Breaking Free from the Dungeon of Liberty: How Giannina Braschi Explodes Colonial Categories Through Word-Drawn Revolution in United States of Banana: A Graphic Novel (2021)
- Rolando Pérez
- 5 days ago
- 8 min read
United States of Banana: A Graphic Novel – A Book of Liberation and Becomings
United States of Banana: A Graphic Novel is an artistic event, born from a collaboration between Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi and Swedish cartoonist Joakim Lindengren. This graphic novel transforms Braschi's 2011 genre-bending book of the same name—part prose poem, narrative, and play—into visual form.
"I was born after the distinctions were made, so I don't distinguish between la chicha y la limonada, el merengue, y el coquí," declares the character of Giannina in United States of Banana. This statement captures the essence of what the graphic novel masterfully portrays: Braschi's deconstructive ontology, epistemology, politics, and ethics—a performance of something completely new, a language of indistinctions and liberation from binarism that recalls Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil.
Deconstructing Ontological Categories
This geopolitical tragicomedy joins the Latinographix series at Ohio State University Press, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama (a.k.a. Professor Latinx), who has championed Latinx superhero comics and graphic novels more than anyone else—through his creative and scholarly work, through curation of other series like Brown Ink that published Braschi's magnum opus Putinoika (reviewed herein), and through his Latinx Pop Lab at UT-Austin.
In addition to the extraordinary Latinographix publications that include titles like Ilan Stavans' Angelitos (2018), Alberto Ledesma's Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer (2017), Aldama and Oscar Garza's Through Fences (2024), and Aldama's co-edtied From Cocinas to Lucha Libre Ringsides (2025), we're seeing dozens of other Latinx graphic novels. Many have been reviewed in the Latinx Pop Magazine such as Samuel Teer and Mar Julia's Brownstone (2024), Pablo Leon's Silenced Voices (2025), Omar Morales' Major Thomás (2025), Julio Anta and Gabi Mendez's Speak Up, Santiago!, and many others.
Braschi's becomings deconstruct the ontological categories of what is and what is not human, withdrawing them from traditional Aristotelian hierarchy.
What sets United States of Banana apart in this distinguished lineup is its radical embrace of becomings—transformations that deconstruct the very nature of identity itself. These becomings deconstruct the ontological categories of what is and what is not human, withdrawing them from traditional Aristotelian hierarchy.
Performing Stories of Transformation
In Braschi and Lindengren's work, characters metamorphose beyond fixed categories, creating a narrative of becoming, independence, and freedom that challenges the violence of stasis, borderlands, Sameness, and the imposed categories of race, gender, and nationality maintained by colonization and empire. This graphic novel doesn't just tell a story of transformation—it performs one.
Joakim Lindengren, who has profoundly understood the original text, seizes the opportunity to parody Guy Peellaert's brain-twisting cover illustration of David Bowie's 1974 album Diamond Dogs. Lindengren replaces Bowie's becoming-dog (with genitals) with an androgynous Hamlet's becoming-dog, while Segismundo peers from behind instead of two women. "The best of both worlds" reads the caption, exemplifying Braschi's mestizaje, where one doesn't have to choose between a false A and B. Thus begins (incipit) the comedy where Giannina, Hamlet, and Nietzsche's Zarathustra converge, first in the 2011 novel and now in Lindengren's visual rendition.
We see Hamlet and Zarathustra carrying dead bodies on their backs into the Fulton Street Market (Braschi's allusion to "Flies at the Market-Place" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra), while Giannina carries a coffin-shaped backpack-sardine can with a cross, containing a dead sardine. Hamlet appears in seventeenth-century princely garb; Zarathustra as a bearded, decrepit old man sporting a Superman outfit (alluding to Nietzsche's übermensch); and Giannina in contemporary attire.
The graphic novel opens with "Burial of the Sardine", a significant choice because there's no moving forward, no ferry trip to Liberty Island, until the smelly sardine that is "the 20th century" with all its horrors has been buried. "When I said I will bury the 20th century—everybody—not just me—went looking for a dead body," says Giannina. This "burying," like the "death of God" announcement, is interpreted literally, yet there's something quite literal about it, like Lindengren's realistic depiction of the Fulton Market in New York City, near where the Twin Towers fell on 9/11. After all, United States of Banana is a post-9/11 text, fragmented like all the fragments—glass, paper, torsos, body parts—that came down that day.
Unfortunately, the 20th century isn't dead. When Giannina opens the sardine-coffin, she finds the "ugly" sardine still moving, begging not to be buried alive. Later, in a parodic panel of Da Vinci's The Last Supper, Giannina sits on one side of the table with Hamlet, while Zarathustra sits on the other. Significantly, no one occupies the center position—the redeemer has died. "We are gathered here to break bread with our dead bodies," declares Zarathustra. When Zarathustra asks Giannina if she believes in liberty, she answers: "As much as I believe in God, in Santa Claus" .
Neither Zarathustra nor Hamlet can assist; obsessed with ghosts, Hamlet looks only backward. Heavy with ressentiment, he bridges nothing. As they leave for the ferry, they pass a bar with a large bay window—Lindengren's parody of Hopper's Nighthawks (1942), replacing "Phillies" with "Philistines." The alienation and isolation in the crowded bar are complete.
Next, we encounter the Statue of Liberty, tired of being a statue. "I have inspired empires. I have destroyed empires," she says with boredom. "They turned me into the mausoleum of liberty," she complains, evoking Nicanor Parra's artefact depicting the Statue of Liberty with the words: "USA, where freedom is a statue."
