Anacristina
Rossi’s Limón Reggae:
Pancaribbean identity and Central American Politics.
Laura/Aisha,
the protagonist of Limón Reggae,
the latest novel by
Costa Rican author Anacristina Rossi, is
the daughter
of a Lebanese mother and a mulatto father who lives in San José. Her heritage and skin color do not fit
the official profile of Costa Rican identity which, from the nineteenth
century
nationalist impulse to its consolidation in the twentieth century
imaginary,
highlights light skin and European ancestry, and erases regional and
ethnic
difference. Laura feels out of
place in San José
due not only to this racial tension but also because of the
pathological
abjection that she observes among the poor in the city, particularly
the
cruelty that street kids show against animals. This
is something that, as a child, she can
not understand and that she names simply as “eso,”
or “that thing.” “Eso,”
a perversion to which
extreme long-term poverty and neglect might lead, becomes a central
theme in
this novel’s project of exploration of the root causes of violence in Central America, both at the personal and
political
levels.
As it is the case with
Rossi’s
other literary texts, Limón Reggae pays tribute to the natural and
human beauty of Limón, Costa Rica’s Caribbean
province. Unlike San
José and the Central Valley,
Limón is an emotional refuge for
Laura during
the summers that she spends with her maternal aunt and role-model Maroz, a strong woman who preserves her Lebanese
cultural
identity amidst pluricultural and
patriarchal Limón,
and who gives Laura the Middle Eastern name Aisha.
Limón
also offers Laura/Aisha a political
education to
which most likely she would have never had access in the Central Valley when she joins a group of West
Indian teenagers influenced
by the ideas of Marcus Garvey and of the North American Black Panther
movement. This group’s main concerns are the
racist policies of the Costa Rican government towards Limón and
finding
spiritual as well as political grounding for their activism. But Aisha is eventually rejected from this group
because of her
heritage and skin color. To her
Costa Rican West Indian friends she is not sufficiently black and,
culturally, they
consider her a “paña,” i.e.,
Hispanic, and therefore, unwelcome.
It is at this point that she comes to the realization that she
is a
Costa Rican for whom Costa
Rica doesn’t feel like home. This deep lack of belonging that the
protagonist feels sets the stage for Rossi’s exploration of ethnic and
gender subalternity within Costa Rica,
major themes
that she had already introduced in
her previous novel Limón Blues (2002). The realization of
not belonging,
together with the images of brutalized poor youth in San José,
push the
protagonist to look for other sources of identity and empowerment,
which she
eventually finds through her involvement with the political left and
guerrilla
warfare in El Salvador, and through a pan-Caribbean multifaceted
identity whose
tenuous cohesion is symbolized by the rhythm and rebellious lyrics of
reggae
music, which Laura/Aisha qualifies as
“ecumenical” for its inclusiveness of all peoples who fight
domination of one sort or another.
The plot line starts in the 1970s and concludes after the 2001
attacks on
New York’s Twin Towers.
Political history
informs much of
Rossi’s work but Limón Reggae is by far her most political
text to date. If in Limón
Blues she exposed the
racist policies and politics of the Costa Rican nation state against Limón’s West Indian population, in Limón Reggae she trespasses
national boundaries to review, from a leftist perspective, the
revolutionary
history of Central America in the last three decades of the twentieth
century, within
the frame of the US and Cuba’s thirst for control of the region, and
black
emancipation movements in Africa, the Americas and the US.
Through Laura/Aisha’s
mind’s development from adolescence in the seventies to her mature
years
by the end of the novel, Rossi painstakingly recreates the process of
becoming
politically aware and of coming to the realization that it is only
through
political revolution that the ideal of a just society can be reached.
It is a
fresh look at the nowadays demonized left, not to hide its failures but
to
highlight its idealistic drive and its past and present political
potential. As the author herself
has said in various interviews, Limón
Reggae is an effort to explain to young people today the promise of
utopia
that lead a whole generation of Central Americans in the past to take
up arms,
the tragedy of losing those dreams to the corruption of leaders and
governments
under ominous US pressures in the region, and the relationship of those
events
to today’s reality of poverty, urban violence and political frustration
in the isthmus. Rossi is as critical of the left as of the right
political
spectrums.
Rossi initially
conceived Limón Blues and Limón Reggae as a diptych on historical revisionism of West
Indian
presence in Costa
Rica. But her
aesthetic goals changed in the
process of writing Limón Reggae. Her
celebration of Afro-Costa Rican
difference and history is intact here, but she also highlights
ideological
contradictions among this subaltern group in their continued fight
against
state racism. Limón Reggae also presents
a pessimistic outlook on the future of West
Indian youth in Costa
Rica. The
message is that even today there is
no future for most of them there. That
is why, perhaps, the main West Indian characters in the novel end up
finding
success only abroad, in New
York. But however
thematically different
Rossi’s two most recent novels are, several stylistic features link
them
together. The combination of
Spanish and Limonense English that she
experimented with in Limón Blues
appears here but more subdued, making the text more easily readable,
particularly by a Spanish speaking readership with no knowledge of the
English
language. Eroticism also has a
prominent space in this novel. As nineteenth-century Latin American romances had done, erotic liaisons in Limón Blues
had represented allegorically new
national alliances that crossed class and racial lines, in this case
between
West Indian and Central Valley Costa Ricans. Limón Reggae’s
liaisons go a step further erasing national boundaries. Aisha’s
reciprocated deep desire for Fernando, for example, highlights what
Costa
Ricans and Salvadorans share socially and politically, and contradicts
the myth
of Costa Rica’s
uniqueness among its Central American neighbors. Rossi’s
iconoclastic intent in Limón Reggae, a staple
of her
latest narratives, does not disappoint.
And, incidentally, her ironic critique of Oscar Arias as the
architect
of Central American peace is very apropos now that he is back in power.
Limón
Reggae accomplishes in fiction what Gioconda
Belli’s El país bajo mi
piel did in autobiography a few years
ago. It gives an honest look at the end of
the twentieth century’s political struggles in Central America through
marginalized perspectives that need to be listened to, perhaps more
than ever
today: those of women and of the
political left. But Limón Reggae highlights a
much less discussed
case than that of Nicaragua: the Salvadoran war and the quiet involvement
of the Costa Rican political right and left in that struggle.
Sofía Kearns
Furman University
References
Belli,
Gioconda. El país bajo
mi piel. Memorias de amor y guerra. Barcelona:
Plaza y Janés, 2001
Rossi,
Anacristina. Limón Blues.
Cali: Colombia,
Alfaguara, 2002.
---. Limón Reggae.
San José: Costa Rica:
Legado, 2007.
Sommer, Doris. Foundational
Fictions. The National
Romances of Latin
America. Berkeley, Los
Angeles, Oxford: University
of California
Press, 1991