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Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat |
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The Farming of Bonesby Edwidge Danticat |
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From the bestselling author of Breath, Eyes, Memory, a passionate and profound novel of two lovers struggling against political violence
The Farming of Bones begins in 1937 in a village on the Dominican side of the river that separates the country from Haiti. Amabelle Desir, Haitian-born and a faithful maidservant to the Dominican family that took her in when she was orphaned, and her lover Sebastien, an itinerant sugarcane cutter, decide they will marry and return to Haiti at the end of the cane season. However, hostilities toward Haitian laborers find a vitriolic spokesman in the ultra-nationalist Generalissimo Trujillo who calls for an ethnic cleansing of his Spanish-speaking country. As rumors of Haitian persecution become fact, as anxiety turns to terror, Amabelle and Sebastien's dreams are leveled to the most basic human desire: to endure. Based on a little-known historical event, this extraordinarily moving novel memorializes the forgotten victims of nationalist madness and the deeply felt passion and grief of its survivors.
* New York Times Notable Book
* Named one of the Best Books of the Year by People, Entertainment Weekly, Chicago Tribune, Time Out New York, Publishers Weekly, and the American Library Association
* The author was nominated for a National Book Award and named one of the "20 Best Young Novelists" by Granta
"A remarkable new novel . . . Danticat writes in wonderful, evocative prose, and she is especially adept at treading the path between oppression and grace. At times, it's a particularly painful path, but, always, a compelling one." --The Boston Sunday Globe
"[With] hallucinatory vigor and a sense of mission . . . Danticat capably evokes the shock with which a small personal world is disrupted by military mayhem . . . The Farming of Bones offers ample confirmation of Edwidge Danticat's considerable talents." --The New York Times Book Review
"It's a testament to her talent that the novel, while almost unbearably sad, is still a joy to read." --Newsweek
Penguin Readers Guide Available
From Amazon.com Review:
In a 1930s Dominican Republic village, the scream of a woman in labor rings out like the shot heard around Hispaniola. Every detail of the birth scene--the balance of power between the middle-aged Señora and her Haitian maid, the babies' skin color, not to mention which child is to survive--reverberates throughout Edwidge Danticat's Farming of Bones. In fact, rather than a celebration of fecundity, the unexpected double delivery gels into a metaphor for the military-sponsored mass murder of Haitian emigrants. As the Señora's doctor explains: "Many of us start out as twins in the belly and do away with the other."
But Danticat's powerful second novel is far from a currently modish victimization saga, and can hold its own with such modern classics as One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Color Purple. Its watchful narrator, the Señora's shy Haitian housemaid, describes herself as "one of those sea stones that sucks its colors inside and loses its translucence once it's taken out into the sun." An astute observer of human character, Amabelle Désir is also a conduit for the author's tart, poetic prose. Her lover, Sebastian, has "arms as wide as one of my bare thighs," while the Señora's complicit officer husband is "still shorter than the average man, even in his military boots."
The orphaned Amabelle comes to assume almost messianic proportions, but she is entirely fictional, as is the town of Alegría where the tale begins. The genocide and exodus, however, are factual. Indeed, the atrocities committed by Dominican president Rafael Trujillo's army back in 1937 rival those of Duvalier's Touton Macoutes. History has rendered Trujillo's carnage much less visible than Duvalier's, but no less painful. As Amabelle's father once told her, "Misery won't touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of." Thanks to Danticat's stellar novel, the world will now know. --Jean Lenihan
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Breaking Bones..... -  |
The Farming of Bones Review |
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Sad, but stunningly beautiful, FARMING OF THE BONES is a powerfully written evocative account of the horror of the genocide committed in 1937 against poor Haitian cane workers and others by the Dominican General Rafael Trujillo.
