Farming of Bones

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In a 1930s Dominican Republic village, the scream of a woman in labor rings out like the shot heard around Hispaniola. Every detail of the birth scene--the balance of power between the middle-aged Señora and her Haitian maid, the babies' skin color, not to mention which child is to survive--reverberates throughout Edwidge Danticat's Farming of Bones. In fact, rather than a celebration of fecundity, the unexpected double delivery gels into a metaphor for the military-sponsored mass murder of Haitian emigrants. As the Señora's doctor explains: "Many of us start out as twins in the belly and do away with the other."

But Danticat's powerful second novel is far from a currently modish victimization saga, and can hold its own with such modern classics as One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Color Purple. Its watchful narrator, the Señora's shy Haitian housemaid, describes herself as "one of those sea stones that sucks its colors inside and loses its translucence once it's taken out into the sun." An astute observer of human character, Amabelle Désir is also a conduit for the author's tart, poetic prose. Her lover, Sebastian, has "arms as wide as one of my bare thighs," while the Señora's complicit officer husband is "still shorter than the average man, even in his military boots."

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Edwidge Danticat's first collection of short stories, Krik? Krak!, was shortlisted for the National Book Award in 1995, making her the youngest writer ever nominated for that honor. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, which was a recent Oprah pick, established her as not only a remarkable young talent but also a new and important voice for Haitian Americans. Now, with her latest, Danticat turns to the past, to locate and give a new voice to a moment in history that is an all-but-forgotten holocaust. Her powerful new novel focuses on the 1937 massacre by Dominicans of the Haitians living within their borders.

It is 1937, and Amabelle, orphaned at the age of eight when her parents drowned, is a faithful maidservant of many years to the young Dominican wife of an army colonel. Amabelle's lover, Sebastian Onius, is a field hand, an itinerant sugarcane cutter. They are Haitians, useful to the Dominicans but haunted by the knowledge that they are not entirely welcome. Rumors say that in other towns, Haitians are being persecuted, even killed. But there are always rumors.

Amabelle and Sebastian decide they will marry and return to Haiti at the end of this cane season. But what should be the hope-filled dawn of their new lives together quickly becomes a sudden fall of darkness in the terror and madness of an ordained "ethnic cleansing" ordered by Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo. Betrayed by their inability to speak unaccented Spanish (specifically, their inability to pronounce "parsley"), those who have long lived among the Spanish-speaking Dominican population, as wellasthe impoverished itinerants, are sacrificed to preserve the purity of Dominican culture.

In this, her second novel, Danticat re-creates a vanished world, memorializing these victims of nationalist madness who have long been ignored by the spotlight of world history. The Farming of Bones is about love, fragility, dignity, and the only triumph possible for the persecuted and the innocent: to endure. With quiet lyricism and atmospheric, at times dreamlike prose, juxtaposed with the passion and violence inherent in this epic tragedy, Danticat weaves a tale of insufferable loss and illuminates the hearts and souls of the Haitian people whose way of life was so undervalued. Realizing the promise evident in her two previous works of fiction, The Farming of Bones is a story told in an astonishingly mature voice with the assured hand of a major writer.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

It is 1937, the Dominican side of the Haitian border. Amabelle, orphaned at the age of eight when her parents drowned, is a maid to the young wife of an army colonel. She has grown up in this household, a faithful servant. Sebastien is a field hand, an itinerant sugarcane cutter. They are Haitians, useful to the Dominicans but not really welcome. There are rumors that in other towns Haitians are being persecuted, even killed. But there are always rumors. Amabelle loves Sebastien. He is handsome despite the sugarcane scars on his face, his calloused hands. She longs to become his wife and walk into their future. Instead, terror enfolds them. But the story does not end here: it begins. The Farming of Bones is about love, fragility, barbarity, dignity, remembrance, and the only triumph possible for the persecuted: to endure.

SYNOPSIS

Edwidge Danticat's elegiac second novel (after the Oprah-annointed Breath, Eyes, Memory) tells the story of an island divided -- its history of militaristic takeovers, fractured territories, and orphaned people. Smelling of cane and parsley and echoing with the roar of rushing water, this "tiny piece of land" shared by Haitians and Dominicans forms a rich backdrop for narrator Amabelle's tale of survival and longing, the story of an orphan searching for her memory, her lover, and her home.

