The Erzulie skirt by Ana-Mauríne Lara positions the female body as the stage where lives are interconnected throughout history and as a thesis on the human condition. Its protagonists, Micaela and Miriam, tell a story of love, struggle, and survival that echoes the historical significance of slavery and the Caribbean midway through time and space. Divided into several sections based on time and place, a particular period of Lara's novel most closely connects Micaela and Miriam's experiences to slavery as a whole. After crossing the Mona Strait in an attempt to escape living conditions in the Dominican Republic, they find themselves captured, trapped in a brothel and forced into prostitution. Many parallels can be drawn to interpret Lara's use of the brothel as a metaphor for the slave ships used to cross the original Middle Passage, including the comparable use of people as commodities, specific imagery and language used by Lara, the historical narrative presented at the beginning of each section, and the broader themes in which identities have been both stripped away by oppression and also preserved within the context of community and spirituality. In Erzulie's Skirt, the reader sees two disoriented women awaken to the harsh reality that they have been deceived and imprisoned after their journey. They are then locked in a concrete room with nothing but their clothes and two beds, forced to prostitute themselves for the personal gain of a racist woman named Delia. In the brothel, Micaela and Miriam are forced to allow men to act out their unnatural sexual desire and fetishes, and if they dare to resist or refuse, they are beaten almost to death. Most obviously, this position reflects the treatment ...... middle of paper ...... as well as that of Micaela and Miriam. To remember is to retain power and identity. To forget is to lose power and to be subject to imposed identities. By using memory, slaves were able to preserve their personal history, ancestral tradition, and a sense of community power. Erzulie's Skirt helps explore modes of resistance to oppression, the role of religion in resistance and preservation of identity, and how past and present journeys are connected. The loss and revival of faith, physical abuse, and mental oppression suffered by Miriam and Micaela directly mimic the same injustices felt by those who suffered through the Middle Passage, supporting the idea that the brothel is a metaphor of a slave ship and arguing that the purpose of literature is to maintain the interconnectedness of lives despite the distance of time and space.