Dancing
Nude in the Moonlight, is
Antiguan writer, Joanne Hillhouse’s first novel. It was first published by
MacMillan-Caribbean in 2004 and
republished by Insomniac Press, Canada in 2014. She has since published three
other novels,
The Boy from Willow Bend (Hansib Publications Ltd. UK, 2009), Oh
Gad (Strebor books/Atria/Simon & Schuster, USA, in 2012) and Musical
Youth, young adult fiction (Caribbean Reads Publishing, St.
Kitts-Nevis/USA, 2014) which placed second in the 2014 Burt Award for Caribbean
Literature.
These books were followed by With Grace: A children’s picture
book (Little Bell Caribbean, USA, 2016) and Lost! A Caribbean Sea
Adventure, children’s fiction/picture book (Caribbean Reads Publishing, St.
Kitts-Nevis/USA 2017).
Dancing Nude in the Moonlight is the
first of three novels that delve into the theme of migration and abandonment. Michael
Lindo, one of the central characters, tells his girlfriend, Selena Cruz that
his father, who left for Canada before his birth, “didn’t want me,”(p.93)
and he (Michael) and his family “wasn’t considered good enough by some of
his [father’s] people”(p.93). This theme recurs in The Boy from Willow Bend, “I
know if you mother gone ‘way she soon forget you, mine did,” (p.20) and in Oh Gad! ,“A lot of us went over there back then, you
know. Cutting cane and such. A lot of their people coming back now, though
the truth be told, some of them that coming can’t rightly claim any people
here. That’s just the passport” (p.37).
Dancing
in the Moonlight’s central characters are Michael Lindo, an Antigua-born,
short-lived, professional cricketer and sports commentator and Selena Cruz, a
Dominican Republic-born, young woman who works in the service industry. Michael
and Selena are introduced to each other by Pamela, Selena’s youngest sister. Michael
works as a PE coach at Pamela’s school. His attraction to Selena is immediate. “He
looks into her eyes and saw the truth of his future unfolding before him ” (p.17).
And Selena, in Michael’s company, “for the first time since coming to Antigua…
felt content in the company of an Antiguan” (p.67).
However,
their relationship is complicated by their individual feelings of betrayal and
abandonment. Furthermore, it is challenged
by his mother and her middle sister, Celia, for example, whose actions scrape
on emotional wounds, and by Antiguans’ stereotypes and islanders’ suspicions of
Dominican Republic immigrants as well as Antiguan-D.R.* returnees.
Michael is haunted by his absent father, who abandoned his
mother after impregnating her. She, as a result, is a bitter, broken woman who “[wears]
her suffering like a second skin…” (p.121), but she insists that her son must
have a relationship with his father’s family. “His father had been gone….to
Canada. But his mother insisted that he know his family and get what was coming
to him. And though Daniel Lindo, Sr. said the boy wasn’t his, they couldn’t
deny the truth of his lineage…” (p.19). Michael’s father becomes a constantly
poignant presence who affects his behavior and whittles away at his
self-confidence. He suspects his
difficult relationship with his mother is due to his resemblance to his father
whom he has hated all his life. “Her sorry became so heavy it made him feel
like he was running through water, and when her every present voice lamenting
the same story of betrayal became so loud, he felt it was right in his head,”
(p.51).
Selena, who immigrated to Antigua with two younger sisters,
comes with her own baggage. Her
boyfriend, Victor, abandons her and their baby, Silvano, soon after their
arrival in Antigua. She realizes then that her beauty has not spared her from
domestic violence and betrayal. And now “she [wants] to count for something,
not to be counted as somebody’s prize,” (p.26). Work keeps her occupied,
but she has had to cope with “…stereotypes that all [people from the
Dominican Republic] looked and dressed like whores, all wanted their men (as
if…!) and were good for nothing more than a wild fuck, and all were fit only to
clean up after them and to pick up their garbage,” (p.27).
Michael’s uncle Wellie, his mother’s brother, is his
surrogate father. “Cricket, Uncle Wellie had told a younger Michael, was part
of what defined them as West Indian.” (p.30). Michael becomes downcast
while searching for a reliable and satisfying profession after his cricket
career falls through due to injury. His uncle Willie helps to rebuild his
confidence and give him direction. Uncle Wellie’s “presence in his life
[has] made the absence of his own father easier to take,” (p.29). He is the
first to detect that Michael had fallen for Selena.
And Selena feels Michael “[is] different from any man she
had known,” (117). However, her middle sister, Celia, the one who brings in
most of the bacon, is hardly enamored
by
dark-skinned, non-Latino, Michael.
Michael is thrown off the rails by his father’s unexpected
visit from Canada. During their encounter at a Lindo-family-party, his father
admits that he left Antigua because he “wanted his own life, not just
because he was scared of being a father, though that truthfully did feel like
another noose. But it was an excuse. A good excuse,”(p.134). His father’s
comparison of him to a noose around his neck devastates him. It leads Michael
to feel like a boy who had just got “a public beating,” (p.135). Selena,
noticing that he was hurting, makes her observation that “men didn’t know
what to do with their pain, … and she knew there was no fighting it,”
(p.136). Loaded with pain and anger, Michael finds solace in binge-drinking and
an old seductive girlfriend.
