Introduction: Read and Write Dangerously

Valerie Fryer-Davis

This critical companion explores the role of memory in Haitian-born writer Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones. The novel tells the story of a young Haitian woman, Amabelle, who immigrated to the Dominican Republic after her parents’ death to work as a servant for a wealthy family. When the 1937 Parsley Massacre breaks out, she flees back to Haiti, losing her lover, Sebastien, to dictator Rafael Trujillo’s forces. The rest of the novel details how she continues to live with the trauma inflicted upon her. In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the role of memory in fiction, particularly in regards to Black women writers who rewrite histories that have been absented from the official colonial and postcolonial archives. Following in this tradition, this project places The Farming of Bones historically, politically, and socially to reveal how Danticat brings the Parsley Massacre into the public discourse through fiction. This novel bears witness to the voices of the victims, such as Amabelle’s, that have been expunged from the public record. The novel is a work of memory that asks readers to remember this violent history. The project engages with this history to ask, why is this history important? Why does Danticat need to bear witness to this particular history and this particular point of view? How has the memory of the Parsley Massacre been largely erased and then how does Danticat use fiction to reveal the lingering and unaddressed trauma that victims continue to live with?

Danticat emphasizes the importance of bearing witness to forgotten histories throughout her oeuvre. In 2008, Danticat gave a speech titled after Albert Camus’ famous essay, “Create Dangerously”, “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work”. She wrote this piece for the Toni Morrison Lecture series in which she discussed how the immigrant writer speaks truth to power through the written word. She later published the speech in a collection of personal essays from across her career. The book, titled after the lecture, reveals how Danticat has always been writing about individual and collective Haitian memory. Spanning topics as varied as the AIDS crisis, 9/11, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Danticat reflects on what it means to break the silence on violence through art. She argues that writing for her is always about “striking a dangerous balance between silence and art” (Danticat, Create Dangerously). For Danticat, the written word becomes a means to bring silenced memories into the public space.

But, as the title of her speech suggests, this power of words places writers in a precarious position. She begins her essay by recounting the execution of two Haitian writers and revolutionaries under the Haitian dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Marchel Numa and Louis Drouin. Duvalier was known for his regime of torture that silenced dissenters. Danticat explores this specific history in another novel, The Dew Breaker. As Maria Rice Bellamy notes in her work on postmemory—memory that haunts future generations who did not experience trauma directly (Belamy 2-3)—The Dew Breaker reveals Danticat’s commitment to sharing “the weight of [Haiti’s] traumatic legacy” with “sympathetic readers” (145). Similarly, in Create Dangerously, Danticat evokes the violence of the Duvalier regime to illustrate how forms of writing and reading that share silenced traumas can be a dangerous act of rebellion. This idea of writing and reading as resistance inspires all of Danticat’s work. She claims, “All artists, writers among them, have several stories—one might call them creation myths—that haunt and obsess them. [Numa’s and Drouin’s execution] is one of mine” (Danticat, Create Dangerously). Haiti’s historical trauma “haunt[s]” Danticat such that she must write about Haiti’s memories of violence. To do this form of writing is dangerous, not in the same way as writing during a time when one could be executed for their words, but there is indeed an element of danger in voicing silenced memories of violence. This is what Albert Camus meant when he suggested, “To create today is to create dangerously” (Camus): there is a reason that some memories have been expunged from official histories; to bring these memories into the public record through fiction, memoire, or essay-writing opens one up to potential backlash from those in power.

Creating dangerously is so powerful because it operates on both an individual and collective level. It often takes the form of investigating individual memories of trauma, as The Farming of Bones does with Amabelle’s story, but these individual stories attempt to redress collective suffering. In The Farming of Bones, we hear from many voices who experience the Parsley Massacre in different ways: most prominently Amabelle, who manages to escape from the Dominican Republic, but also Dominicans who were mistaken for Haitians, Senora Valencia who attempted to save Haitians from her military husband’s forces, and finally her lover Sebastein whose absent voice stands in for all those in unmarked graves whose stories will never be heard. Those who have been silenced by official records might find their voice within this novel, making this a collective narrative that might inspire them to speak truth to power. As Danticat remarks, for herself and other artists who do this form of work, there is the hope that their words might inspire those living under extreme oppression: “Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, a future that we may have yet to dream of, someone may risk his or her life to read us. Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, we may also save someone’s life, because they have given us a passport, making us honorary citizens of their culture” (Danticat, Create Dangerously). Here, Danticat affirms her commitment to writing the stories of collective memory: her writing is for others that may find their voice in her words.

Importantly, the above quote also reveals how Danticat’s writing can become collective outside of Haitian spaces. The work is collective not only because it speaks with a communal Haitian voice, but also because it opens up avenues for cross-cultural exchange. One day, if not now, then perhaps someone might invoke Danticat’s words to speak truth to power. In this case, the reader who reads dangerously creates a global community of the oppressed, invoking violence against Haitians to articulate one’s own oppression. This is a similar form of memorialization that Michael Rothberg has described in his book, Multidirectional Memory. Rothberg coins the term “multidirectional memory” to show how public memory is “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing” (Rothberg 3). Multidirectional memory suggests that we might draw seemingly disparate histories together in order to bring forward silenced narratives into the public sphere. In this sense, Danticat suggests the possibility of multidirectional memory through making public silenced Haitian memories and relating them to future violence. Novels such as The Farming of Bones thus have the potential to become collective in numerous ways: first, by bearing witness to collective Haitian trauma, and second, through resonating with future readers, creating linkages between the violences in different cultures.

By framing the work as both an individual and collective project, Danticat situates her writing within a tradition of Caribbean women writers that reveal silenced oppression. Audre Lorde famously argued in “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” that Black women must speak about the violence they experience. The fear to speak must not dominate because through language Black women can resist structures that dehumanize them. As Lorde says, Black women “all [share] a war against the tyrannies of silence” (Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence” 41). The collective struggle against silence recognizes that language is action against those that mean to silence voices. In Audre Lorde’s work, most prominently in her magnum opus, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, the personal becomes collective and political. Zami—a semi-autobiographical book cited as inventing the biomythography genre, which relies on personal and invented history—recounts how Lorde navigates white supremacist hetero-patriarchal New York City as a Black lesbian Caribbean woman. Through telling this story, Lorde uses her personal history to speak against homophobia, racism, and sexism in both Caribbean and American cultures that silence women with her identity. In this sense, language transforms the personal narrative into a collective and political history of violence. Language is an action that renegotiates how one perceives Caribbean women in the diaspora. It allows one to see broader institutional forms of racism, sexism, and homophobia through individual experiences of violence.

Danticat’s work similarly relies on the personal to speak to broader political problems in Haiti. Danticat herself observes how she fits within this tradition that uses the personal and collective alongside each other: “[I] merge my own narratives with the oral and written narratives of others” (Danticat, Create Dangerously). These multiple perspectives cross languages—French, English, and Haitian Creole—as is often the case with postcolonial writing. See, for example, Rebecca Walkowitz’s recent book, Born Translated, that argues postcolonial writers are always writing through multiple languages and thus must be read as always-already translating. But despite inheriting French and Haitian Creole, Danticat chooses to write in English in order to introduce Anglophone readers to this Francophone postcolonial nation that one might not otherwise be familiar with (Bellamy 145), or might only know of it as the first nation to decolonize and the island that was devastated by an earthquake in 2010. Danticat engages with a multitude of silenced voices (including her own) in many languages across Haiti’s colonial and postcolonial history to orient the reader towards a renegotiated perspective of Haiti.

