March 14, 2000

Book Review: The Farming of Bones

     Edwidge Danticat's first book, a collection of short stories called Krik? Krak!, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1995, and her next novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was selected for the Oprah Book Club, spending many weeks on best-seller lists across the country. So readers familiar with her previous work will not be surprised that her most recent novel, The Farming of Bones, won the American Book Award in 1999. As with her other works, The Farming of Bones is an exploration of memory and narrative and history as the most fundamental components of our lives. But this is also a novel of scars, the painful effects of our history, memory made visible. Haitians living and working in the Dominican Republic under Trujillo's dictatorship, Danticat's characters bear physical scars from working in the cane fields and psychic scars of displacement, isolation, and loss. The bones in the novel's title are at once cane stalks, ancestors, and the casualties of the Haitian Massacre ordered by Trujillo in 1937.

     Amabelle Désir came to the Dominican Republic many years before, after her parents drowned trying to cross a flooding river. Found on the bank of that river, Amabelle is "adopted" by a wealthy Dominican family who allow her to work for them as a house servant. Repeatedly awakened from sleep by the nightmare of her parents' drowning, she seeks comfort from Sebastien Onius, a fellow Haitian who works the cane fields that "have ripped apart most of the skin on his shiny black face, leaving him with crisscrossed trails of furrowed scars." Sebastien lost his own father in the hurricane of 1930, and he understands how Amabelle is haunted. Promised to each other, they look forward to their shared life, trying to heal the scars of their past.

     When Trujillo orders the Massacre and a single word--perejil 'parsley'--determines who lives and who dies among the Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, Amabelle and Sebastien are separated. Once she makes the dangerous journey back to Haiti, fleeing both Trujillo's soldiers and ordinary Dominican citizens, Amabelle searches for Sebastien, hoping desperately that he, like Saint Sebastian for whom he was named, "could have two deaths. The first one comes quick enough, so it's good to have another one in reserve."

     In The Farming of Bones Danticat blends memory, race, language, testimonials and heritage into this moving novel about the strength of family and hope. Giving her own testimonial about the Massacre, Danticat forces memory to become history, a past we must all share.