At home, another betrayal awaits Selena. Celia brings home Selena’s
ex-partner, Victor. He is Celia’s new lover and a wedge is formed in their once
unbreakable relationship.
Michael and Selena
spend time apart sorting out their personal conflicts until uncle Wellies
illness and death draws them back together. It is then that Michael recognizes that uncle
Wellie “made me who I am…I had been moaning all this time ’bout the father I
didn’t have. Truth is I had one of the best fathers anybody could want… Uncle
Wellie was more than enough,” (p.199).
Selena has an epiphany, too. She comes understands that she
has distanced herself from everyone including her younger sister, Pamela, who
let her know that “Everybody you push in and out of your life is pushed in
and out of my life, too. And I am tired of it. You can’t choose for me that
Cecelia’s no longer my sister or Michael no longer my friend…”, (page 194).
As Michael and Selena reunite and reconnect with family,
Pamela is in a relationship with a young man from the Dominican Republic with
Antiguan roots. He is one of many Dominicans reconnecting with families they
left behind a century ago. He is one of many whose return is impacting
Antigua’s political and social fabric. The injection of a new language and
increasing competition in the employment sector are not without consequences.
In the end Michael and Selena agree to share a home. Marriage
is in the horizon. Selena realizes that she has found a home in Michael, and
that he wants her to “erase the errors of his childhood…give him a
future…wanted them to be family…wanted them to dance…” (p.225).
Of particular interest to me was Selena’s story—People from
the Dominican Republic seeking a better life in Antigua, and the story of
Dominicans of Antiguan descent returning after one century. Spanish is now a
second language in Antigua and that itself is creating change in Antiguan
socio-cultural fabric. According to the article, The Spanish Language in Antigua and
Barbuda: Implications for Language Planning and Language Research by Bernadette
Farquhar:
A Spanish-speaking community now constitutes a sizeable section of
the population of Antigua and Barbuda as the result of immigration from the
Dominican Republic, particularly after 1981, the year of the country's
independence….A
significant section of the community is said to be descended from Antiguans who
emigrated to the Dominican Republic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries in search of employment. A lax visa system and favourable conditions
of citizenship induce them to choose Antigua and Barbuda rather than the United
States or one of the Latin American countries. In Antigua and Barbuda, they
generally obtain low paying jobs and some of the women seek employment in the
sex trade either willingly or because they were unable to find the attractive
jobs which they were told awaited them in their new community (Johnson 2001).
 |
| Photo from Noticarios Barahhona, Ccolos |
My grandmother and her brother were Antiguans who left for
the Dominican Republic a century ago. She returned to Antigua with my D.R. born
father and an older Spanish speaking son. Her brother remained in the Dominican Republic
where he had started a family. My father, younger sister, and her daughter
visited them some fifteen years ago in San Pedro de Macoris, D.R.
I have
recently come into contact with a distant cousin who is a
Dominican-returned-Antiguan and I am very interested in hearing his story. He is one many Dominican Republic citizens
labeled Cocolos.* His story is my family’s story, too.
I am usually not a big fan of romance novels, but Joanne Hillhouse’s
novels also engage the reader in the island’s socio-political history. As a
result, we come away with knowledge that is reflective of the larger Caribbean
story. I have lived away from the Caribbean for many decades and reading her
novels take me home. I learn a little more about who I am.
This novel, Dancing Nude in the Moonlight, though
fiction, touches on our realities and personal histories. It is the story of broken relationships seeking a
path to healing. It is the story of people trying to make themselves whole again.
We should bare our souls in order to reveal who we are. We should “dance more
often in the moonlight.”
Book
review ©Althea Romeo-Mark 13. 06, 2019
Born in
Antigua, West Indies, Althea Romeo Mark is an educator and writer who grew up
in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. She has lived and taught in the Virgin
Islands, USA, Liberia, England, and in Switzerland since 1991. She writes poetry and short stories and has been internationally published.
in the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados,
USA, England, Germany, Norway, Portugal, Colombia, India, U.K., Kenya, Liberia,
Romania and Switzerland. Her last poetry collection, The Nakedness of New, was
published in 2018. She has participated in International Poetry Festivals in Romania,
Kenya and in Colombia.
Footnotes
1. D.R.-Domincan Republic
Cocolo is
a term used in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean to refer to non-Hispanic African
descendants, or darker-skinned people in general. The term
originated in the Dominican Republic and
is historically used to refer to Anglophone Caribbean immigrants
and their descendants and more rarely, towards those from the Francophone Caribbean.[1] Namely
the Cocolos of San Pedro de Macorís, Puerto Plata, the Samaná Peninsula, and other Afro-descendants who
lived in coastal areas and were culturally distinct from the lighter Dominicans who
primarily lived in the interior of the country.[2][3]
The usage, outside the specific ethnicity of the Cocolos of San Pedro de Macorís,
is vague, and at times the word can mean all blacks or all the poor of any race
living in less developed coastal areas. It can also be used to refer to those
who identify with the Afro-Latino culture
and music, such as palos, salsa and
other Spanish Afro-Caribbean musical genres. The term is often used with pride
to refer to oneself, yet can be taken as an insult when others use it.
Bibliography
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocolo https://www.open.uwi.edu/sites/default/files/bnccde/antigua/conference/papers/farquhar.html
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