Danticat’s writing is a political project similar to Lorde’s that reworks understandings of history even within the Haitian community. Danticat observes, “We [Haitians] have, it seems, a collective agreement to remember our triumphs and gloss over our failures. Thus, we speak of the Haitian revolution as though it happened just yesterday but we rarely speak of the slavery that prompted it” (Danticat, Create Dangerously). Silences mire Haitian history, which the characters in Danticat’s novels attempt to work through by recovering lost narratives (Bellamy 132). This deconstruction of silence opens up space for the voices of the oppressed. In this sense, we might situate Danticat’s work within broader subaltern studies debates that asks, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak famously argued that the subaltern cannot speak because we constantly attempt to speak for her, but by making the personal political and collective through merging her own narratives with the oral and written narratives of others, Danticat creates a space for these silenced voices to speak. This political project allows Danticat to reveal colonial and postcolonial violences in an effort to redress them.

The Farming of Bones is one part of Danticat’s broader political project with a specific emphasis on the 1937 Parsley Massacre, an absent historical event among global discourses of genocide memorialization. This project reveals Danticat’s efforts to bring that history to an Anglophone audience. Horace Palmer’s essay, “Masking Discrimination to Promote Nationalism”, opens this critical reader by recounting the historical motivators for the massacre. He brilliantly argues that Raphael Trujillo associated skin color with nationalism in order to inspire ordinary citizens to kill their neighbours. Palmer’s argument resonates with previous postcolonial work that attempts to find a rationale for everyday perpetrators, such as Mahmood Mamdani’s When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda that observes how the genocidal regime in Rwanda relied on a colonial history of ethnic conflict to inspire ordinary people to kill. One could also place the essay within debates on nationalism led by scholars such as Michael Ignatieff who suggests that nationalism was the primary instigator for getting ordinary people with a connected history to fight each other during the Croatian War (Ignatieff 37-8). Following in these traditions, Palmer situates the reader of The Farming of Bones within the colonial and postcolonial history of division that led Dominicans to kill their Haitian neighbours. He excavates this history for us, starting the collecting off by grounding us in Danticat’s historical and political project.

The second and third essays in this collection deal with similar themes of the enduring effect of trauma on the psyche. Autumn Mathew’s excellent psychological analysis asks us to think about how trauma compounds over the course of one’s lifetime. Bringing together Amabelle’s loss of her parents at an early age with the trauma experienced due to the Parsley Massacre as an adult, she argues that these overlapping traumas make it difficult for Amabelle to obtain closure from either violence. Similar to Bellamy’s argument about The Dew Breaker, Autumn proves that Danticat is interested in revealing how trauma haunts an individual long after the violence has occurred. Sarika Sankar takes a similar approach to suggest that pain and suffering are prolonged in The Farming of Bones due to the every-presence of death after the massacre. In line with scholarship emerging from Lawrence Langer, who suggested that victims of the Holocaust live alongside their memories of suffering such that they exist in a state of social death (Langer 63), Sankar argues that boundaries of life and death are broken down in The Farming of Bones. When raised to the political and collective level, both Mathew’s and Sankar’s essays suggest, as Mbembe famously argued in “Necropolitics”, that life in the postcolonial nation revolves around death. Death lingers or haunts in The Farming of Bones, and it comes to define life itself.

Shaquille Migel Nkosi Profitt rounds out the collection with a powerful treatise on bearing witness. As this introduction has argued, Profitt reaffirms Danitcat’s political project to bring silenced Haitian narratives forward into the public sphere. Relying on Lisa Ortiz’s analysis of “prosthetic memory” in the novel—a term coined by Allison Landsberg to describe memories we carry with us like a prosthetic limb—he argues that The Farming of Bones is a testimony against the genocidal atrocities at the hands of Trujillo. He then situates the novel within her larger oeuvre, analyzing scenes from Danticat’s first novel, Krik? Krak! alongside The Farming of Bones to reveal how remembering these Haitian narratives could inspire hope in redressing silenced violences. Profitt expertly reminds us of Danticat’s broader political project: one must read and write dangerously.

Works Cited

Bellamy, Maria Rice. Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction. University of Virginia Press, 2015.

Camus, Albert. “Create Dangerously.” December 14, 1957, University of Uppsala, Sweden. Lecture.

Danticat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Princeton University Press, 2010.

---. The Dew Breaker. Alfred A. Knopf.

---. The Farming of Bones. Penguin Books, 1999.

Langer, Lawrence L. “The Alarmed Vision: Social Suffering and Holocaust Atrocity.” Daedalus, vol. 125, no. 1, 1996, pp. 47–65.

Lorde, Audre. “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” Sister Outsider, Ten Speed Press, 1984, pp. 40-44.

---. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Crossing Press, 1982.

Mamdani, Mahmood. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda. Princeton University Press, 2001.

Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics”. Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2003, pp. 11-40.

Ignatieff, Michael. The Warriors Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience. Chatto & Windus, 1998.

Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford University Press, 2009.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313.

1. Masking Discrimination to Promote Nationalism

Horace Palmer

The Farming of The Bones by Edwidge Danticat details a fictional account that carries historical repercussions and a lesson that we all must learn from. Haiti and the Dominican Republic have shared the same land, yet their borders divide the cultures and have set the tone for a genocide that strongly invokes the term Antihaitianismo. How often do we take advantage of life and the opportunity to have a place to call our own, whether sharing a land where you are inferior in thought but same in heart, blood, and soul? The dead can teach the living so much but we will continue to repeat the same mistakes of dictators that sway the masses to believe their propaganda if we do not listen to them.

The Parsley Massacre was perpetrated on October 2, 1937. The Dominican Republic leader, Raphael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, slaughtered an estimated 35,000 Haitians because of nationalism and pride. This nationalism was an agenda so destructive that Dominicans were blinded by discrimination, killing even those individuals of the same skin color. Judging someone by their skin color was associated with national identity. Danticat herself writes, “there were also Dominicans killed in the massacre and that there were many Dominicans who helped hide and save Haitians. Sometimes Haitian-Dominican families were so blended anyway that there was no separation possible” (Danticat 322).

The buildup to the genocide has a long history. In 1916, the United States landed on the island and occupied the Dominican Republic until 1934. The Dominican Republic was in debt due to an unstable economy and government corruption. The United States noticed that they were not paying back the debts owed to them. The island's occupation lasted until 1934, when the United States also felt that they no longer needed to protect their investment or hold this location as a strategic military position (Pulley). Based on America's deep-rooted history with racism and its influence and implications on the development of third-world countries, the Dominican Republic people continued the sentiment of hate towards the Haitian population. When the United States transitioned power back to the Dominican people, a National Army leader named Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina used his power to rig the elections and seized control of the Presidency. Raymond Pully described Trujillo's regime as “Own force of character, his tactics of ruthless repression, combined with absolute control of all government patronage and appointments have made his influence supreme” (Pulley 24). Rafael Trujillo convinced the United States that leaving him as president would be the best thing for his country. His persuasion was successful because the United States felt the occupation did little to stabilize the government and decrease the debt owed. Once Trujillo gained power, he began a pro-Hispanic and anti-Haitian agenda. With no governing body able to stop his irrational practices, he had total domination of the country.