Through the voice of a young orphaned Haitian woman, Amabelle Desir, we follow the lives of desperate Haitian exiles working the Dominican cane fields in deplorable conditions with paltry wages and sparse living conditions. Danticat is a master storyteller and her prose lifts and carries, even as the atrocities of what she is telling unfold on the page. She travels a very painful path with humbling grace. She allows the reader to witness grave injustices while keeping them safely wrapped in her beautiful and poignant prose. . Dreaming... remembering...and family are strong elements which serve to enrich the story and draw the reader in as the reality of the despair becomes readily apparent. Trujillo wants to 'whiten' his populace and thus begins the recounting of an unimaginable and shocking ethnic cleansing. Towards the end of the novel, a man says "Famous men never truly die... It is only those nameless and faceless who vanish like smoke in the early morning air." ...on the island which Haiti and The Dominican Republic share. Through the eyes of the narrator, Amabelle working as a maid in the Dominican Republic, we see scores of Haitians cruely massacred. None of those killed is anyone famous, nearly all the slaughtered are poor Haitians working as cheap labor in the neighboring country, but Amabelle's story serves to refute those words spoken about the nameless and faceless of the earth. In this book, they are remembered, and in her story they do have names and faces. |
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Excellent Service! - |
The Farming of Bones Review |
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This book came in great condition and quicker than they told me! This is a great service! You won't be disappointed. |
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A Woman's Odyssey -  |
The Farming of Bones Review |
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The heroine of The Farming of Bones is a young girl named Amabelle who, we learn, was left behind in the Dominican Republic when her parents are drowned in the Massacre River. The family that takes Amabelle in as a domestic servant finds her there on the riverbank, a little girl with bleeding knees. Later, when Amabelle is suddenly offered a chance to return to Haiti by Dr. Javier, a kind man who envisions a role for her at a clinic on the other side of the border, we are drawn into a long journey. Her conversations in darkness with her lover Sebastien, who works in the cane fields, confront the bittern dilemma of their lives:
"Sometimes the people in the fields, when they're tired and angry, they say we're an orphaned people," he said. "They say we are the burnt crud at the bottom of the pot. They say some people don't belong anywhere and that's us. I say we are a group of vwayajè, wayfarers." Amabelle recalls her childhood near Cap Haitien where she spent hours playing in the Citadel, from which she peered out at the sea. "From the safety of these rooms I saw the entire northern cape; the yellow-green mountains, the rice valley, the king's palace... the queen's court across the meadow." Space, freedom, and possibility once claimed in the era of the Haitian Revolution have, thus, entered the psyche of Amabelle and remain alive in her consciousness. But her real-world struggle is full of obstacles. There is a rumor emerging that Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo wants to get rid of any Haitian not working in a cane mill. A Haitian woman in Amabelle's village expresses anxiety about not having any "papers in my palms to say where I belong." Amabelle, too, feels displaced and fearful. "I had no papers to show that I belonged either here or in Haiti where I was born." As the story evolves, General Trujillo's army turns on the Haitian people, committing atrocities that are unforgotten to this day. Amabelle escapes, miraculously, to the other side with a friend, Yves. Many friends die in the process and her beloved Sebastien is lost forever. The passages of their imagined communication are like prose poems injected into the darkness of this novel. This is a love story and a woman's odyssey. It holds the history of Haiti within its pages and the whispers the possibility of a better time in measured, evocative prose. In the end, the "place to lay it down" is the Massacre River itself. Danticat leads us to the water's edge with Amabelle. Like an artery running though the body of a nation, it is the source of life and memory that carries us forward. A beautiful book. |
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Two Languages, Two Countries, Two People, One Island - |
The Farming of Bones Review |
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Edwidge Danticat's powerful story about the 1937 massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic on the orders of dictator Rafael Trujillo resonates in these times of increased awareness of genocides throughout the world. In direct language but lyrical structure, Danticat offers an intimate account of a woman caught between two worlds, one by birth and one by adoption.
The narrator, Amabelle, is a young Haitian woman who lives as a servant in a wealthy Dominican household. Taken in by this family after witnessing the drowning of her parents, Amabelle has grown up with her mistress, Senor Valencia, and they are fast friends - at least, as much as their different social standings will allow. Valencia marries Pico, an officer in the Dominican army, and Amabelle falls in love with Sebastien, an outspoken sugar cane cutter and would-be rebel. Sebastien views the unfolding tensions between the two ethnic groups with clear eyes and tries to convince Amabelle that they are in danger. When Amabelle finally accepts this truth, she makes plans to escape the imminent slaughter, even then not believing that it will really happen. What she witnesses and what she must do to survive changes her forever. Danticat uses the imagery of duality to illustrate the segregation, the dangers of division, and the unseen unity in this country. For example, Valencia's twins (one named after Trujillo himself) represent the Dominican and the Haitians sides of the country, one light and one dark, born from the same parents. Ironically, Valencia's husband, one of the officers in charge of carrying out the slaughter, supplies the "dark" genes in his own daughter. Readers who want to look deeper into the story will find many examples of duality, irony, and water imagery. Recommended companion books: In the Time of the Butterflies, Drown, Breath, Eyes, Memory (Oprah's Book Club). |
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Moved... - |
The Farming of Bones Review |
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This was the first book I read from this author and I can tell you, it will not be the last. The writing is amazing. This author has an amazing gift with imagery! She will make you see (and feel) what she is writing about as if you are there in the story. It simply took my breath away! A must read. Tears came from my eyes as I read the last few lines in the book. The story captivated me. |
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