Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Danticat, Edwidge (Vol. 136) - Jacqueline Brice-Finch (review date Spring 1999)

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Jacqueline Brice-Finch (review date Spring 1999)

SOURCE: A review of The Farming of Bones, in World Literature Today, Vol. 73, No. 2, Spring, 1999, p. 373.

[In the following review, Brice-Finch offers a positive assessment of The Farming of Bones.]

Readers of Caribbean literature are no strangers to the harsh conditions of the cane field, particularly in the French Antilles during the early twentieth century. Joseph Zobel in La Rue Cases-Negres (1950; Eng. Black Shack Alley) and Simone Schwarz-Bart in Pluie et vent sur Telumee Miracle (1972; Eng. The Bridge of the Beyond) graphically related the degradation that workers endured to eke out a subsistence living. However, it is the second novel by Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones, which is the focus of another aspect of the history of cane workers, the massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic in 1937.

Due to a growing xenophobia...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Edwidge Danticat with Margaria Fichtner (interview date 1 May 1995)
   2. Edwidge Danticat with Renee H. Shea (interview date 17 January 1996)
   3. Myriam J. A. Chancy (essay date 1997)
   4. Publishers Weekly (review date 8 June 1998)
   5. Michael Upchurch (review date 27 September 1998)
   6. Zia Jaffrey (review date 16 November 1998)
   7. Matthew Rothschild (review date December 1998)
   8. Jacqueline Brice-Finch (review date Spring 1999)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Edwidge Danticat