To understand why the people of Haiti emigrated to the Dominican Republic, we first have to understand the history of Spanish colonial rule of the Dominican Republic, and French colonial control over Haiti. This island was split and constantly at war. It was not until Haiti gained independence from France in 1804 and later took over the Dominican Republic side of the island to free the island of slavery from Spain. While Haitians occupied the Dominican side for about twenty-two years, Haitians supported the Spanish economy with labor and pushed for the equal distribution of wealth. Once the Dominican Republic gained its independence, the relationship with the Haitian people quickly changed (Dunay 147). The United States’s colonialism then amplified the Dominican Republic's racist attitude towards Haitians. Sharri K Hall, writer for the council on Hemispheric Affairs, writes, “ Eventually, a ‘white is Prime’ ideal flourished during the United States’ occupation of Hispaniola beginning in 1915 in Haiti, then 1916 in the Dominican Republic. Some scholars believe that the United States helped the white elite to consolidate power by bringing institutionalized racism” (Hall). In 1930, Horatio Vasquez, the acting president, was betrayed by his army chief Raphael Trujillo. Although Trujillo was part-Haitian, this did not stop him from enacting atrocities on the Haitian people living in the Dominican Republic. In 1937, he gave a speech reminiscent of those perpetrated by a Nazi regime. Danticat wrote, “Trujillo tried to model himself after Adolf Hitler of Nazi Germany and Francisco Franco of Spain” (Danticat 321). He said that Haitians were violent and evil thieves that were stealing from farmers. He also made the Dominican people believe that if Haitians would stay, they would further deteriorate the country (Schlote 71). Through successive colonialism, the Domican Republic slowly adopted an attitude of antihaitianismo.

This history of colonialism also created a lot of opportunities for Haitians to migrate to the Dominican Republic, which exacerbated the antihaitianismo under Trujillo. Haitians have long been living and working in the Dominican Republic. Many sought jobs and seasonal work within the sugar cane fields and were considered laborers and peasants. Economically, Haiti was in heavy debt to the United States and Germany, and Haitians left their country to seek a better life. Due to Haiti's location and rough coastlines, it was hard to make a living. A densely populated island with short rivers is not easily navigated and does not allow transporting of goods via water. The soil is thin from the mountains and does not stay fertile once prepared for cultivation. This will cause famine and crop failures. The northwestern peninsula is subject to heavy rainstorms and varying precipitation making Haiti more susceptible to hurricanes and tropical storms. Thousands of Haitians try to migrate to other countries like the Dominican Republic or Cuba. The Dominican Republic was often the only economically viable opportunity for many Haitians as it offered temporary work for migrants doing agricultural work like sugar cane farming and menial servant jobs (Martinez 3). Haitians were in the Dominican Republic for the opportunity of a better life but were subject to prejudice and discrimination called antihaitianismo. After independence, there were many jobs available in the sugar cane fields. The jobs were menial at best with low paying wages, but Haitians readily took these jobs because of the poor working conditions in their home country. Haitians took those jobs that the Dominicans did not want. Trujillo used this opportunity to tell his countrymen that the Haitians were taking all the jobs and were considered a lower class of race.

There is no distinction between nationality, race, and ethnicity when nationalism is used to hide malicious intent. The word ‘race’ refers to someone's physical traits, whether their hair, skin, or eye color. At the same time, ethnicity is closely related to nationality and language and one's cultural history. Although people may have many ethnicities, they can only have one race. Trujillo used hateful words towards the color of Haitians to persuade his people that they were losing their national identity if they allowed invaders to permeate into the Dominican Republic. The tense relationship between the two countries first began when Haiti began fighting for independence. Dominicans did not want independence; it would mean that the Europeans would no longer continue trade with the Dominican Republic.

Raphael Trujillo noticed that he could differentiate between a Dominican and a Haitian by having them “pronounce the consonant ‘r’ in ‘Perejil,’ the Spanish word for parsley and thus exposing them as Haitians” (Rodríguez Navas). Danticat also references this in the novel: “They raised handfuls of parsley sprigs over their heads and mouthed, ‘Perejil. Perejil.’” (Danticat 189). On October 2, 1937, the Dominican military ordered the murder of an estimated 35,000 Haitian women, men, and children. The mass killings were concentrated all throughout the Dominican and Haitian borders. The weapon of choice used to perpetrate this genocide was the machete, which falsely showed that the killings were done by peasants attempting to protect their livestock from the Haitian immigrants. For more than a year, the dictator Trujillo had planned this massacre, and many of the people killed were Dominicans that were of Haitian descent. The Dominican government censored all information of the killings while dumping bodies in the river separating the two countries or burning the bodies to hide the atrocities. Sadly, no one from Trujillo's government has been brought to justice, and the government was forced to pay a measly $525,000 as reparations to Haiti. The amount of reparations given to Haiti ensured that deceased victims would only receive thirty dollars each, and the survivors would receive two cents. Due to corruption within the Dominican Republic government, almost no money was given to Haitians (Swift).

The memory of the Haitian massacre is a reminder of how leaders who obtain power will manipulate people to go against their neighbors. Dictators will use their skills of persuasion to convince the masses to follow their agendas and censor the flow of information to continue their reign of power. Danticat writes The Farming of Bones to give remembrance for not only the ones that have lost their lives but for those who continue living with the memory of that unfortunate day. When asked why she chose to tell the story from the view of Amabelle, Danticat explains that the voice jumped out at her, and she felt by using Anabelle’s character, the story would be a “kind of testimonial” (Danticat 320).

Works Cited

Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. Soho Press, 1998.

Dunay, Jorge. “Reconstructing Racial Identity: Ethnicity, Color, and Class among Dominicans in the United States and Puerto Rico.” Latin American Perspectives, vol. 25, no. 3, 1998, pp. 147–172.

Hall, Sharri K. “Antihaitianismo: Systemic Xenophobia And Racism In The Dominican Republic.” Council on Hemispheric Affairs, 2017. https://www.coha.org/antihaitianismo-systemic-xenophobia-and-racism-in-the-dominican-republic/

Martinez, Samuel. “From Hidden Hand to Heavy Hand: Sugar, the State, and Migrant Labor in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.” Latin American Research Review, vol. 34, no. 1, 1999, pp. 57–84.

Pulley, Raymond H. “The United States and the Trujillo Dictatorship, 1933-1940: The High Price of Caribbean Stability.” Caribbean Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, 1965, pp. 22–31.

Rodríguez Navas, Ana. “Words as Weapons: Gossip in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” MELUS, vol. 42, no. 3, 2017, pp. 55-83.

Schlote, Christiane. “Representational Ambiguities and the 'Dictator Play': Carmen Rivera's ‘Dictator: The Downfall of the Dominican Dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina.’” Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 2010, pp. 70–86.

Swift, M. “The 1937 Parsley Massacre.” Black Then, 2020. https://blackthen.com/1937-parsley-massacre/

“The Parsley Massacre of 1937.” Genocide Memorial Project, n. d. https://genocidememorialproject.wordpress.com/student-memorial-pages/trujillos-dominican-republic/

2. The Effect of Childhood Trauma in Adulthood

Autumn Matthews

Childhood trauma is the most terrifying and heartbreaking experience for a child to go through especially with being the front row witness of unexpected deaths and torture. There is a repetition of trauma after trauma in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, which is based on the migration of Haitian workers to the Dominican Republic and the subsequent 1937 Parsley Massacre. During this time, the protagonist of the novel, Amabelle Desir, experiences traumatic events from childhood which lingered with her as an adult when she faced more traumatic experiences. Amabelle lost her parents as a child and continues to suffer from this trauma through the repetition of the memory. This trauma compounded with witnessing more tragedy and deaths of Haitians during the massacre. The trauma that Amabelle has gone through never ends and she does not truly get her closure until the very end of the book.

Amabelle’s parents died when she and her parents had crossed the river to Dajabon, a town in Dominican Republic, to buy pots from a Haitian pot maker named Moy. This was their traditional market day for the Desir Family. Amabelle’s father was in a rush to cross the river to get home safely. He was trying to beat the rain since it had already started to rain over in the mountains. As the Desir Family started to make their way across the river, it began to rain harder. Then, intense winds and dark rainy clouds formed in the sky. This did not stop Amabelle’s father from trying to get his wife and himself across the river. He knew the risk of crossing the river during a severe rainstorm, but he believed that he would make it in time to get Amabelle and the Moy pots. They were in the middle of a hurricane, and it had caused them to drown in the river. Amabelle did not know that this would be the last time that she would see her parents alive, and that this tragedy would affect her as an adult.

