Forced Intimacies and Murky Genealogies in Hispaniola: Émile Ollivier's Mère-Solitude and Marisela Rizik's El Tiempo Del Olvido

In this article, I argue that two novels by writers from Hispaniola rescript the long-term idealization of heterosexual coupling in both colonial and nationalist narratives from the Caribbean and Latin America. Mère-Solitude (1983) by Haitian-Canadian Émile Ollivier and El tiempo del olvido (1996) by Dominican-American Marisela Rizik expose the sexual violence that women and other persecuted subjects have suffered historically, and which has engendered the idealized mixed-race nation in nationalist narratives. Using several shared motifs, these two novels question the reproductive optimism central to the post-independence works that imagined the nation as a large family with a powerful patriarch and ideal mixed-race children. The novels' spotlight on sexual violence and its results challenges the symbolic overlap between women's bodies and the land.