Visceral and political
Sleeping beauty is a post-feminist manifesto which leapfrogs heady theory with visceral bone-chilling directness.
In the spirit of Albert Camus, Regine Dubono’s dilemmas are played out with fierce existential honesty and courage. Regine and Desiree are revealed as the "other" in an unspoken hierarchical caste system.
Guinea pigs of an Apollonian, corporate, institutionalized, hegemonic, bureaucratic, tyrannizing system. Yet here is represented a fight without rancor, a battle for self-defintion whose language creates new definfitions and models for co-existing. How can it be that in reading the inner thoughts of two women entwined in the most desperate of human circumstances, who bleed so heavily into their own pain that, like the cycles of the moon, we are transported directly in participation with the rythm of nature?. " Art gives meaning to life, especially music."
Regine’s fierce sense of injustice is spoken in the language of woman, artist, mother chemist, immigrant, lawyer, proleteriate and intelligentsia. Regine is able to mystically . fuse with the external world where everything is Art and Sacred. She invents a language of the body and the oppressed to communicate this knowledge as in the story entitled: "my daughter, myself." In her encounter with endless authoritarian figures:..ie. doctors, police, therapists, husband, supervisor, etc she always treats her tormentor with truth, dignity and compassion. Sleeping beauty opens to the heart of feminism, rousing language from its unconscious service to the prevailing social order. Regine Dubono simply communicates in transcendent, delightfully girlish, and archetyply feminine poetical prose.