As a young woman, she struggles with letting go of the past due to the continuous nightmare of her parents’ unexpected death that she was a front row witness of. Danticat writes “My mother turns back to look for me, throwing my father off balance [...] My father thrusts his hands in front of him, trying to keep the course [...] When he tries to push her up by the legs, a cluster of vines whisks past them; my mother reaches for the vines as though they were planks of a raft” (Danticat 49). Amabelle had to watch her parent’s struggle in the river while she was forced to stay put and wait her turn until her father came back and got her. Amabelle was expecting to get home safe with her parents and enjoy those Moy pots that they have gotten from Dajabon; instead, she was unexpectedly hit with tragedy. Danticat described in this moment that Amabelle witnessed “The water rises above my father’s head. My mother releases his neck [...] Separated they are less of an obstacle for the cresting river” (Danticat 50). The unexpected happened: her parents drowned in the river and there was nothing for her to do but watch them take their last breaths. In her adolescent age, Amabelle did not deserve to face trauma. This adolescent trauma compounds with other traumatic experiences later in her life such that the full force of the trauma continues to linger in her memory.

A child that loses their parents becomes stuck in the moment which puts them in a state of shock, confusion, and vulnerability. They struggled with high-risked pre-death factors such as functional impairment and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Their minds can no longer function in the same way because anything can provoke their PTSD to kick in. According to psychologist Jeffery Hunt, “The loss of a parent would increase the risk for psychiatric disorder and functional impairment” (Hunt 2). A child’s mental health is affected, and it puts them at an extreme substantial risk of suffering. Amabelle experiences disturbing thoughts, feelings, and she dreams of her parent’s death. In one of Amabelle’s nightmares, she jumps into the river to follow her dead parents. As Amabelle remembers in a dream, “I walk down to the sands and throw the pots into the water and then myself [...] Two of the river boys grabbed me and dragged me by the armpits away from the river” (Danticat 50). An experience so traumatic happened and it caused her to want to jump into the water and try to save her parents, who were already dead. But a child this young as Amabelle would not even think of death and will just believe that she can try to help them. Amabelle lost a part of herself when she witnessed the river consume her parents. When she tried to jump into the river herself, one of the river boys said to her, “Unless you want to die [...] you will never see those people again” (Danticat 50). This nightmare stayed in her head for an exceedingly long time in exceeding detail from watching her parents die, to one of the boys pulling her out of the river telling her that she will never see her parents ever again unless she wants to die too.

This sad moment left an exceptionally large scar on her mind, a scar that could not be erased. According to Andrea Danese and Stephanie J. Lewis, “Evidence of an association between childhood trauma and inflammation raises the possibility that inflammation could help explain the pathophysiology of trauma-related psychopathology” (Danese, Lewis 104). The trauma that Amabelle went through as a child affected her mental state as an adult and it increased her chances of experiencing psychopathology such as depression, suicidal thoughts (as we saw when she jumped into the river), anxiety, and isolation. We see these psychopathologies manifest in her adult life.

After her parents' passing, she was taken in by Don Ignacio, the widowed father of Señora Valencia. He raised Amabelle and his daughter, Señora Valencia, in the Dominican Republic. When Amabelle became older she started working for Don and his daughter. Amabelle then falls in love with Sebastien Onius, a young Haitian man. Living with the memory of her parent’s death haunts and depresses Amabelle. She experiences death all around her and it continues in her adulthood. For example, the first death that she witnesses in her adult life gives her anxiety, and it awakens her PTSD. Near the beginning of the novel, two people die in her life one after another: Joel, Sebastien’s dear friend, who was killed by Señora Valencia’s father, and then Señora's newborn son. This was a lot to handle for Amabelle because two lives were lost a day apart from each other and she did not know how to deal with these deaths since she had not truly gotten over the first death— that of her beloved parents. She learns of Joel’s death during her conversation with Senora’s father who admits to her, “I think we killed a man tonight [...] On the day my grandchildren are born, I was in an automobile that may have taken a man’s life [...] My son-in-law did not want to stay and search” (Danticat 43). Initially, Amabelle thought that the man that Don had killed was the love of her life, Sebastien, since after her parent’s death she had grown so used to losing the people closest to her. Her anxiety had risen to the roof: Sebastien did not make it home from working in the fields on time even though Señora’s father and husband did. This led Amabelle to prepare for the worst that the man that Señora’s father had crushed in his car could be Sebastien.

As she waits for Sebastien to come home, a memory of her parent's death flashes through her head. It seems like every time something goes wrong, a memory of her dead parents rushes through her brain. She thinks of her old home in Haiti when closing her eyes and then, Sebastien enters. Her anxiety comes down a bit but her anxiety rises again when Sebastien tells her, “I cannot stay [...] Old Kongo’s waiting for me at the mill. His son Joel was killed. Joel is dead” (Danticat 46). It is only after Sebastien tells her that Joel was killed in the automobile accident, that the reader first learns about the death of Amabelle’s parents. Danticat Sebastien’s and Amabelle’s trauma. Similarly, they both are witnesses of tragic unexpected deaths of their loved ones. Death hits awfully close to home for Amabelle. Every time someone dies, it is almost as if her parent’s death knocks on the door. Like her parent’s death, she had no control over Joel’s death. Indeed, Amabelle has one foot in the past and another foot in the present.

Then, while grieving with Joel’s death, Baby Rafi unexpectedly dies. It is a source of sorrow and resentment. She was saddened over Joel’s death as well as the loss of the innocent life of Baby Rafi. But, she also felt resentment towards their deaths, especially by Baby Rafi’s death. Amabelle says, in deep thought, “At least she [Senora] could place her hands on it, her son’s final bed. My parents had no coffins” (Danticat 91). Again, one foot is in the past while the other is in the present. She is heartbroken that she never got a proper funeral for her parents to say goodbye to them. Baby Rafi gets a proper burial and resting bed, but her parents do not. Their final resting place was at the bottom of the river where their bodies were last seen. Amabelle encounters death in her adult life, which provokes her to think about her parents. When Baby Rafi dies, she cannot get the thought out of her head that she never got to say goodbye to her parents.

In Chapter 26, Señora Valencia’s doctor, Dr. Javier, asked Amabelle if she wanted to come back to Haiti to help him care for his Haitian patients. He had warned Amabelle about Dominican Republic’s dictator Rafael Trujillo’s violent orders against Haitian immigrants. She had already witnessed three traumatic deaths: her beloved parents, Joel, and Baby Rafi. She felt that returning to her roots would not be such a bad idea and that this is what she needed to get away from the trauma. Amabelle decided to leave the Dominican Republic with Dr. Javier, Sebastien, Mimi (Sebastien’s sister), and Yves (Sebastien’s friend). However, the day that they were all supposed to leave the genocide had already begun and Sebastien, Mimi, and Dr. Javier were arrested by the soldiers who were ordered to take prisoners to Dajabon. Amabelle did not feel right with leaving Sebastien or his sister behind. She says to Yves, “I must go to Dajabon. There is a chance of finding Mimi and Sebastien there. I should go at once” (Danticat 163). Even though she experienced heartbreak and trauma three times, it gave her hope, courage, and bravery because she knows what death looks and feels like. She dealt with her trauma by putting her life on the line for the people that she loved since she could not do that when her parents had drowned to their deaths. She did not give up: all the traumatic moments that she had been through thus far had prepared her for surviving the return to Dajabon where she watched her parents take their last breaths.