FROM THE CRITICS

Gayle Hegland - The Progressive

The Farming of bones by Edwige Danticat is set in 1930s village in the Dominican Republic. Anabelle Desir is the narrator of this harrowing testimonial to the atrocities commited by Dominican president Rafael Trujillo's army in 1937, which systematically murdered Haitian emigrants working in the Dominican Republic. Danticat's poetic prose illuminates the people, colors, and customs of Haitian life and made me hope against historical fact that the inevitable carnage would not happen. It is an excurciating and compelling read.

Dan Cryer

Pity the young novelist surfing the wave of novelty and hype. Sooner or later, she's going to wipe out. Although Edwidge Danticat has written only a so-so first novel (Breath, Eyes, Memory) and a modest story collection (Krik? Krak!), given all the hoopla, you'd think she was Haiti's great gift to American literature. A prized seat among the literati-in-waiting of Granta Magazine's 20 Best Young American Novelists and a National Book Award nomination for Krik? Krak! Oh, please! Has anyone actually read these books?

The Haitian folk tradition that Danticat brings to the literary table has a certain fascination -- the tangled knot of family connections, the everyday presence of fearsome or whimsical divinities, the overwhelming sense of life's fragility. To this, she adds a contemporary overlay of feminist indignation and political protest. But her plots, alas, are predictable and occasionally static. Her style is as often overwrought as it is pleasingly lyrical. And she can be as preachy and sentimental as Alice Walker at her most embarrassing.

In the history of Danticat's birthplace, the hemisphere's poorest country, it's not only the Yanqui imperialist who has served as villain. The U.S. Army may have stormed in periodically to depose one ruler and install another, but unlike Haiti's next-door neighbor, the Dominican Republic, it hasn't subjected the island to genocidal fury. At the heart of Danticat's new novel, The Farming of Bones, is a little-known massacre ordered by the despot Rafael Trujillo in 1937. Thousands of desperately poor Haitians, lured across the border to work the sugar cane fields, became victims of bloodthirsty Dominican nationalists. "When you stay too long at a neighbor's house," one Haitian observes, "it's only natural that he become weary of you and hate you."

Danticat is so eager to pay tribute to these unsung victims that she neglects to portray any real people. Her characters are mere monuments to remembrance. Amabelle Desir, servant to well-to-do Dominicans, is little more than a gritty survivor (her parents drowned years ago in the same river where the massacre takes place). She and her lover, cane cutter Sebastien Onius, are depicted in such broad, all-purpose strokes that it's hard to care, except in the most abstract way, when they flee for their lives toward Haiti. They are hard-working, brave, resourceful -- and utterly forgettable. Minor characters fill required roles wearing the husk of stereotype: the hateful Dominican military officer, his naive wife, the kindly Dominican who warns Amabelle of danger ahead.

This is by far Danticat's longest book, and the stretch shows. Her strategy of keeping the horrors at a distance (or in Amabelle's memories of childhood) slackens the pace and makes a reader uncertain about what's really going on. (Unlike the Holocaust, these are not such familiar historical events that avoiding direct description can actually heighten the tension.) Given the life-or-death excitements looming in the background, the book's longueurs are inexcusable. Oddly enough, by slowing things down for a loving -- and uncritical -- evocation of culture and community, Danticat has robbed her book of vitality. Only 29, Danticat has plenty of time to achieve her considerable potential. But overpraising her work won't help her get there. -- Salon

Lori Tharps

Passionate and heartrending, Bones lingers in the consciousness like an unforgettable nightmare. -- Entertainment Weekly

Brenda E. Campbell

Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones, traverses a landscapes that is simultaneously lush and untamed, dark and predatory. . . it seeks simply, in the quiet retelling of a story, to humanize a tragedy that has been looked at only from a far and then only in relation to other tragedies. . . .Ms. Danticat has once again crafted a novel of significance, a novel that holds no stereotypes and is bound only by a history too soon forgotten. It is a story uncommonly placed in its advocacy of political and social justice because the retelling and the remembering of this holocaust story is its own reward, its own justice. -- Quarterly Black Review

William Trevor - The Wall Street Journal

[T]he redeeming power of bearing witness.Read all 21 "From The Critics" >

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