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On and Off the Island

IN THIS ARTICLE I EXPAND STUDIES OF maroon narratives to include Angie Cruz’s 2005 novel Let It Rain Coffee.1 I read Cruz’s protagonist Don Chan as a modern-day maroon. Historically, the maroon, or runaway enslaved person, is an individual who takes flight to secure his or her freedom and resist colonial powers. The maroon is part of a tradition of resistance that can be traced from the Caribbean’s first maroon rebellion, on Hispaniola in 1503, to the writers and organisations2 working today – in and beyond the Caribbean – to create a more inclusive and just society. Modern-day maroons such as Don Chan, the focus of this article, take flight, fleeing or migrating to, from, or within Hispaniola. Additionally, they resist forms of enslavement and oppression, including brutal dictators, US-occupying forces or, more broadly, economic hardships and patriarchy. Focusing on the maroon in literature is a means of acknowledging the often repressed historical, political, and cultural connections between the people of Hispaniola, and redefining rigid notions of identity. The wide range of twentiethand twentyfirst century novels that feature the maroon reflects the unique diversity found in the Caribbean.3 In Let It Rain Coffee, Cruz crafts a modern-day maroon who is influenced by black resistance and who complicates notions of national identity in the Dominican Republic (DR), which have been constructed on the negation of an African ancestry and place an emphasis on the nation’s indigenous and Hispanic origins. Importantly, many politicians and writers in their reimagining of the Dominican nation promote the falsehood that Haiti is blacker or more African than the DR. Cruz’s protagonist Don Chan rewrites the story of Hispaniola through his migration, initiated in 1991, and through his memory lapses or ‘flights’ which revisit the 1960s.