During Amabelle and Yves’ journey to Dajabon, they meet Wilner, Odette, Tibon, and two Dominican sisters who were also traveling to Dajabon. The group splits leaving only Wilner, Odette, and Tibon to travel beside Amabelle and Yves. Amabelle and Yves grow a close bond with Wilner, Odette, and Tibon. As mentioned in this discussion, Amabelle unexpectedly loses every person that she has ever become close with. When the group arrives at Dajabon, death makes its entrance, just as it had done when Amabelle was a child. This time death comes in three: Amabelle, Yves, and Tibon are separated from Wilner and Odette when they make it to Dajabon, and are violently attacked by a mob of Dominican men when trying to cross the river. Amabelle witnessed the Dominican men torture Tibon to his death. Amabelle described how one of the guys took Yves’ machete and used it to stab Tibon in his back while they were all held down against their will. Amabelle also recalls:

Yves and I were shoved down onto our knees. Our jaws were pried open and parsley stuffed into our mouths. My eyes watering, I chewed and swallowed quickly as I could, but not nearly as fast as they were forcing the handfuls into my mouth [...] I tried to stop listening to the voices ordering the young men to feed us more. I told myself that eating the parsley would keep me alive (Danticat 191).

Amabelle wanted to make it out of Dajabon alive as she did before when experiencing her first traumatic moment of watching her parents drown to their deaths in the river. While she was held against her will, her survival instincts kicked in and she showed no weakness, in spite of seeing Tibon murdered right in front of her. In the back of her mind, she had to get out of there alive, just like the young and traumatized Amabelle had tried to do at the river.

Being tortured was a nightmare for Amabelle. Amabelle and Yves had made it out alive but had lost Tibon in the process of trying to cross the very same river that had killed her parents. After watching Tibon’s murder, Amabelle was put through another stage of trauma during the tragic deaths of Wilner and Odette as they crossed the river. Like Amabelle’s father, who faced tremendous hardships crossing the river, Wilner and Odette struggled to cross. Wilner had been fatally shot by a soldier and then his lover, Odette, struggled to swim across the river but eventually drowned. Amabelle remembers taking one last look at Odette’s dead body, something that she never got a chance to do when her parents had drowned in the river. Going into the river as an adult made her relive the moment of seeing someone that she cares about take their last breaths. This forced her to accept death for what it was.

Amabelle's acceptance of death leads her to understand trauma, pain, and loss. In the midst of it all, and everything that she had endured, she lives and grows with the effects of trauma. Amabelle was able to find closure at the end of the novel. Years later, after her departure from the Dominican Republic, Amabelle goes back into the river:

In the coal black darkness of a night like this, unless you are near it, the river ceases to exist, allowing you to imagine just for a moment that all of them—my mother and father, Wilner, Odette, and the thousands whose graves are here—died natural deaths, peaceful deaths, deaths filled with moments of reflection, with pauses and some regret, the kind of death where there is time to think of what we are leaving behind and what better things may lie ahead (Danticat 306).

She accepts the deaths that she had been a witness to, which gives closure for Amabelle. Closure for her was “a satisfying end to some traumatic event” (Berns 49). Amabelle’s closure was “presented as an end stage of grief” (Berns 49). The last stage of her grief with her traumatic moments was to face the river that had taken her beloved parents and many other lives away. Amabelle accepts the trauma and deaths which proves that she had gone through it all and survived. At the end, returning to the river allowed Amabelle to get back the little girl that she had lost when her parents died: she accepted the deaths of her loved ones and finally moved on by letting go of the past.

Works Cited

Berns, Nancy. “Chasing ‘Closure.’” Contexts, vol. 10, no. 4, 2011, pp. 48–53.

Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. Soho Press, Inc., 1998.

Danese, Andrea, and Stephanie J Lewis. “Psychoneuroimmunology of Early-Life Stress: The Hidden Wounds of Childhood Trauma?” Neuropsychopharmacology, vol. 42, no. 1, 2017, pp. 99–114.

Hunt, Jeffrey. “Sudden Parental Death Has Long‐lasting Effects on Young Children.” Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology Update, vol. 20, no. 9, 2018, pp. 1–3.

3. The Prolonged Aspect of Death that give rise to Pain, Suffering, and Memories

Sarika Sankar

The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat portrays the stories of Haitians that have migrated to the Dominican Republic, the settlement ultimately causing a widespread killing of Haitians known as the Parsley Massacre. Many characters in the novel died as a result of brutality or accidents and this devastation describes how general and unexpected death can be. The losses are traumatic and sudden, death is brutal towards everyone. The pain and suffering from Haitians were caused by the Dominican Republic because it was dictated from the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Amabelle experiences tremendous causes of pain, suffering, memories, and the lingering aspects of death. I argue that Danticat makes Amabelle’s character accept the real incident of the Haitian Massacre. The Farming of Bones reveals how death defines life for the characters and the lingering aspect of death that causes pain, hardship and memories.

In addition, Michele Wucker captures the raw and fearful emotions of her fellow

Haitians and declares justices for human rights. For many years, Haitians have been mistreated and taken advantage of and this affected them in many ways such as painful memories and hardship. The pain and suffering for Haitian people began in the Dominican Republic when the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo rose to power. In the book The Farming of Bones, Amabella and her lover Sebastian both have painful memories of parental deaths. Death comes to all of us and it is not the greatest, the greatest loss in life is what keeps us alive and what dies from the inside. Death leaves behind a trail of darkness for Amabelle’s loss. Amabelle experiences the trauma of death and pain through her journey in water, the massacre river. Water is portrayed as a symbol of death and sorrow.

Moreover, the incident that took place in 1937, was when Dominicans put Haitians to the test to pronounce the word “pereji” the way the Dominican claimed to be the proper way and if they could not do so, the Haitians would be put to death. The Farming of Bone focuses a lot on the physical and psychological events, the devastating 1937 massacre took on thousands of Haitians migrants or roughly about “12,000-35,000 deaths took place within 3-4 days and nights,” (Judith 365). Many were killed with machetes and knives, most were killed by the Dominican Republic military as well as radicalized Dominicans. Haitian bodies were being alienated and segregated from the Dominican crowd. The amount of pain and grief Amabella experienced affected her, not just mentally but emotionally and physically as she continued to search for freedom. As Jelena Šesnić argues, “Her flesh was simply a map of scars and bruises, a married testament,” (Šesnić, 246). Here, Šesnić implies that Amabelle’s body is “a site of witnessing thus in effect dismantling the primary accorded to the psychic trauma,” (Šesnić, 246). Coincidentally, the binary between the cultured and uncultured, and the binary between life and death tend to revolve around the same relationship. Danticat examines the history and elaborated on Amabelle as a human representative and an active bearer of memories of suffering and brutality. Even though the past continued to haunt Amabelle, it was the unstoppable force to enraptured ethnic purge that consumed thousands of Haitians into worthless and nameless death that caused Amabelle's suffering.

Death defines the characters’ lives. Amabelle witnesses her parents drown in the river, Sebastien's father was killed, and Joel died when he was struck by a car. Many of the people in Amabellea life die as a result of the massacre: her traveling companion Tibon dies when a group of angry Dominicans beats him to death, another companion Wilner was shot by Dominican soldiers, one of Senora Valencia twins died, Odette dies, thousands of Haitians died, and most importantly Sebastian died. Death became so real and present that it is the quality of being certain to happen in Amabelle’s life. Amabelle has been beaten and separated from her fiancé, while witnessing the murders of numerous other Haitians attempting to run away and get across the Massacre River. People are usually expected to heal after witnessing death, violence, or brutal death. However, if such events are refused to admit the truth of a place in history, healing becomes especially difficult. Amabelle has witnessed many deaths in the novel and it was an ugly image that suffered her at nearly every state of being awake and every state of her sleep. People often learn to heal after witnessing death, even violent or brutal death. However, the incidents that happened in The Farming of Bones haunt and hurt Amabelle.

