Sophie Maríñez is an interdisciplinary, comparatist scholar whose research lies at the intersection of literature, history, and cultural studies from the Caribbean and its diasporas, with a focus on post-colonial/decolonizing thought and aesthetics, collective memories, and cultural productions that challenge dominant notions of race, ethnicity, gender, and national identity. Her work has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Her most recent book, Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Penn Press, 2024) is the winner of the 2025 Frantz Fanon Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. It draws from Spiralism, a Haitian aesthetic developed in the 1960s, to examine literary works in connection with historical processes that inform national narratives on both sides of the island. Written as a grito of outrage, it offers a fierce response to the human rights crisis accelerated in 2013 by the Dominican Constitutional Court’s Ruling 168-13, which denationalized hundreds of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. In doing so, it explores the legacies and representations of colonial, imperial, and national-era violence that appear in legislation, private and official letters, oral traditions, collective memories, Afro-indigenous spiritual and musical practices, and works of fiction, plays, and poetry produced across the island and its diasporas from 1791 to 2002.
Tiffany Troy: Your introduction to Spirals in the Caribbean proposes to look at Spiralism as a tool to examine literary and cultural productions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. For readers not familiar with Frankétienne, can you give just a snippet of who he is and how your book extends his theory to the entire island?
Sophie Maríñez: Frankétienne is one of the founders of Spiralism, an aesthetic he developed in Haiti along with writers René Philoctète and Jean-Claude Fignolé in the 1960s. They were inspired by the shape of the spiral, which they found in nature (the galaxy, the hurricane, the conch, some plants), but also in social phenomena, which evolve like a spiral, where each turn deepens and expands. As scholar Kaiama Glover also pointed out, they sought to apply this vision to their literary work to reflect a reality of violence, chaos, and poverty that manifests not linearly but in repetition, expanding with changes and differences over time.
I have known about Spiralism since graduate school but gained a renewed appreciation a few years ago when I read René Philoctète’s novel Le peuple des terres mêlées (translated in English as The Massacre River), which is about the mixed populations living in towns of the borderlands between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the massive killing of this population, shattering these long-standing mixed communities. As I read more about the Spiral–as a vision, an aesthetic, and a concept–I realized that it crosses boundaries imposed by geographies or identity constructs based on race, language, and nation. What Frankétienne, Philoctète, and Fignolé had noticed about the Spiral could very well extend beyond Haiti and the French language, or even literature, adapting to realities elsewhere in the Caribbean, where countries like the Dominican Republic do not have such close historical ties with France. Thus taking Philoctète’s novel as my cue, I decided to extend the Spiral as a lens to analyze realities and national narratives on both sides of the island.
TT: What is your way into the study of Spiralism?
SM: Kaiama Glover already did an incisive study of Spiralism in Haiti Unbound (2010). What I do is not so much a study of Spiralism as an application of its tenets to analyze narratives and cultural productions across the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In so doing, I found that national narratives on both countries draw primarily on three foundational episodes of violence that, as they are narrated and re-narrated over time, adapt to the historical changes and social sensibilities of the new moment, thus repeating with differences, like the spiral, extending and deepening over time. The first of these three foundational episodes is the 1791-1804 revolutionary moment that led to the birth of Haiti and the immediate response against it by enslaving nations and empires across the Atlantic, which, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Colin Dayan, and Sibylle Fischer already discussed, resulted in either the silencing or the demonization of this revolution. This demonization, as we know, never stopped. It reappears over time, with negative tropes that evolve according to new audiences. One of these tropes is that of a nation of cannibals, which in the Dominican Republic appears as the “Comegente” or People Eater, a figure that emerged as early as 1791, changed its form in late nineteenth-century nation-building narratives that needed to create a psychological border or taboo to distance the Dominican Republic from Haiti, and reemerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century, to serve political purposes as José Francisco Peña Gómez, a survivor of the 1937 genocide who became one of the most formidable political leader of the Dominican Republic. When he ran for the presidency in the 1990s, his opponent, right-wing President Joaquin Balaguer, questioned his loyalty to the nation because of his Haitian origins. More recently, the People Eater trope migrated to U.S. elections when the MAGA campaign turned it into a Pet-Eating figure to demonize Haitian migrants, a change that reveals a new sensibility when cannibalism is no longer credible. The pet-eating version of the Comegente is thus a recurrence of a very old trope that adapted to an audience that perhaps cares more about their pets than other humans.
