Question 1

What was the Parsley Massacre?

Accepted Answer

The Parsley Massacre (known in Spanish as El Corte — The Cutting) took place in October 1937, when the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered the murder of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, particularly in the border region. Trujillo's stated motivation was the 'Dominicanization' of the border — the elimination of the Haitian presence in the Dominican Republic and the enforcement of a racial and national boundary that Trujillo defined in terms of skin color and cultural practice. One of the methods reportedly used to identify Haitians was to ask suspected individuals to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley — perejil — on the premise that Haitian Creole speakers would pronounce the 'r' differently from Spanish speakers; this is the origin of the massacre's English name. The death toll is disputed — estimates range from five thousand to thirty thousand — and the events received little international attention at the time; the United States government, which was aware of the massacre, did not intervene. The massacre is one of the most significant episodes of state-sponsored anti-Black violence in the twentieth century and is largely unknown outside the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora. Danticat's novel is one of the few works of literature in English to engage with it directly.

Question 2

How does The Farming of Bones portray the relationship between Haitians and Dominicans?

Accepted Answer

The Farming of Bones engages directly with the complicated political and racial history of the relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic — two nations sharing an island, with a long history of conflict and mutual exploitation. Danticat portrays a Dominican Republic in which Haitians occupy a specific social position: essential laborers, particularly in the sugar cane harvest (the 'farming of bones' of the title refers to the bone-breaking labor of cutting cane), but socially invisible and racially marked as Other even when they have lived in the Dominican Republic for generations. Amabelle's position — beloved by the Dominican family she serves, but never fully belonging — embodies this contradictory status. Danticat does not present the relationship as simply oppressor and victim: some Dominican characters resist the massacre and hide Haitians; others participate enthusiastically. The novel's portrait of Trujillo's racial ideology — which constructed Dominicans as 'white' (or at least whiter than Haitians) in order to justify the massacre — is a portrait of how nationalism and racism interact to make mass murder seem rational.

Question 3

What does "the farming of bones" mean as a title?

Accepted Answer

The title has multiple layers of meaning in the novel. Most literally, it refers to the labor of cutting sugar cane — the Haitian laborers who cross the border seasonally to work in the Dominican sugar harvest are doing work so brutal and dangerous that it is described as farming bones; the term captures both the literal danger of the cane-cutting tools and the way the work treats laborers as raw material to be consumed rather than as human beings. More broadly, the title refers to the Haitian experience in the Dominican Republic as a whole: Haitian laborers are brought to the Dominican Republic, used, and discarded, and the massacre is the final expression of a relationship in which Haitian lives were treated as expendable. At a more metaphorical level, the title suggests Amabelle's survival project: she is farming her own bones, reconstructing herself from the raw material of trauma and loss, trying to build a life that has more than just the mechanics of survival in it.

The Farming of Bones Reading Order

Complete The Farming of Bones Book List