Queer Materiality, Contestatory Histories, and Disperse Bodies in La mucama de Omicunlé

Abstract

Rita Indiana’s La mucama de Omicunlé challenges conventional articulations of the materiality of the body and its interaction with the natural environment. The protagonists do not merely inhabit the environment, rather, the environment inhabits them and challenges their separation from the natural world. In this article, I argue that by reading La mucama de Omicunlé through a lens of queer materiality, Indiana’s novel uncovers two important considerations for the interaction between humankind and nature in the twenty-first century. First, she reveals the exigencies of reconceptualising humankind’s interaction with and understanding of nature as a materially separate being from humankind. Secondly, Indiana represents a specifically Caribbean cosmology, one that goes beyond European and North American ontological states. The representation of this cosmology is achieved through the coexistence of past, present, and future, combined with the protagonists’ doubling through space and time. Through the act of narrative generation, Indiana both represents and creates a material reality that dismantles static and fixed readings of the materiality of time, space, and being.