Amabelle struggles to hold on to the never fading memory of her parents which was

worsened by the Dominican slaughter of Haitian immigrants. The Farming of Bones deals with the pain of the past and present and how that affects Amabelle identity. Amabelle says, "It's either be in a nightmare or be nowhere at all. Or otherwise simply float inside these remembrances, grieving for who I was, and even more for what I've become,” (Danticat, 2). She is implying that her life has become a nightmare of her dead parents and her nightmares were destroying her life. After Sebastian disappears, Amabelle is both emotionally and physically shocked. Danticat fills The Farming of Bones with the reality of pain and joy, past and present, and dream and authenticity of a person who undergoes the complications of her social and national identity in society and experiences of being different and inferior. Throughout the novel Amabelle has struggled with finding herself and trying to turn her life around. While I agree that Amabelle feels like she needs to give voice to this violent history, and that she comprehends the power of history, I would also argue that she does not have the power to deal with what happened by documenting those incidents, so instead she keeps them inside.

I want to share my personal experience of painful memories and hardship along with trauma. Growing up in a West Indian home in New York was not always the easiest thing In today’s society we experience racism since we would be considered black or dark skinned. I have experienced and witnessed police brutality alongside being racially profiled numerous times. With my daily travels to work and school I would feel as if I was being watched or looked at as a threat and it even caused my parents pain to constantly wonder if their child would make it home at night. I have experienced painful memories since childhood because of witnessing and experiencing death, unlawful arrests, racism, and violation of our human rights. Hearing gunshots, police sirens, ambulances, and screams of men and women crying out for help whilst having bodily harm done to them caused me a lot of paranoia and trauma. Living in today’s world where racism and hate groups still take place and minorities may feel that their human rights have been revoked. At the end of the novel, Amabelle is sadly disappointed when she returns hoping that she will meet Sebastian. I believe Amabelle’s memories are something she does not want to let go of because they bring her close to Sebastien, to a place where her mother visits her at nights. They remind her of a time when nothing was lost. Of course, her dreams and memories tormented her, but they brought her peace, even though she did not get closure.

Works Cited

Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. Soho Press, Inc., 1998.

Misrahi-Barak, Judith. “Biopolitics and Translation: Edwidge Danticat’s Many Tongues.” International Journal of Francophone Studies, vol. 17, no. 3, 2014, pp. 349–371.

Šesnić, Jelena. “Wounded History: A Reading of Edwidge Danticat’s Fiction.” SRAZ, 2006, pp. 231-260.

Sylvain, Patrick. “Textual Pleasures and Violent Memories: in Edwidge Danticat Farming of the Bones.” International Journal of Language and Literature, vol. 2, no. 3, 2014, pp. 1-19.

Wucker, Michele. “Edwidge Danticat: A Voice for the Voiceless.” Americas, vol. 52, no. 3, 2000, pp. 40.

4. Bearing Witness in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones

Shaquille Migel Nkosi Profitt

Edwidge Danticat eloquently reminds us that “Each of us has a story to tell and each of us bears witness in our own way” (Shea 18-19). In Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998), Amabelle Desir, the narrator, bears witness to the 1937 Parsley Massacre. The narrative follows Amabelle, a Haitian woman, and her attempt to find her lover Sebastien, who is displaced by the massacre. Danticat writes vividly about Amabelle’s journey to Haiti and about the moment Haitians are herded together and choked with parsley. In tandem, Danticat distinctly brings the massacre to the fore of Haitian and global history. Most central of all, The Farming of Bones, surveys unexamined history and trauma, and that bearing witness to it leads to hope. Danticat reimagines and recreates the experiences of Haitians through “prosthetic memory” and writes about the death of Haitians, whose voices and histories were silent and repressed by the massacre. This paper seeks to argue that through “prosthetic memory,” Danticat consistently bears witness to violence and trauma through her works of fiction. Namely, this paper will probe at two of Danticat’s works, Krik? Krak! (1995) and The Farming of Bones, to convey that bearing witness requires one to unearth trauma and unaddressed history that lingers in society.

Elie Wiesel affirms that: “For the dead and the living, we must bear witness” (Good Reads Quotes). Human beings possess a moral responsibility to bear witness to tragedy. Intriguingly, when Danticat visited Haiti, “[S]he recounts how she grieved and mourned ancestors who had lost their lives there” (Ortiz 64). Danticat asserts “There was no sign of the mass killings that occurred so many decades ago: a woman was washing clothes in the water, a man was letting a mule drink, and two boys were bathing. […]. I had come looking for deaths, but I found habitualness, routine, life” (Danticat qtd. in Cengage Learning Center Gale). Here, Danticat wanted to exhume the bones of the dead and place this tragedy into people’s memory. She does this through Alison Landsberg’s concept of “prosthetic memory.” In Landsberg’s own words:

The technologies of mass culture and the capitalist economy of which they are a part open up a world of images outside a person’s lived experience, creating a portable, fluid, and nonessentialist form of memory. Like a prosthetic limb on an amputee, these technological memories are not ‘organic’ products of lived experiences. Yet, also like prostheses, they are carried around with us and become part of our lived experience. (Bernstein 127).

Prosthetic memory supplies readers with another way of contextualizing history “presented in novels, museums, movies, and television dramas […] mass media sources allow audiences to create ‘prosthetic memories’ for things they—or their direct ancestors—never experienced” (Bernstein 127). Indeed, in Danticat’s The Farming of Bones and Krik? Krak!, she reminds readers that bearing witness is about authenticating people’s experiences and helping find meaning to their suffering, while resuscitating lived experiences of her ancestors.

As Mikelle Djkowich, et al. eloquently purports, “[B]earing witness does entail a call to action, albeit that action may simply be standing with or naming what is happening, or it may be more—much more. Bearing witness is a socially and politically […] mandate” (Djkowich, et al., 3). The Farming of Bones serves as a testimony for loss and trauma, but it is also framed by hope. It reveals that underneath trauma lies hope which leads to action. Danticat takes action by re-telling a traumatic experience of Haitians and “Reviv[ing] a tragedy of Haitian history by recreating voices for those silenced by the massacre” (Ortiz 75). As this discussion reflects, Danticat retraces her ancestral land’s history and remembers the lives of her people. For instance, in The Farming of Bones, Amabelle describes a cave she and Sebastien visited after the death of Joel and Rafael and Sebastien says, “Holds on to some memory of the sun that it will not surrender. On the inside of the cave, there is always light, day and night” (Danticat 98). Words like “sun” and “light” suggest the cave is a symbol of hope. Amabelle responds and says, “I have always wished for this same kind of light on the grave of my parents, but now I wish it also for both Joel and Rafael” (99). In terms of hope, Amabelle believes that despite the darkness of the cave, she hopes that light shines on the dead as it continues to shine on her parents’ grave.