The second episode of foundational violence is the 1937 genocide, which was never brought to justice and still haunts collective memories. Haitian survivors and writers identify the genocide as Kout Kouto, or knife-stabbing, not only because it was mostly perpetrated with knives and machetes but also because it was experienced as backstabbing, a betrayal by those who until then had been their neighbors, their friends, their siblings.
Finally, the third moment of violence I discuss in Spirals is chronologically the first: the genocide perpetrated against the First Peoples of the Caribbean, the Indigenous popularly known as “Tainos.” This past recurs in national narratives since 1804, when Jean-Jacques Dessalines decided to name the new nation after the island’s original name Ayiti, declared the revolution as an act that avenged the natives for the atrocities committed by the Europeans against them, and declared Haitians as the nouveaux indigènes, a term that set the tone for subsequent intellectuals and writers from Haiti, like the Baron de Vastey, Emile Nau, and Jean Métellus, who saw themselves–and Haitian anti-colonial revolutionaries–as the heirs, the successors of the anti-colonial fight first waged by the Indigenous chiefs and their communities. This early colonial moment also appears in Dominican narratives, but with an opposing variation, where Africans vanish and the First Peoples “reconcile” with their European oppressors. Spirals’s last two chapters explore an overlooked Afro-Indigenous connection that reemerges today in spiritual and musical traditions among Afro-descendant communities.
TT: How does it help us better understand visually and aesthetically the literary and artistic production of the Caribbean in conversation with Western literature?
SM: The Spiralist vision informs the works of renowned Caribbean thinkers, like Benítez-Rojo, whose Repeating Island evokes the language of the Spiral to explain the repetition of social and historical phenomena across the region. It also anticipates Kamau Braithwaite’s notion of tidalectics, which builds on the image of ocean waves that constantly dissolve and resurface in new forms. Even Edouard Glissant admitted to writing as if in a spiral, rewriting and deepening older ideas in his new books. What this entire generation had in common, and here I also include Derek Walcott, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Maryse Condé, and many other brilliant men and women who shared most of the twentieth century, is that they came of age under a colonialist, Western thought, and yet, they broke the mold. They appropriated what served them, discarded what infantilized and oppressed them, and did so to the best of their ability, as they were the first generation to do so. What I appreciate in their self-decolonization process is that they don’t discard Western literature as a whole, for what matters is not so much our engagement with this literature but how we engage with it, breaking away from colonizing patterns that still permeate our lives today.
Writing in the sixties, Spiralists sustained a deep engagement with Western philosophical and aesthetic traditions, starting with Frederick Engels, for instance, who stated that societies evolve like a spiral and that the spiral is one of the laws of dialectics. In a remarkable coincidence, French philosopher Gilles Deleuze published his Répétition et différence in 1968, the same year in which Frankétienne published the first Spiralist novel, Mûr à craquer (Ready to Burst). Also in 1968, Frankétienne and Fignolé published their first essays on what constituted Spiralism, claiming their right to experiment with language just as the Symbolists (Rimbaud, Baudelaire, etc) had done in the nineteenth century or the Surrealists in the twentieth. In sum, like Derek Walcott’s and Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry, Spiralism is not a rejection of Western literature but a reappropriation of concepts and practices that change meaning and purpose when recirculated through the Caribbean experience.
TT: What are your main contributions to the discourse of Caribbean literature through Spirals in the Caribbean?
