The paper is part of my current research project that looks at the tropes of exile in the fiction of contemporary Caribbean women living in the Diaspora. It focuses on the specific use of the trope of the “border” in the novel The Farming of Bones, published in 1998 by US-resident Haitian author Edwidge Danticat. I argue that Danticat uses the porous nature of the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic and a real episode of historical massacre in order to make the case for the instability of other historical, cultural and ethnic “borders” that have shaped the Caribbean as a region.
Danticat’s inspiring assertion during a recent interview—“My people are vulnerable: not able to live behind high walls”—takes me to explore the significance of the term “vulnerable” in relation to the potential vantage perspective provided by the Caribbean border. Danticat rehabilitates the history of the border region as one of the many ‘crossroads’ that are both painful and productive for the identity of the islands. Echoing the protagonist of The Farming of Bones, I argue that some borders are like ‘veils’ that can provide an escape to identities from superimposed definitions while ‘containing’ them at the same time. Finally, Danticat’s “visibility” in the international literary market also makes The Farming of Bones a “border” text, since it bestows globalized appeal to a “local” history that has been ignored both inside and outside the Caribbean.