A Never Ending Journey: The Impossibilities of Home in Sirena Selena vestida de pena and Flores de otro mundo

Reconsiderations of home have been crucially examined in Caribbean cultural productions. As Jamil Khader argues in her article on “Subaltern Cosmopolitanism: Community and Transnational Mobility in Caribbean Postcolonial Feminist Writings,” Caribbean feminists are faced with the task of challenging a conventional idea of home that has historically located women and other marginal subjects under conditions of oppression and exploitation. In focusing on the narratives by Aurora Levins Morales, Rosario Morales and Esmeralda Santiago, she points out the infinite sense of homelessness that invades, in particular, these Puerto Rican individuals who need to find more productive manners to articulate “home” while establishing a crucial critique of its traditional significance. Despite the postcolonial approach unfolded by Khader and by those Caribbean feminist scholars, the contemporary works I analyze in this article show a complex dialogue and juxtaposition between a desire for traditional home and the above mentioned sense of homelessness inherent to Caribbean marginal subjects.