SM: Spirals focuses on dismantling anti-Black narratives, inviting readers to rethink constructs of identity and harness the power of class solidarities over time. As historian Lauren Derby (UCLA) pointed out in a recent conversation about my book at Recirculation, Spirals comes across as a grito. Indeed, I wrote it as a cry of outrage but also as a call for exposing and dismantling the edifice of ideological lies that have dominated popular imagination to this day.
From a theoretical perspective, Spirals dares to propose an approach born in Haiti–a country seldom, if ever, portrayed in mainstream media as making any kind of intellectual or artistic contribution. In doing so, it counters old clichés about Haiti and draws attention to its role as a regional literary and intellectual power. Spirals also unspools connective threads of history and solidarities over three centuries of interconnected analysis drawing from an archive that is colonial and historical, oral and modern, enriched by my own experience growing up in the Dominican Republic. Its islandwide approach dismantles what Samuel Martínez insightfully identified as the “fatal conflict” paradigm–a tendency to portray the two nations in antagonistic terms, as if in a “cockfight,” reduced to conflicts and mutual hatred–all of which hides a more dynamic reality, marked by a spectrum of sentiments that do include fear and hatred, but also a mutual attraction, love, friendship, and solidarity among individuals, communities, and entire populations who have known how to unite to defeat a mutual, external enemy.
Spirals contends that this antagonistic paradigm serves as a mask to hide internal, vertical conflicts between an elite and the state that serves this elite on top and, at the bottom, an oppressed population fighting for its liberation. The elites of both nations get along very well–they conduct business, marry one another–and benefit from exploiting the population on both sides. The Dominican elite and all governments since Trujillo to this day have succeeded in spreading the belief that Haitian migrants are the nation’s enemies. As we know, anti-immigrant rhetoric has always served to deflect attention from unpopular policies–such as defunding public education and health care–designed to exploit the very population these states are supposed to protect. This well-known divide-and-conquer strategy has gained even more traction in the Dominican Republic because of its long-standing anti-Haitian narratives and state policies.
In contrast to these anti-Black, dominant narratives, Spirals puts forth lesser-known cross-island connections and solidarities that emerged since the advent of colonization, as African and Indigenous runaways founded communities outside of colonial purview, establishing a long lineage of multiethnic traditions and shared epistemologies. To recognize that the indigenous were the sole protectors of African freedom-seekers is to recognize slavery as the cornerstone of colonialism–a fact that most Dominican elites and historians have sought to erase. And yet, the evidence emerges in plain sight when you visit Afro-descendant communities in the Dominican Republic who sing prayers to the “Indios” that populate the “Division del Agua,” in the popular religious practice known as “servir los misterios” or Division 21. Why Afro-descendants would revere indigenous spiritual entities when they had their own lwas from Africa is a question that few have explored. To be sure, early Afro-Indigenous alliances resurface in spiritual and musical traditions as well as individuals’ phenotypes and DNA across the region. I argue that if the Indigenous are “not extinct,” as many have claimed, it is in large part thanks to the descendants of both African and Indigenous populations who shared their lives, their cosmovisions, and a common need for survival. As they did so, they produced a creolized, anti-establishment subjectivity and a narrative at odds with the ludicrous notion of Euro-Indigenous “reconciliation.”
TT: You highlight a divergence of thought between writers who focus on identity versus the Spiralists who look to transcend identity via a common concern in poverty and the pressing political issues of the day. And I’m curious about your thesis concerning a flattening out of gender, sexuality, and woman issues as secondary or peripheral. What is your proposed framework to bring these issues back to the forefront with the Spiralists?
