(Name of Student)
(Name of Professor)
(Name of Course)
Book Review: ‘The Farming of Bones’ by Edwidge Danticat
The canons of literature around the globe are bestrewn with great works about wars. A curious thing about war literature is that there is almost always a clear heroic, moral victor who triumphs against a ‘worthy’ adversary – one who is able to fight back and is in no way victimized. Unlike such ‘glorious’ narratives, there are books which deal with less black and white forms of violence. Books such as ‘The Farming of Bones’ by Edwidge Danticat dive headlong into violent narratives where there really is no glory in death. There is merely an act of violence perpetrated against a community which could not have realistically defended itself, leaving in its wake nothing but memories of what were and what might have been.
That, in my opinion, is the most powerful aspect of the book ‘The Farming of Bones’ – memory. From the opening, one notices that there is a heavy note of things that were and no longer are. The book is written in first person, being narrated by Amabelle Desir and almost always speaks in past tense – of things that were. The book deals with the 1937 Massacre in the Dominican Republic while the narrator herself is situated just after the massacre. Right from the get go, it seems as though the reader is made to walk backwards through the narrative. I would describe this backwards-narrative as a kind of negative nostalgia. By this I mean that unlike true nostalgia, where one feels an affinity to the past and a longing to return to it, negative nostalgia is when one is trapped by the past and cannot escape. This kind of inescapability is best portrayed in the world of dreams. The author herself (through the voice of Amabelle) best explains this – “I looked to my dreams for softness, for a gentler embrace, for relief from the fear of mudslides and blood bubbling out of the riverbed”. There is undeniable a subtle Freudian undertone in this treatment of dreams. However, I would argue that this kind of dreaming takes the Freudian understanding of dreams it a step further. It is not mere a dream which one has at night and forgets about it in the morning, it is dream that haunts the waking hours of the dreamer.
The story centers around Amabelle and her search for her love, Sebastien, who was separated from her through various complications. Together with Yves and Tobon, the narrator and her friends highlight another important aspect of the novel – segregation, separation, and discrimination. Two major plot elements show this – the first is Amabelle’s separation from her lover. Numerous writers and poets have paid homage to the idea that a pair of lovers are like one soul in two bodies and I likewise feel that Amabelle’s quest (if one can call it that) is to find wholeness, not just in terms of intimacy, but also to make sense of a distorted, largely senseless reality, in the person of Sebastien. The second form of separation is the Hiatians inability to pronounce the word ‘perejil’ which leads to discrimination by the Dominicans segregate.
As this intricate novel winds down, the two ideas of memory and separation unite in the final scene to form an image of disjoint memory. A stucturally and formally powerful work, Danticat weaves words together like a tapestry to tell a painful story – the story of many Hiatians in the 1930s and 40s. Considering that her initial reason for embarking on this work was to create a memorial for those who lived and died during the Massacre, I think the book has beautifully lived up to its purpose.
References
Danicat, Edwidge. ‘The Farming of Bones: A Novel’. New York: Soho Press. 2013.
Print.