In The Farming of Bones, the death of Joel and Rafael marks the start of trauma and loss for Amabelle, and she wishes for light upon their graves as a symbol of hope. Danticat uses the cage that Amabelle and Sebastien first made love in as a vehicle to bring about hope and to bear witness to the dead. Danticat writes, “The more days go by, the more I think of Joel’s grave. (Of Wilner’s, Odette’s, Mimi’s, and Sebastien’s too). I could no more find these graves than the exact star that exploded and fell from the sky the night each of them perished” (Danticat 263). When Amabelle makes it to where she believes Sebastien and his sister Mimi are, they are gone. However, she witnesses the capture, torture, and death of many other Haitians. By mentioning the names of people who were close to her and tragically died, Amabelle bears witness to bodies that have been lost because of Trujillo. When Danticat says, “the exact star that exploded from the sky,” she uses light language to show the light of hope and possibility. The notion that despite the death of Wilner, Odette, Mimi, thousands of Haitians, and her beloved Sebastien, hope is greater than darkness and this offers Amabelle relief. This is also shown in Chapter 40 when Danticat says, “Men with names never truly die,” (280) and she mentions Sebastien’s name (which is also the first sentence of the novel) constantly throughout this bolded chapter: “His name is Sebastien Onius and his spirit must be inside the water cave at the source of the stream where the cane workers bathe” (280). In this example, Sebastien’s full name is mentioned as she bears witness to it. By alluding to the death of her parents, and by linking the light in the cave (that Amabelle and Sebastien first made love in), she wishes on the graves of both Joel and Rafael and highlights that light is inescapable. Danticat makes clear that, even in the face of death and tragedy, and despite how dark the world may seem, light triumphs over darkness.

In Lisa M. Ortiz’s “Re-membering the Past: Weaving Tales of Loss and Cultural Inheritance in Edwidge Danticat's ‘Krik? Krak!,’” she purports that to understand Danticat’s work, the concept of prosthetic memory is quintessential because it “Requires that she borrow memories no longer guaranteed and anchored by [the bodies] that lived through them” and that she must “overcome a legacy of loss through borrowed, or prosthetic means” (Ortiz 65). In Krik? Krak!, a collection of short stories, Danticat bears witness by alluding to the Haitian Massacre in a chapter titled “Nineteen Thirty-Seven”. Ortiz contends that “She [Danticat] resurrects her cultural inheritance of Haitian oral histories from the graves of her foremothers, thousands of whom were slaughtered” (64). In weaving these narratives together, “Danticat takes her place in a cultural genealogy of Haitian women as both a descendant and as a link in the chain of lives, spirits and tales” (65). In Krik? Krak!, Danticat uses the past to inform the future by bearing witness to it. She recovers vanished histories of her ancestors and because she consistently returns to the Massacre River while writing The Farming of Bones, she allows her characters in Krik? Krak! to return to the river as well, a site of lost memories.

In Krik? Krak! Danticat uses the narrator, Josephine, and her mother to bear witness to Josephine’s grandmother who was murdered. By simply having Josephine “[return] to the river many times as [she] was growing up” (Danticat 40; Krik? Krak!), Danticat borrows memory from the living body of survivors to give voice to the dead. The Massacre River is a site that Josephine and other women who had lost a loved one go to remember and bear witness. Meanwhile, in The Farming of Bones, Amabelle returns to the Massacre River at the end of the novel. Danticat writes:

[I]f I came to the river on the right day, at the right hour, the surface of the water might provide the answer: a clearer sense of the moment, a stronger memory. […]. I wanted to ask him, please, to gently raise my body and carry me into the river, into Sebastien’s cave, my father’s laughter, my mother’s eternity. […] The professor returned to look down at me lying there, cradled by the current, paddling like a newborn in a washbasin” (Danticat 307-308).

Amabelle, just like Josephine in Krik? Krak!, returns to the Massacre River (where she witnesses her parents’ drowning, where she witnesses Wilner’s death and the death of many Haitians, and where she believes Sebastien took his last breath). Through prosthetic memory, “Danticat helps us understand that memory is created for specific purposes and is not exclusively organic or solely located in the body that experiences, but also might be transferred or inherited” (Ortiz 71). Danticat bears witness to death and at the same time presents a political testimony of trauma. Both narratives consistently bear witness to tragedy by allowing the characters to return to the site of loss.

The Farming of Bones functions as a testimony against the genocidal atrocities at the hands of Trujillo. Or, as Ortiz writes, Danticat “Recover[s] oral histories that have nearly vanished with the execution of their ancestors” (Ortiz 65). Danticat uses prosthetic memory to weave a larger history while telling an individual story; she does this by reconstructing the Haitian experience. Amabelle concludes that the justices of the peace listen to those who survived the slaughter: “I hear there are officials of the state, justices of the peace, who listen to those who survived the slaughter and write their stories down. […] He writes your name in the book and he says he will take your story to president Stenio Vincent so you can get your money” (Danticat 229, 232). Importantly, Danticat uses the justices of the peace to bear witness and preserve history. Danticat writes, however, “You tell the story, and then it’s retold as they wish, written in words you do not understand, in language that is theirs, and not yours” (Danticat 244). By rediscovering identities, Danticat “overcomes the boundary between those who lived experience and those with non-experiential relationships to Haitian oral history.” By keeping a written record of testimony through prosthetic memory, Danticat uses her position as a Haitian American writer to bear witness and re-write untold narratives of oppressed people, be it witnesses, mothers, fathers, daughters, or sons.

In a 2018 interview with Jack Brownell, Danticat says, “I think of myself as a witness: a person who can report on what I’m seeing and who can report on what others are saying. […] I feel more comfortable saying I’m a witness, and the way I witness is through this work of writing” (Brownell). The primary reason Danticat bears witness is to provide hope. The notion that despite all the darkness and despair, sustaining hope can guide people out of the darkness. Through prosthetic memory, Danticat habitually bears witness to trauma and violence through literature by writing from the perspective of women. This is seen in her short story collection Krik? Krak! and her novel The Farming of Bones. Danticat’s position as a writer stems from a place of loss and the importance of telling stories of unaddressed trauma and history. She archives tragedies into public memory.

Works Cited

Bernstein, Lee. “Reviewed Work: Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture by Alison Landsberg.” The History Teacher, vol. 39, no. 1, 2005, pp. 126–128.

Brownell, Jake et al. “‘I Am a Witness’ - A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat.” Colorado Public Radio, Colorado Public Radio. www.cpr.org/podcast-epidode/i-am-a-witness-a-conversation-with-edwidge-danticat.

Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of Bones. Soho Press, Inc., 1998.

---. Krik? Krak! Soho Press, Inc., 1995.

Djkowich, Mikelle, et al. “Bearing Witness in Nursing Practice: More Than a Moral Obligation?” Nursing philosophy, vol. 20, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1-8.

Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. Columbia University Press, 2004.

Ortiz, Lisa M. “Re-Membering the Past: Weaving Tales of Loss and Cultural Inheritance in Edwidge Danticat's ‘Krik? Krak!".” Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2001, pp. 64–77.

Shea, Renée H., and Edwidge Danticat. “Bearing Witness and Beyond: Edwidge Danticat Talks about Her Latest Work.” Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, 2001, pp. 6–20.

Vargas, Jennifer Harford. “Novel Testimony: Alternative Archives in Edwidge Danticat's ‘The Farming of Bones.’” Callaloo, vol. 37, no. 5, 2014, pp. 1162–1180.

A Study Guide for Edwidge Danticat's "The Farming of Bones". United States, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2016.

Appendix: Annotated Bibliographies and Further Reading

General Context

Ayuso, Monica G. ““How Lucky for You That Your Tongue Can Taste the ‘r’ in ‘Parsley’”: Trauma Theory and the Literature of Hispaniola.” Afro-Hispanic Review, vol. 30, no. 1, 2011, pp. 47-62.

