That’s how Acilde gets her job as a maid to the santería guru of the country’s latest dictator that too is how she gets her hands on the dose of Rainbow Brite that turns her into a man. She is particularly indignant one night after being raped by a doctor, but not so much that she wouldn’t accept a make-up gift from her abusive customer. The reality depicted in Tentacle is already one of fluid (and violent) sexual practices, in which the young Acilde, pretending to be a teenage boy, frequents the shadier parts of town, where rich old men go for clandestine action. After satisfying herself that the intruder has stopped moving, Acilde, the maid of the house and protagonist of Tentacle, returns to her daily chores, cleaning the windowpanes with Windex.īut if technology breeds “modern” attitudes towards life and death, gender identity is positively revolutionised by the pharmaceutical industry and the commercialisation of Rainbow Brite, an invasive product that abruptly triggers the internal transformation of female gender traits into male ones. Already in the opening sequence we are faced with an aberration that is treated as a totally commonplace situation when an illegal immigrant from Haiti, seemingly infected with some virus, is automatically exterminated by a security device at the doorstep of an uptown residence. Precisely this fluidity is what makes Tentacle stand out, working as a thread that cuts across all levels of this brief novella.
At the same time, life goes on in the Santo Domingo of the 2020s and the 2030s, with technology making supreme progress, so much so that the traditional boundaries of what is and isn’t possible – as well as what is and isn’t morally acceptable – are blurred beyond distinction. Rita Indiana’s creation is very much in touch with the intrinsic conflicts of a drastically divided society in which racial prejudice and social boundaries compound each other, a country where “being white is a profession”, where the precious few live a life of extreme privilege, where widespread ignorance and institutionalised dishonesty breed vice, exacerbate poverty and perpetuate injustice. That’s about the extent of the good news in this distressing if imaginative rendering of what the Caribbean in general and the Dominican Republic in particular will be like over the next fifteen to twenty years: a place ridden with problems, many of them familiar, standing at a critical juncture as a series of pressing issues are brought to their logical (and highly explosive) conclusion. Once upon a time the year 2027 sounded a lifetime away, but as we enter the end of the century’s second decade the future in which Rita Indiana sets her fourth novel is only two US presidential elections ahead, ie beyond the reach of Donald Trump.
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