Reworking the Perspective on Dominican Identity: Blackness in the Poetry of Aída Cartagena Portalatín

Abstract

In 1941 the Dominican poet Aída Cartagena Portalatín has the opportunity to meet the surrealist poet André Breton. This, recently arrived in Santo Domingo after having been in Martinique, will speak to her and the other members of the poetic group of Poesía Sorprendida of an extraordinary poet, Aimé Césaire, and the poetry of the négritude. Years later, Cartagena Portalatín would remember this meeting as 'unforgettable'. This paper proposes an analysis of the elements related to blackness that Cartagena Portalatín reworks in his poetry from 1961. The results of this analysis will offer an interpretation of the relationship that the poet maintained with blackness in relation to the Dominican cultural and ideological context of the twentieth century.