countryside. Wealth and land ownership were directed to him, causing widespread poverty and displacing entire communities. Mail was censored, telephones monitored, and citizens required government permission to move or practice any profession.

In 1931, a catastrophic hurricane struck Haiti and the Dominican Republic, killing 2,000 people and injuring many more. Trujillo exploited the crisis to consolidate his power, controlling all medicine and building supplies. He imposed “emergency” taxes that were never repealed. Naturally, resentment against him grew, and he murdered, tortured, or imprisoned anyone he suspected of disloyalty.

During this time, many Haitians crossed into the Dominican Republic seeking work after the hurricane's devastation. Their numbers caused unease among some Dominicans, tinged with racism. As the book notes, Dominicans were told, “Our motherland is Spain, theirs is darkest Africa, you understand? They once came here only to cut sugarcane, but now there are more of them than there will ever be cane to cut, you understand? Our problem is one of dominion.… Those of us who love our country are taking measures to keep it our own.”

Trujillo Orders Genocide
In 1937, to halt this influx and implement these “measures,” Dominican troops killed between 10,000 and 15,000 Haitians. As Scott Adlerberg remarked in the Richmond Review, “None of those killed is anyone famous, nearly all the slaughtered are poor Haitians working as cheap labor in the neighboring country.” Danticat also notes that despite the insistence that “our motherland is Spain, theirs is darkest Africa,” there is often no color difference between the two groups. Language is the only distinguishing feature, and Dominican troops used the Haitians' inability to pronounce the trilled Spanish “r” in perejil, the word for parsley. “Que diga perejil,” the soldiers demanded, and anyone who responded “pewejil” was shot as a Haitian.

Pace
Danticat's narrative unfolds at a slow, deliberate pace, set within a traditional agrarian society. The story opens with a dreamlike interaction between Amabelle and her lover Sebastien, followed by the birth of twins—a boy and a girl—to Amabelle's wealthy employer. Initially, the book evokes the feel of many substantial nineteenth-century classics that often start with the protagonist's birth.

Danticat subverts this expectation, however: the true protagonist is not one of the children, but Amabelle, the servant who midwives the twins using the skills imparted by her healer parents. Elements of violence begin to seep into the narrative: the twins’ father kills a sugar cane worker in a car accident but faces no consequences due to his status as a high-ranking military officer and the dispensability of the cane workers' lives. Additionally, both Amabelle and Sebastien have lost one or both parents at a young age, underscoring the precariousness of their existence—or, as Danticat suggests, everyone's existence: no one is immune to the potential violence inherent in every society and individual.

As the story progresses, both the violence and the pace intensify. Rumors of an impending massacre of Haitians circulate. The boy twin dies of crib death. Haitian workers recount tales of other workers being killed in recent weeks. Amabelle narrowly escapes death from a stray bullet during her employers' target practice. When the genocide begins, people are subjected to horrific deaths—stabbed, shot, drowned, crushed by trucks, forced off cliffs, and choked with parsley, their inability to pronounce the word correctly in Spanish marking them as Haitians.

Point of View
Danticat's narrator, Amabelle, recounts the story in the first person. She experiences and endures all these events firsthand, and Danticat's use of this perspective, combined with her vivid imagery and sensory detail, lends the narrative an almost suffocating immediacy. Amabelle's narrative tone is flat, almost documentary-like, as illustrated in the following passage:

Her face flapped open when she hit the ground, her right cheekbone glistening as the flesh parted from it. She rolled onto her back and for a moment faced the sky. Her body spiraled past the croton hedge down the slope. The mountain dirt clung to her dress, her arms, her face, her whole body gathering a thick cloud of dust.

Danticat intentionally refrains from showcasing excessive emotion throughout the book, capturing the inherent numbness experienced by catastrophe survivors. She instead presents the scenes, allowing readers to perceive them and internalize the emotional weight of the slaughter, torture, and displacement the refugees endure. This reader engagement makes the scenes difficult to ignore and impossible to forget. In an interview with Calvin Wilson for the Kansas City Star, Danticat remarked, ‘‘The things that I have written so far are things that almost give me nightmares.’’

Separation of Emotions
At the book's beginning and end, Danticat permits Amabelle to express her emotions more openly in brief passages where she describes her dreams, memories of her deceased parents, desires, and fears. These passages are intentionally kept separate from the main narrative, as Amabelle only feels secure enough to express these emotions when she is alone, whether hiding in a secret cave with Sebastien or, by the book's conclusion, when she has found some peace with his loss and reconciled with her life as a survivor without him. As she poignantly states, ‘‘I sense that we no longer know the same words, no longer speak the same language. There is water, land, and mountains between us, a shroud of silence, a curtain of fate.’’

Sources
Adlerberg, Scott. ‘‘The Farming of Bones,’’ in Richmond Review (online), 2000.

Charters, Mallay. ‘‘Edwidge Danticat: A Bitter Legacy Revisited,’’ in Publishers Weekly, August 17, 1998, p. 42.

Cryer, Dan. ‘‘The Farming of Bones,’’ in Salon (online).

Danticat, Edwidge. ‘‘A Brief Reflection on the Massacre River,’’ in Kreyol (online), May 19, 1999.

‘‘The Farming of Bones,’’ in Publishers Weekly, June 8, 1998, p. 44.

Rooney, Megan. ‘‘Danticat MFA ‘94 Reads from The Farming of Bones,’’ in Brown Daily Herald, October 5, 1998.

Van Boven, Sarah. ‘‘Massacre River: Danticat Revisits Haiti,’’ in Newsweek, September 7, 1998, p. 69.

Wilson, Calvin. ‘‘Edwidge Danticat’s Prose Floats in Realm of Sadness and Eloquence,’’ in Kansas City Star, September 22, 1999, p. K0779.

Further Reading
Acosta, Belind. ‘‘The Farming of Bones,’’ in Austin Chronicle, January 19, 1999. This analysis of Danticat’s novel also includes remarks about her overall writing style.

Brice-Finch, Jacqueline. ‘‘Haiti,’’ in World Literature Today, Spring, 1999, p. 373. A concise review of The Farming of Bones within the framework of Haitian history.

Farley, Christopher John. ‘‘The Farming of Bones,’’ in Time, September 7, 1998, p. 78. Farley examines Danticat’s literary trajectory and her publications.

Gardiner, Beth. ‘‘Writer’s Work Evokes Experience of Haitian Regime, Emigration,’’ in Standard-Times, April 12, 1998. Investigates Danticat’s personal experiences in Haiti and their influence on her fiction.

Gladstone, Jim. ‘‘Breath, Eyes, Memory,’’ in New York Times Book Review, July 10, 1994, p. 24. A brief critique of the book.

Jaffe, Zia. ‘‘The Farming of Bones,’’ in The Nation, November 16, 1998, p. 62. A short review.

Shea, Renee H. ‘‘An Interview between Edwidge Danticat and Renee H. Shea,’’ in Belles Lettre, Summer, 1995, pp. 12-15. Shea and Danticat discuss her life and literary works.