Week 2. The Farming of Bones - Edwidge Danticat.

This week I read ‘The Farming of Bones’, a novel by Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-born, New York-living writer of remarkable talent. It tells the story of Amabelle Désir, a Haitian maidservant, and her love for the cane-cutter, Sebastien Onius. Set in the Dominican Republic in 1936, at the brink of the Generalissimo Trujillo’s massacre of Haitian immigrants, the story is heavy with loss, desperation and tragedy. Yet, Danticat’s use of Amabelle’s dreamlike narrative voice allows the story to slip and slide through sadness and violence whilst maintaining a delicacy of language. A writer for Newsweek describes how the novel, “while almost unbearably sad, is still a joy to read”, highlighting Danticat’s exquisite handling of prose — she relates a history of genocide, horror and trauma with such a gentle touch that each word of Amabelle’s testament is fully absorbed by the reader. The narrative is so compelling that I could do nothing other than carefully listen to each word, no matter how painful.

After studying the repetitive movements of the pigeons in my garden last week, I found Danticat’s descriptions of the birds particularly curious. Sebastien, like Amabelle, carries the loss of his father with him and tells how the “crooning of pigeons” haunts him. To him, their moans are the same as the cries of lonely, forgotten ghosts. Just as Cisneros’ ‘Woman Hollering Creek’ encouraged me to notice the pigeons, this novel allowed me to see them take on another shape and form altogether. The soft plumage on the pigeon’s breast started to morph into the tears of the lost. Later on, Papi, the father of Amabelle’s Señora, tells Amabelle that as he writes the history of his life for his grandchildren, he feels “like a bird who’s flown over two mountains without looking at the valley in the centre”. The bird again comes to be a connection with the past; the eye through which to reflect. However, where Sebastien’s pigeon is a lonely call from the dead, Papi’s bird enables him to reflect upon his grand, yet hollow, life. Papi is only reflecting on his past so that he can gift it to his futures — his heirs and grandchildren. Sebastien’s life, like his painful work cutting sugar cane, is much more tinged with danger from the outset.

This desire to recount what you have experienced in a lifetime runs throughout the story, subtly interlinking many of the characters. There is a fear of becoming nameless and being forgotten in death — only those with lost names truly die. Towards the end of the novel, Amabelle overhears a tour guide telling a group of young, white Spaniards that: “Famous men never truly die. (…) It is only those nameless and faceless who vanish like smoke into the early morning air.” It is this sentiment that drives those afraid of death (such as, I suspect, Señor Pico) to partake in horror to establish power and an everlasting presence. This desire to remain unforgotten may also have influenced Señor Pico’s decision to name his son Rafael: the name of the Generalissimo, a famous, everlasting name. A desire to establish an enduring presence is also why the first line of the novel is: “His name is Sebastien Onius.” — A sentence that is, as if to summon him, repeated throughout. It is also why those affected by the massacre waited for days to speak to a justice of the peace; to relate their traumas and losses. The opportunity to receive money as a compensation for their loss was certainly a factor in drawing the crowds — yet they stayed even when it became clear that they were unlikely to receive anything. They stayed to tell their stories and to have their names noted down. A small testament to their presences.

However, Danticat shows not only how words and names can connect people to their pasts and futures; they can also be used to establish people as other and sever them from a community. The word “perejil”, Spanish for parsley, was used to identify Haitians whose native tongues of Kreyòl did not allow them to correctly combine the trill of the r and the jota. “Their own words reveal who belongs on what side.” One word may determine being in or out. Life or death. Like the power of language to separate or bring together, the river that runs as a border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti holds a similar duality. It is the river that drowned Amabelle’s parents and it is the river that years later carried away the bodies of the massacre. But it is also the river that returns Amabelle to her homeland and it is the river she seeks to return to. At first the river appears only in nightmares, a violent being with its own destructive agenda, but slowly it morphs into a boil between life and death. As she becomes less afraid of death, the river calms and, eventually, she can find peace within the shallow parts of its waters.