Historical Trauma and Cultural Memory in Marianela Medrano’s Diosas de la Yuca

Authors

Christopher McGrath, Grand Valley State University

Department

Modern Languages & Literatures

College

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Date Range

2011-2012

Abstract

This presentation explores the ways in which Dominican poet Marianela Medrano, in her most recent collection of poems Diosas de la Yuca, goes beyond any utopian project or attempt at building a national myth to explore Taina spirituality, rooting it in the immediacy of individual Dominican experience. More than a mere literary trope, the indigenous in Medrano s poetry is proposed as a living force and a key cultural element by which the Dominican can shape his or her subjectivity and thus resist and overcome the divisions and erasures caused by the original trauma of the Spanish conquest and the current experience of living simultaneously in the here and there of diaspora.

Conference Name

Moving Dominican Studies Forward

Conference Location

Naugatuck Valley Community College, Waterbury, CT 06708

ScholarWorks Citation

McGrath, Christopher, "Historical Trauma and Cultural Memory in Marianela Medrano’s Diosas de la Yuca" (2011). Faculty Scholarly Dissemination Grants. 349.
https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/fsdg/349