The Farming of Bones

Even though I grew up in Jamaica, which is about 334 miles from Haiti, I knew nothing about the 1937 Parsley Massacre, during which thousands of Haitians were executed under the orders of Dominican President Rafael Trujillo.

This book blends the personal love story of Amabelle and Sebastien with the history and politics of that time. I came away from this book with a greater understanding of survival, racism in the Caribbean, and the power of memory. 

What I love most about Danticat’s writing—this is a very long list—is the way she evokes the inherent dignity of characters in almost unspeakably tragic situations. In this case, her subject is a pair of lovers and their community whose lives are upended by the 1937 massacre of Haitians and Dominico-Haitians living along the Dominican side of the border with Haiti. The mass killing is an inflection point in the two nations’ shared history, which individual human stories are essential to understanding.

This book is a beautiful and heartbreaking work that blends real and fictional characters to tell the story of a historical tragedy in a manner that respects its victims. (Danticat’s The Generalissimo is based on Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo.) The novel narrates the story of a young Haitian woman living in the Dominican Republic and who survives the 1937 Parsley Massacre. Though the story of survival it tells is very different from the one I tell in my own book, Farming of Bones also uses a first-person narration woven with memories to tell its tale.