Erzulie's Skirt
by Ana-Maurine Lara
Set in the age of urbanization in the Dominican Republic over the course of several lifetimes, Erzulie’s Skirt is a tale of how women and their families struggle with love, tragedy and destiny. Told from the perspectives of three women, Erzulie’s Skirt takes us from rural villages and sugar cane plantations to the poor neighborhoods of Santo Domingo, and through the journey by yola across the sea between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. It is a compelling love story that unearths our deep ancestral connections to land, ritual and memory.
ISBN-10: 0-9786251-0-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-9786251-0-8
Specs: Softcover
Price: $15.00
Pub. Date: October 2006
Cover art copyright © 2006 by Wura-Natasha Ogunji
Cover design: E.M. Corbin
Praise for Erzulie's Skirt :
The intersections of women’s lives have been a staple of women’s prose as long as women have been writing. In Ana-Maurine Lara’s debut novel Erzulie’s Skirt, Lara brings us to the dirt roads and sugar cane of the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, as well as the historical roots of an African village. ...the connection of Miriam and Micaela to their past is clear. In the process, the two women find love, a sense of family, and a connection with faith. …Lara is adept at showing, without being preachy, the repressive expectations that are thrust upon daughters, domestics, mothers, single women, and women who love whomever they choose. Lara’s novel renders a tale that places past lives and present ones in her two main characters’ lives with ease and care.
—Tara Betts, Mosaic Magazine, Winter 2007
A finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards category for lesbian debut fiction, Erzulie’s Skirt, by US-based Dominican writer Ana-Maurine Lara, is an ambitious work. …As a sociological work it is fascinating, providing a rare glimpse into the lives of peasants and practitioners of the Voudou religion in Santo Domingo. Pitched radically different from another example of American-Dominican writing, Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Erzulie’s Skirt is a literary novel set in the early-mid-1900s. It is the story of two peasant women, one of Haitian heritage and one Dominican. They are united by faith, as each is chosen to be the vessel of a god—gods who happen to be lovers in the Voudou pantheon. …Lara wonderfully and passionately details the rituals surrounding the family faith… [She] is a capable, sometimes even lyrical writer.
—Lisa Allen-Agostini, Caribbean Review of Books, August 2007
Dominicans and Haitians share a long history, one painfully marked by the brutal 1937 massacre when almost 30,000 Haitians were murdered on the orders of Dominican dictator Trujillo. But the relationship has also been intertwined along the lines of solidarity and love, and in her debut novel [Erzulie’s Skirt], Ana-Maurine Lara treats readers to the lives of two women shaped by that history, by the religion of vudú and finally by their love for each other.
Lara’s writing is lyrical as she describes the birth of Miriam, whose Haitian mother lost six children in the 1937 massacre and now reluctantly promises her daughter to Changó, the god of rain and thunder. Years later, Miriam—all grown up and with a young son of her own—sets off on a small, rickety boat with her lover, Micaela, for the United States. What the two women find, however, is a nightmare, and they undertake a long journey back home to create a life on their own terms.
—ColorLines, July/August 2007
Erzulie’s Skirt is part-novel, part-fable, and part exploration of the black diaspora. …Lara reveals a rarely told story; that of the many Caribbean-born women who are forced, or cajoled, into traveling to other lands to work. It’s a sweeping tale of love and loss, discrimination and affection, material poverty and cultural richness. …the book is absorbing, tender and powerful, and a delight to read.
—Kay Sexton, Chroma, June 2007
…Erzulie’s Skirt is a powerful story that the reader will not soon forget. It’s a book that challenges our North American complacency, finds beauty in a hard life full of bigotry and poverty, and paints a portrait of a love that soars from the physical to the spiritual; it’s a book that’s well worth reading.
—Martha Miller, Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, May-June 2007
Erzulie’s Skirt is an accomplished, first novel that chronicles the lives of two lovers, the patchwork where their lives intersect and where they are different, yet each tells a living portrait of the island they love and call home. …Lara paints her images directly, no prior tracing, just raw image, shifting from past tense into present with ease, to slow the moments down. …Lara provides marvelous dialogue that reads in English as if it was spoken in Spanish, and has the quality of showing the kindness of people even in the most dire circumstances. One recognizes the sweetness inherent in the Dominican character, the humor in the speech, and the sisterly way that women treat each other. …Ana-Maurine Lara’s strength as storyteller is that she remains truthful to [the] story. There is a universe …where voices blend and stories are not told from the beginning to end because that is not the way they happen. We might just have to become used to spending more time there, and with narrators like Lara, it is my hope that we shall.
—Mariana Romo-Carmona, Lambda Book
Report, Spring 2007
With a moving novel about the conflicts between cultures and neighboring nations, author Ana-Maurine Lara has expanded the terrain of American literature to include the experience of Haitians in the Dominican Republic.
At its core, Erzulie's Skirt (RedBone Press, $15 paperback) is a love story between two women who travel different paths but share similar goals—securing the survival of their African birthright as healers and spiritual guides for the next generation. Infused with the language of ritual and indigenous beliefs, Erzulie's Skirt is a credible narrative, in which dreams and the spirit world communicate with the living, blurring boundaries and borders as a method of teaching humanity about tolerance and the curative nature of hope.
—Rigoberto Gonzáles, El Paso Times, 12/03/2006
Set largely in the Dominican Republic, [Erzulie’s Skirt] is lush and descriptive, a paean to the profound, complex relationships between women. The novel chronicles postcolonial life in the Dominican Republic, mostly on the batey—the plantation—and in Santo Domingo, the capital. Miriam leaves the batey, where she grew up, for Santo Domingo when she becomes pregnant. The father of her child soon leaves her, which means she's alone with a baby in the city. But before long, she meets Micaela, who had grown up in the country to the north of Miriam's batey, and came to Santo Domingo when she was exiled from her childhood home by her mother. … The Dominican vudu religion, a blend of mostly African, but also European and American, religions, brings in a host of ancestral spirits as characters and serves as a connecting thread through the plot twists and shifts in setting. Erzulie, “great goddess of the sweet waters and the ocean's waves,” is one such palpable and all-encompassing force. Another is Chango, god of thunder and lightning, who inhabits Miriam's body from time to time. Another connecting thread is the love between the two main characters, Miriam and Micaela. Sensitively underplayed so as not to detract from the larger postcolonial account of cruelty and domination, the reader is nonetheless struck by the beauty of their relationship.
— www.hercircleezine.com, December 2006
The Dominican Republic is the setting for Erzulie's Skirt by Ana-Maurine Lara. Miriam and Micaela come from different rural villages and spiritual traditions, eventually meeting each other in Santo Domingo. Their strength, fortitude, and resilience swim throughout this mystical book, peppered with the traditions of Vodoun (Vudú). Think magic realism with an African Diaspora flavor, mixed with a heavy dose of survivor instinct and the desire to not accept the status quo. These women face tradition, prejudice, deceit, and abuse head on while on their path to fulfilling their dream—which brings them round circle, though not exactly back home. I strongly suggest that you read the author's reference notes and glossary in the back as an overview before beginning the novel itself, and mark these sections for easy retrieval during your read. It's a much richer experience having some fore-knowledge before opening the spirit-full pages.
—www.btwof.com, v. 3, n. 8, December 2006