The Farming of Bones: How to Make Sense of an International Tragedy

Authors

Kathleen Baker '08, Illinois Wesleyan University

Abstract

Although its memory remains a haunting specter in the national memories of Haiti and the Dominican Republic alike, General Rafael Trujillo's 1937 slaughter of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic remains without burial places or markers for its victims. This lack of what several critics have called "sites of memory" eventually became the catalyst for Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat's novel, The Farming of Bones, a novel that is both testimony and narrative to the events of 1937 (Johnson 7). Critic Kelli Lyon Johnson believes that The Farming of Bones works to create a new "narrative space" that serves as a site of memory for the massacre, with the specific intent of expressing "a national identity that includes members of the memory community previously excluded from historical discourse" (1).

Recommended Citation

Baker '08, Kathleen (2008) "The Farming of Bones: How to Make Sense of an International Tragedy," The Delta: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 8.
Available at: https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/delta/vol3/iss1/8