SM: Kaiama Glover and Rachel Douglas have highlighted this divergence between the Spiralists –focused on a reality of poverty, violence, and political repression– and other writers from the Francophone Caribbean who discussed identity in geographical, racial, and linguistic terms, founding such movements and notions as négritude, créolization, and créolité, among others. Doris Garraway also noted in The Libertine Colony (2005) how terms that emphasize cultural mixedness and historical processes at the core of creolization shared as a primary blindspot the sexual violence that physically (not just metaphorically) led to this mixedness and creolization. Clearly, creolization begins with the enslaved women who endured rape and forced reproduction their entire lives. As Maryse Condé put it in her oft-cited article “Order, Disorder, Freedom, and the West Indian Writer” (Yale French Studies, 1993), male writers of her generation maintained a primarily masculinist vision and prescription for what, in their eyes, ought to be “Caribbean literature.”
Because the Spiral shows how narratives–whichever they are–repeat with changes over time, it easily lends itself to foregrounding questions of gender, sexuality, and women in literary analysis. In my chapter on Afro-indigenist literature from Haiti and the Dominican Republic, I analyze Con flores a la reina, a novel published in 2002 by Dominican writer and historian Francisco Rodríguez de León. This novel addresses the massacre committed in 1503 against the Indigenous population in Xaragua, where hundreds were murdered, including the cacica Anacaona, a figure that keeps recurring in the literature of both nations, portrayed as either naïve or, as critic Catharina Vallejo pointed out, “a respectable señora”–in tune with the bourgeois norms and expectations traditionally imposed on women. As I examine these portrayals, I ask, what if the historical Anacaona was more rebellious and conniving than writers have cared to admit? What if, following imperial chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s portrayal of her as an intelligent, capable leader who “plotted” against the empire, we lent her an ounce of agency, leadership skills, and strategic thinking to precisely “plot” against those who were clearly her enemies? We do not need to absolve her to turn her into an innocent, diplomatic, or “nice lady.” Quite the contrary, in fact.
TT: What research projects are you working on now?
SM: Now that Spirals is out, my primary goal is to amplify its reach—through translations into Spanish and French, book talks, conferences, public-facing events, and podcasts like 34&5, where Diomelca Rivas, a Ph.D candidate in History at the Graduate Center, interviewed me in Spanish. I have several research projects in the works—spin-offs from subjects and figures I could not explore at length in Spirals, but I’m taking my time to catch my breath and reflect on what’s next, be it through this research or creative projects that have always intrigued me. An all this needs time...
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts for your readers?
SM: Occasionally, when I talk about my book to certain scholars outside my field, I get the impression that all they retain is that it is “about Haiti and the Dominican Republic.” This, of course, is the obvious subject matter. However, this kind of reduction often assumes that the book would hold little interest or relevance to students who –due to a long history of excluding the Caribbean from broader fields such as Latin American Studies or even U.S. and Western history and world literature– know so little about this region where everything modern began. Since the arrival of Europeans in 1492, the Caribbean has been the first stage for Indigenous dispossession and genocides, the enslavement of African populations, the accumulation of wealth that led to the development of capitalism and modernity in Europe, and a Black revolution that challenged Western notions of freedom and human rights and led to the expansion of the United States through the Louisiana Purchase. Indeed, it is not a secret that the Caribbean has been a target of U.S. imperialism and nefarious corporate interests even before 1898 when the U.S. won its imperialist war against Spain and gained dominance over the hemisphere. Thus, to assume that Haiti or the Dominican Republic would hold little interest for new generations of scholars—despite the noticeable rise of interest in social justice—is quite a disservice to these students, especially for those in New York or the East Coast in general, where an enormous portion of the immigrant population is precisely from the Caribbean.
The fact is that Spirals makes several crucial interventions: 1) it engages in debates of Human Rights outside Euro-centric circuits; 2) it addresses the overlooked but alarmingly close danger of statelessness, as birthright citizenship is now a point of contention in the U.S., too; and 3) it contributes to a scholarship on anti-Black and anti-immigrant narratives that keep shaping assumptions, including, among others, pervasive stereotypes of criminality. At the same time, Spirals offers hope and a new vision for the future as it excavates lesser-known collective memories of historical alliances and solidarities, in tune with the emergence of a renewed class consciousness in the twenty-first century.