Critics have examined the novel’s representation of the traumatic event that has been silenced and omitted from the official narratives. TI - “Yanki Occupation” of Haiti in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of BonesĪB - Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) depicts a tragic history of the 1937 massacre of Haitians by Dominican military troops, particularly migrant workers, under the dictator Rafael Trujillo’s orders, with the participation of Dominican civilians. Based on Danticat’s article, I examine how she represents the history of the US occupation of Haiti as an underlying cause of the 1937 massacre and portrays its continuing effects on Hispaniola in the novel. Explaining how America affected and propelled the development of sugar plantations in the Dominican Republic, the Haitian eastward movement, and exploitation of Haitian migrant workers as cheap labor force, this article sheds new light on important aspects of the 1937 massacre that have been relatively neglected in discussions of The Farming of Bones. Danticat harshly criticizes the United States in her article, “The Long Legacy of Occupation in Haiti,” published in 2015 on the hundred-year-anniversary of the US invasion of Haiti. These readings tend to overlook one of the most crucial histories of the 1937 massacre referenced in Danticat’s novel-the US occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Despite different approaches, the current readings have commonly re-circulated the binary between Haiti/Haitian/victim and Dominican Republic/Trujillo/persecutor and reproduced a popular perception of the massacre as a conflict between the two Caribbean nations, while highlighting the long legacy of French and Spanish colonization on Hispaniola as its root cause. Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) depicts a tragic history of the 1937 massacre of Haitians by Dominican military troops, particularly migrant workers, under the dictator Rafael Trujillo’s orders, with the participation of Dominican civilians.

Danticat the farming of bones