She in Paris, I am in San José: an analytical reading, with subjective implications, around the novel Corazón que ríe, corazón que llora by Maryse Condé

Abstract

This article consists of an analytical encounter with the novel “Corazón que ríe, corazón que llora” by Maryse Condé, based on the reading of deep hermeneutics and ethnopsychoanalysis, proposed by Hidalgo (2012), which is a method that constructs meaning by recognizing the subjective implications in the encounter with the text, in triangulation with the analysis of the reception history of the text, the conceptual theoretical reflection and the historical analysis of the text. Following the above, I reflect on the work, starting from a series of implications, irritations, and crossings, which intertwine the novel's scenes with my own story, so that an unsuspected journey is built between the author's migrations and my own. Thus, four sections of results are constructed, which address 1. the author’s presentation in which her link with writing is situated, 2. the work’s presentation in terms of its historical link, 3. the theoretical-analytical reflection: a. The construction of the Other, b. The places of the feminine and c. The body as a place of freedom. The text begins and closes giving rise to countertransference and concludes in the passages of the novel where the forms of violent domination are revealed, in which the matrix of coloniality of power operates from the intersectionality of race/class/sexuality/gender, and where the author makes a claim of her blackness as a political force, underlining self-defined black femininity with awareness of its historical and systematic conditions of oppression.