21st Century Curaçaoan Women Writers: Revisiting, Destabilizing and (Re)imagining the Kurasoleña

Abstract

A critical analysis is presented of the racial and gender decolonization process and social agency in three works of fiction by three Curaçaoan women writers. This is an attempt at locating the performance of third-space politicization and identity formation of Curaçaoan women in Aliefka Bijlsma’s Gezandstraald [Sandblasted] (2007), Loeki Morales’ Bloedlijn Overzee: Een Familiezoektocht [Overseas Bloodline: A Family Search] (2002) and Myra Römer’s Het Geheim van Gracia [The Secret of Gracia] (2008). The main female characters in the above-mentioned novels reinvent themselves by contesting, infl?uencing and reshaping the dominant sociopolitical, gender and cultural norms and structures of their landscapes. The main female characters in Bijlsma’s, Morales’ and Römer’s novels are attempting to find a ‘home’ that allows them to perform a Kurasoleña identity and cultural citizenship on their own terms. This attempt at self-determination within the politically, culturally and economically bound Curaçaoan city calls to some extent for a dismantlement of all popular held beliefs surrounding constructions and definitions of the Kurasoleña.