutual solidarity. Nina is determined to resist white supremacist patriarchy in Cuba and she is conscious of the need to encourage others, particularly but not exclusively women, to join her quest for autonomy and liberation. She cherishes the first achievement upon arrival in the Escambray: “Lo logré; Cuca y Catalina están conmigo” (178).Footnote ²⁰

The planned endeavor is the setting up of a small-scale factory of natural cosmetics in the Escambray, a region rich in herbs and medicinal plants. Nina, Cuca, and Cata work together, each contributing with their (ancestral) knowledge, skills, and experiences but also privileges, particularly in the case of Cata. However, the female circle is disrupted and invaded when Philippe unexpectedly finds and (unwelcomely) joins them. He tries to contribute with his skills but ultimately only causes the women trouble. The local police get suspicious, especially at the sight of two Afro–Cuban women and a foreign man in the woods. Cata intervenes by using her PCC (Communist Party of Cuba) membership to reassure the policemen of the legitimacy and legality of their business. Still, her intervention is futile, and she leaves first the Escambray and then Cuba for the US. It is this decision of Cata’s that we consider determinative of her embodiment of performative solidarity. Her life as part of the powerful elite, as the widow of a Cuban ambassador, is detached from the experiences of the majority of Cubans on the island. She particularly struggles when her autonomy and freedom are affected, as in the Escambray (218–219). Her ability to act in solidarity across boundaries of class and race is, therefore, limited and usually happens when convenient for her.

The intersection of the coloniality of power and patriarchy causes the failure of Nina’s endeavor in the Escambray. The police act in the name of the Cuban government, which has not appropriately engaged with its own coloniality, as we have mentioned earlier. This is particularly relevant given that Nina discovers the silenced histories of anti-revolutionary stances and violent repression by the Revolutionary government, dating back to the 1960s. Philippe, whose presence is neither endorsed by any of the women nor the inhabitants of the Escambrayan village, embodies the coloniality of power of the Western political left. He perpetuates epistemic violence by denying Nina, Cuca, and even Cata’s experiences and exerting power as he pleases. His conduct raises police suspicions, and his illegal marijuana field provides them with sufficient reason to demand the dismantling of the small-scale factory. His attitude causes Nina to rage, to “almost explode” (“a punto de estallar,” (214)) and to demand he leave not only the Escambray but Cuba. His departure is a victory for Nina and her rage and a chance to, temporarily, reinstate the bonds of feminist solidarity between Nina, Cuca, and Cata upon their return to Havana.

Male Versus Feminist Rage

At the beginning of this section, we noted that rage is not only expressed by female protagonists in Negra. Jorge rages too, but his rage is neither feminist nor does it facilitate solidarity. Instead, he enacts his emotions through white supremacist patriarchal views and violence. Thus, Guerra creates gendered, binary opposites in her novel. She juxtaposes Nina and Lu’s and Cata and Cuca’s solidarity with Jorge’s violence and destruction. This strict binary opposition is slightly disrupted by the introduction of Tom in the novel’s final part. He is African American and Dominican and the representative of the US Office of Interest in Havana.Footnote ²¹ He shares Nina’s experiences of racism and acts in solidarity with her based on these similarities. This slight deviation does not challenge the highly gendered representation of rage in Negra, with the female protagonists employing it as a transformative tool and the male protagonist using it destructively.

