Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) undertakes a number of border crossings—between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, between the tolerance of past lived experience and a present politics of exclusion, between healing and dying and between dreaming and waking. Amabelle Désir lives with ghosts of the past, including the historical rebel leaders, Henry I and Anacaona, and ghosts of the present, including the parents whose drowning she witnessed. As the political situation in the Dominican Republic under Trujillo becomes more oppressive, the novel explores questions of identity in relation to race, skin colour, language and class.
This paper analyses the ways in which The Farming of Bones bears witness to the events leading up to the massacre of Haitians in 1937 through Amabelle’s direct and indirect forms of testimony. It argues that incomplete mourning is trapped in the unconscious of Amabelle and her lover Sebastien. Amabelle’s attempt to find a continuity between their present and their past can only be achieved through disjuncture in the present and future as Amabelle attempts to deal with trauma and the guilt of the survivor after her forced return ‘home’. Her refusal to allow her former mistress Señora Valencia the ‘privilege’ of a shared history with her breaks the bond, referred to earlier in the novel, of the dead twin and the other for whom it sacrifices itself.