Annotation by Sarika Sankar

The article discusses the 1937 massacre of thousands of Haitian seasonal farm workers initiated by Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the president of the Dominican Republic. It focuses on various pieces of literature which depict events associated with the massacre, known as the Parsley Massacre, including the poem "Parsley" by Rita Dove, which is the first in a series of literary renditions of an overlooked aspect of Haitian history to appear in the United States. The novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Álvarez, sets a wide stage for the remembrance of Trujillo by positioning the reading public as witness through an empathetic visitor from the United States (a Dominican-American unnamed and as such universal), who is eager to listen but embarrassingly ignorant of the circumstances surrounding the tragic death of the sisters implicated in the Dominican national underground. Ayuso also gives a close reading of the novel, The Farming of Bones, by Edwidge Danticat. Particular attention is given to the application of trauma theory to literature produced in and around the island of Hispaniola. The article documents how the dispute over land leading to the boundary war between Haiti and the Dominican Republic eventually culminated in international catastrophe.

Brice-Finch, Jacqueline. “Haiti.” World Literature Today, vol. 23, no. 2, 1999, pp. 377.

Annotation by Sarika Sankar

This story of emigres is particularly revolting because the slave-like conditions endured by the Haitians are imposed on them by their neighbors sharing the island of Hispaniola. Shaped by a tortured history of conquest, the elimination of its native inhabitants, and the slave trade, the island itself occupies a special place. The armed revolts against slavery and colonization in Guadeloupe, unlike those of Haiti, were crushed by French troops and did not lead to independence. The Farming of Bones is a stark reminder of the massacre as well as a tribute to the valor of those Haitians who escaped the terror. Brice-Finch argues that the novel attempts to narrate how a wave of genocide decimated the Haitian emigre population. What is striking about this historical fact is how relevant the situation is to current immigrant backlash in many countries around the world.

“Edwidge Danticat: A Bitter Legacy Revisited.” Publishers Weekly, 17 Aug. 1998.

Annotation by Sarika Sankar

This article provides background information on Danticat and her career. Danticat's first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory (Soho 1994), describes a young Haitian torn between her love for her mother and sense of betrayal. The Farming of Bones exposes the 1937 Haitian genocide at the border of the neighboring Dominican Republic. The novel takes a historical background of the fright of dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled over a period of rising Dominican nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment (Haitians have emigrated to the bordering Dominican Republic for work since the 19th century). In 1937, the anti-Haitian propaganda campaign flared into violence, resulting in the death of thousands of Haitians. Danticat was born in 1969, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She was separated from her father at age two when he emigrated to the United States to work in a factory. She was four when her mother retired and followed her father. Danticat and her younger brother were turned over to the care of her father’s brother, a minister who lived with his wife and grandson in a poor area of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. At age 12, Danticat finally rejoined her parents in Brooklyn, NY, but had to struggle to remake her family ties. She had to learn English from scratch. She graduated in 1990 from Barnard college and applied for her MBA.

Bearing witness

Annotations by Shaquille Migel Nkosi Profitt

“The Legacy of the Parsley Massacre.” YouTube, uploaded by Pierre Michel JEAN. 7 Oct. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mxfihr9d_cU

In this video, a witness of the massacre (now, in his old age), recounts/bears witness to the 1937 Haitian Massacre. He says, “Nobody died of bullet wounds. In fact, not one shot was fired. They died slaughtered, [sic] cut to pieces, stabbed bayoneted, and bludgeoned. They took small children and threw them up in the air to catch them with their bayonets. Some died after their return, but others survived and bore witness to what they saw and what they endured.” This video shows that the living must bear witness.

Bishop, Marlon, and Tatiana Fernandez. “80 Years On, Dominicans And Haitians Revisit Painful Memories Of Parsley Massacre.” NPR, 7 Oct. 2017. www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/10/07/555871670/80-years-on-dominicans-and-haitians-revisit-painful-memories-of-parsley-massacre

I write briefly about returning to the site of loss when Amabelle, just like Josephine in Krik? Krak!, returns to the Massacre River (where she witnesses Wilner’s death, and the death of Haitians, and where she believes Sebastien took his last breath). This article, although published in 2017, bears witness 80 years on, as Haitians and Dominicans revisit the Massacre River, as an act of remembrance.

Dove, Rita. “Parsley.” Poetry Foundation, 1983, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43355/parsley.

In this political poem, Rita Dove, retells the mass murder of thousands in the Dominican Republic in 1937. By merely writing a poem about this tragic event, Dove bears witness to unaddressed history by bringing it to light.

Additional Quotes about Bearing Witness, Memory, and Memorialization in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones

“Those who die young, they are cheated. Not cheated out of life, because like is a penance, but the young, they’re cheated because they don’t know it’s coming. They don’t have time to move closer, to return home. When you know you’re going to die, you try to be near the bones of your own people. You don’t even think you have bones when you’re young, even when you break them, you don’t believe you have them. But when you’re old, they start reminding you they’re there. They start turning to dust on you, even as you’re walking here and there, going from place to place. And this is when you crave to be near the bones of your own people. My children never felt this. They had to look death in the face, even before they knew what it was. Just like you did, no” (240)?

You tell the story, and then it’s retold as they wish, written in words you do not understand, in language that is theirs, and not yours” (244).

“The thought came to me that I should swim across the river again, collect his body to be buried on this side. All the soldiers. All the guns. I couldn’t. I have not been able to do for anyone what Joel did for me. And I never will. No. Never. Because the more I see people die, the more I want to guard my own life” (247).

“He writes your name in the book and he says he will take your story to president Stenio Vincent so you can get your money.” She kept her eyes on the crowd, no longer watching the soldiers for approval. “Then he lets you talk and lets you cry and he asks you if you have papers to show that all these people died” (232).

“The past is more fresh than air, our stories testimonials like the ones never heard by the justice of peace of the Generalissimo himself” (279).

“I hear there are officials of the state, justices of the peace, who listen to those who survived the slaughter and write their stories down.” “The Generalissimo has not said that he caused the killing, but he agreed to give money to affected persons.” Why? I don’t think he would have the answer, but I wished he did know. “To erase bad feelings - as if he were no longer linked to the slaughter. And the dead? “They pay their families” (229).

“Freedom is a passing thing[;] someone can always come and snatch it away” (210).

“They tell the civilians where best to strike with the machetes so our heads part more easily from our bodies.” Tibon used his bony hand to make the motion of a machete striking his collarbone. “They make us stand in lines of six on the edge of the cliff,” he said. “Then they come back to the trust to get more. They have six jump over the cliff, then another six, then another six, then another six.” I didn’t know how many groups of six he named. I shut my ears to him for a moment and tried to imagine Sebastien’s voice, telling me he was alive” (171-172).

“Some things are too wasteful to remember” (119).

“I have always wished for this same kind of light on the grave of my parents, but now I wish it also for Joel and Rafael” (99).

“This was how people left imprints of themselves in each other’s memory so that if you left first and went back to the common village, you could carry, if not a letter, a piece of treasured clothing, some message to their loved ones that their place was still among the living[...]His freed was one of memory, how remembering--though sometimes painful--can make you strong” (71).

Amabelle bearing witness to her parents’ death: “The water rises above my father’s head. My mother releases his neck, the current carrying her beyond this reach. Separated, they are less of an obstacle for the cresting river. [...] I tossed the pots in and watch them bob along the swell of the water, disappearing into the braided line that is the river at a distance” (50).

Sebastien says, “holds on to some memory of the sun that it will surrender. On the inside of the cave, there is always light, day and night. You who know the cave’s secret, for a time, you are also held captive in the prism” (98).

Sebastien bears witness to his father’s death: “If you let yourself, he says, finally, “you can see it before your eyes, a boy carrying his dead father from the road, wobbling, swaying, stumbling under the weight. The boy with the wind in his ears and pieces of the tin roofs that opened the father’s throat blowing around him. The boy trying not to drop the father, not crying or screaming like you’d think, but praying that more of the father’s blood will stay in the father’s throat and not go into the muddy flood, going no one knows where. If you let yourself, you see it before your eyes” (33).