Jorge’s violence toward Nina increases progressively throughout the novel. The initial passionate attraction between Nina and Jorge is quickly disrupted, first by Nina’s small observations that are mentioned almost in passing, for instance: “… si mi placer sobrepasa al suyo, entonces Jorge detiene el juego … ” (23); Nina even remarks: “Me anulo en silencio …” (23), and “Tengo la mala manía de obedecerle siempre …” (23).Footnote ²² The power imbalance in their relationship is clearly gendered and racialized; Jorge holds power over Nina, determines the conditions and dynamics of their relationship. His racist outburst upon discovering Nina’s pregnancy, which we examined in detail earlier in this section, reveals his objectification and eroticization of Nina as a Black woman. Thus, he serves as an agent of the covert coloniality of state power in Cuban society. Once Nina understands that broader social dynamics are reproduced in their relationship and realizes how deeply rooted racism and misogyny are in both Jorge’s attitudes and Cuban socialism, she turns to Lu for sympathy and support. We readers then witness the first sexual encounter between Nina and Lu, which constitutes the complete opposite of Nina and Jorge’s sex. As we later find out, when Nina and Lu are in France, neither of them considers themselves queer. Instead, they emphasize that the physical aspect solidifies their friendship and is an expression of their strong bonds. As mentioned earlier in this section, we see the potential of Nina and Lu’s occasional sex in the novel; we have already examined it within the frame of resisting compulsory heterosexuality (Rich, Reference Rich, Charlesworth Gelpi and Gelpi1993) and erotic agency (Sheller, Reference Sheller2012). Nina’s realization of deeply embedded inequalities and the resulting restriction to her autonomy leads her to pursue her agency. The erotic becomes her medium of expressing agency. For Mimi Sheller, erotic agency is closely linked to citizenship, and expressing a non-heteronormative sexuality embodies the struggle for freedom that can be dragged into the public, as Nina and Lu do in Marseille (Sheller, Reference Sheller2012: 245–248).

We see further parallels between the macro and micro levels of patriarchal and racist violence when tracing the gradual escalation of Jorge’s violence against Nina. The covert becomes overt once Jorge voices his racist understanding of Nina’s role in his life; the violence then progresses to a stage of indirect action. Instead of physically assaulting Nina himself with the intention of forcing her back into a submissive role and agreeing to an abortion, Jorge pays two men to intimidate her. As a result of the assault, Nina miscarries. Yet, Jorge’s objective is only partially achieved, as Nina does not return to her submissive role and instead leaves for France. Thus, her agency and autonomy grow, and she distances herself from Jorge. Her refusal to assume the role he sets out for her infuriates Jorge and his hostility toward her rises visibly. Cata’s actions play a decisive role in Jorge’s escalation of violence. At first, she quietly pushes him to pressure Nina into the abortion. Later, while staying with Cuca and Nina, she seems to act in full feminist solidarity with the two Afro–Cuban women, but we then find out that her solidarity is only conditional and temporary; it is a performative solidarity, as we have argued earlier in this section. Before leaving Cuba for the US, Cata informs Jorge of Nina’s recent actions, of her visible empowerment and growing autonomy that stems from, as we affirm, her rage and the solidarity of other female protagonists. Those bits of information Cata shares with Jorge are the final spark that ignites his destructive rage. From prison, he tries to blackmail Nina into supporting his efforts to be released. He aggressively threatens to share with the highest authorities her involvement with Tom, the US diplomat, and Philippe’s marijuana field in the Escambray. Nina refuses to give in to his blackmail and instead returns to the Escambray to destroy all incriminating evidence of Philippe’s marijuana; Tom is set to leave Cuba to return to the US. Just as we readers think that Nina might succeed in her final resistance to Jorge, fuelled by her rage, her new critical understanding of Cuban society and her place as a Black woman in it, and feminist solidarity, we witness how white supremacist patriarchal violence maintains its power. Unexpectedly, Jorge appears in the Escambray and, in a brutal attack, kills Nina. And Oya, the orisha, entrusts Lu with telling Nina’s story, from Nina’s perspective, as an ultimate act of feminist solidarity.

What does this tell us about the transformative potential of rage and feminist solidarity? Both Bruised Hibiscus and Negra end with the partial defeat of feminist rage and the partial victory of destructive male rage. In each of the novels, one friend is killed and the other survives to remember and to tell the lost friend’s story. Is this the only conceivable potential of the feminist rage and solidarity, or is there more to it?