Resumen de Aping King Kong in Hernán Robleto's Una mujer en la selva
The scientific portrayal of apes at the turn of the twentieth century functioned as a rich space to probe the border between humans and the nonhuman world and to rethink the tenets of evolution. To take up these themes, Nicaraguan author Hernán Robleto (1895–1968), whose theatrical and narrative work was otherwise characterized by a costumbrista realist style, turned to the speculative genres of science fiction and fantasy in his novel Una mujer en la selva (1936). Inspired by the jungle adventure fantasies of Edgar Rice Burroughs and by the hit Hollywood film King Kong (1933), Robleto's novel offers a surprising fable about a ladina woman who falls in love with a giant ape in Nicaragua's jungled Atlantic coast. The erotic interspecies encounter is ontologically transformative; after the death of her primate lover, the protagonist becomes a legendary ape woman who haunts the social body. Allegorically, the novel deploys the giant ape as a stand-in for the marginalized Afro-descendant peoples of Nicaragua's east coast. The problematic collapse of blackness into the figure of the ape underscores how ladino writers like Robleto struggled to write about Afro-Indigenous populations in realist terms. The abstraction of blackness into the figure of the ape is a racist reification of Black animality, but at the same time, the fantastical interspecies romance in Robleto's novel tentatively advocates for a non-normative model of national coupling grounded in the Atlantic coast.