The Statue's social security number is 009-11-2001, "the day the towers fell" and she began to shrink. The following panels make impactful allusions through photography and art history to twentieth-century horrors. One panel foregrounds Nick Ut's famous photograph The Napalm Girl (1972), showing a girl running naked after a napalm attack in Vietnam, with smoke billowing from the Twin Towers in the background. Another parodies Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory (1931) with the words "We were set to take the ferry to Liberty Island when the Twin Towers melted down". Various panels depict disintegration, sadomasochism, and bodily exploitation through references to Francis Bacon, Hans Bellmer's bound dolls, and Bettie Page photographs.
When Giannina asks the Statue—who has become a piggybank and cash machine because "in the United States of Banana everything is for sale"—about her expiration date, the Statue responds: "The day Segismundo takes the crown".
For Zarathustra, Segismundo "is the overman"; for Giannina, "a poet"; for Hamlet, "a conqueror". This leads us to "Under the Skirt of Liberty", one of United States of Banana's most satirically profound sections, offering a glimmer of hope through decolonization in all its forms.
Segismundo, protagonist of Pedro de Calderón de la Barca's play Life is a Dream, has been "living in the dungeon of Liberty" for over a century. In this Spanish Golden Age play, King Basilio of Poland imprisons his son, Prince Segismundo, at birth, fearing a prophecy that the boy will destroy the kingdom. This makes Segismundo and Hamlet "brothers" for Braschi, and their literary parents, Basilio and Gertrude, later marry in the "Wedding of the Century".
If the first iteration of Da Vinci's Last Supper had no one at center, this time Segismundo takes center stage. More than a character, Segismundo is a force, a world, a country. Segismundo is Puerto Rico, which for more than a century has been under the sandals of the Statue of Liberty, but which at last wishes to be independent and free in a Latin American sense.
Braschi writes: "Segismundo thinks that he depends on liberty, but the truth be said—liberty has more need of him than he of the statue...The people want to liberate him. Especially his own people—immigrants and prisoners from around the world. So in order to prevent the coming insurrection, a voting system is created to give the people the impression that Segismundo's destiny is in their hands."
"Free From Freedom"
This is how the United States of Banana's theater of freedom and democracy functions: a traffic light with a button that says "press to cross," but nothing happens. The light changes when it is programmed to do so. The people are "given" three options, writes Braschi:
"If they vote for Wishy [independence]—Segismundo will be liberated from the dungeon. If they vote for Wishy-Washy [commonwealth], the status quo will prevail. If they vote for Washy [statehood], he will be sentenced to death, and nobody will have the honor of hearing his songs rise from the gutters of the dungeon liberty. Every four years the citizens of Liberty Island vote for Wishy-Washy. They can choose between mashed potato, French fries, or baked potato. But any way you serve it, it's all the same potato."
No wonder Giannina repeatedly says she doesn't believe in freedom, in a country where, as Parra would say, liberty is nothing more than a statue. "Freedom is a demagogue, I am a warrior," Giannina tells Zarathustra in the graphic adaptation. She says this responding to the Statue's earlier claim that, as a trophy and the spirit of Joan of Arc, she "liberated France from Anglo-Saxon freedom"—the very notion of freedom Giannina refuses to believe in.
This individualistic concept of liberty has kept Puerto Rico (Segismundo) imprisoned in the dungeon beneath the Statue's skirt. In a monologue from United States of Banana, Segismundo declares: "I have to separate myself from your expectations, so that I can claim the liberty to be free from an associated state. The freedom I will claim is an interior freedom, but that freedom which I have inhabited for a long time, will blow Puerto Rico's mind out of the association that has harmed its sovereignty". In the graphic novel, the Statue's own desire to become "free from freedom. Free," is captured in a parody of Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912).
Here at last, the emperor has no clothes, and the only way for Puerto Rico (like Hamlet) to gain independence is by sending the United States of Banana "to the nunnery." In one of many renderings of Escher's Relativity (1953), Zarathustra and Hamlet ascend a staircase while Giannina descends it upside down, with the caption: "To liberate Segismundo, to declare independence of Puerto Rico, to become happy—to become Hamlet (without Ophelia)"—that's what's necessary for new beginnings.
Beyond Borders
In the end, the liberation from the United States of Banana—where Giannina, Zarathustra, Hamlet, and Segismundo float away on the crown the Statue has hurled into the river—can only occur because Segismundo is able to put himself "in the shoes of the other" and dance (the Nietzschean dance) wearing stockings and high heels: in a new world where "genders like genres are melting like the seasons.
The borders are no longer effective in underlining distinctions between melodrama and drama". This makes United States of Banana quite literally a post-9/11 work. On that date, the melted and collapsed Twin Towers, symbols of capitalism and the old empire, made way for new values. To that end, Giannina, who often appears more Nietzschean than Zarathustra himself, says: "The great event is the creation of a new value—a new value appears like a rainbow with many envelopes that shed mystery".
United States of Banana: A Graphic Novel is a work of metamorphoses and becomings, masterfully achieved through the image-inspiring words of iconic Latinx poet and radical thinker Giannina Braschi and the artwork of Joakim Lindengren, whose illustrations give them a bizarre and beautiful twist. Where Braschi parodies—always with utmost respect—the history of literature, Lindengren does the same with the history of art (classical and contemporary). Together they have created a book of words and images, an artefact, an event.
