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The Farming of Bones
Edwidge Danticat, 1998
Viking Penguin
320 pp.

In Brief
It is 1937, the Dominican side of the Haitian border. Amabelle, orphaned at the age of eight when her parents drowned, is a maid to the young wife of an army colonel. She has grown up in this household, a faithful servant. Sebastien is a field hand, an itinerant sugarcane cutter. They are Haitians, useful to the Dominicans but not really welcome. There are rumors that in other towns Haitians are being persecuted, even killed. But there are always rumors. Amabelle loves Sebastien. He is handsome despite the sugarcane scars on his face, his calloused hands. She longs to become his wife and walk into their future. Instead, terror enfolds them. But the story does not end here: it begins. The Farming of Bones is about love, fragility, barbarity, dignity, remembrance, and the only triumph possible for the persecuted: to endure. (From the publisher.)

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About the Author

• Birth—1969
• Where—Port-au-Prince Haiti
• Education—B.A., Barnard College; M.F.A.,
• Awards—James Michner Fellowship Award, National Book
  Award Finalist.  
• Currently—lives in New York City

Edwidge Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1969. Her parents emigrated to New York when she was a small child, while she and her brother remained in Haiti, where they were raised by an aunt and uncle. At the age of twelve she moved to Brooklyn to be with her parents.

Danticat began writing as a teenager, and her essays and stories have appeared in many periodicals. She received a degree in French literature from Barnard College and an MFA in writing from Brown University. At Brown she completed work on Breath, Eyes, Memory, which she had begun as an undergraduate, and the novel was published in 1994. After finishing her master's degree, Danticat worked in Clinica Estetico, the production office of film director Jonathan Demme, who has a consuming interest in Haiti. She read and wrote scripts and continues to monitor and occasionally protest American policy in Haiti. In late 1994, Danticat returned to Haiti for the first time in thirteen years, to see President Aristide restored to power.

Danticat is the recipient of a James Michener Fellowship and awards from Seventeen magazine and from Essence. She is also the author of a collection of Haitian stories, Krik? Krak!, which was a National Book Award finalist, and the novel, The Farming of Bones (1998). She lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)

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Critics Say. . .
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.
New York Times


Danticat. . .capably evokes the shock with which a small personal world is disrupted by military mayhem. . . .a spare, searing poetry infuses many of the book's best passages. . . .At times. . .reads like a small-scale Gone with the Wind told from the servants' point of view.
Michael Upchurch - New York Times Book Review


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.
Boston Sunday Globe


Both poetic and graphically realistic, this novel sets the love affair of an orphaned house servant against the backdrop of the 1937 revolution in the Dominican Republic.
People


Pity the young novelist surfing the wave of novelty and hype. Sooner or later, she's going to wipe out. Although Edwidge Danticat has written only a so-so first novel (Breath, Eyes, Memory) and a modest story collection (Krik? Krak!), given all the hoopla, you'd think she was Haiti's great gift to American literature. A prized seat among the literati-in-waiting of Granta Magazine's 20 Best Young American Novelists and a National Book Award nomination for Krik? Krak! Oh, please! Has anyone actually read these books?

The Haitian folk tradition that Danticat brings to the literary table has a certain fascination -- the tangled knot of family connections, the everyday presence of fearsome or whimsical divinities, the overwhelming sense of life's fragility. To this, she adds a contemporary overlay of feminist indignation and political protest. But her plots, alas, are predictable and occasionally static. Her style is as often overwrought as it is pleasingly lyrical. And she can be as preachy and sentimental as Alice Walker at her most embarrassing.

In the history of Danticat's birthplace, the hemisphere's poorest country, it's not only the Yanqui imperialist who has served as villain. The U.S. Army may have stormed in periodically to depose one ruler and install another, but unlike Haiti's next-door neighbor, the Dominican Republic, it hasn't subjected the island to genocidal fury. At the heart of Danticat's new novel, The Farming of Bones, is a little-known massacre ordered by the despot Rafael Trujillo in 1937. Thousands of desperately poor Haitians, lured across the border to work the sugar cane fields, became victims of bloodthirsty Dominican nationalists. "When you stay too long at a neighbor's house," one Haitian observes, "it's only natural that he become weary of you and hate you."

Danticat is so eager to pay tribute to these unsung victims that she neglects to portray any real people. Her characters are mere monuments to remembrance. Amabelle Desir, servant to well-to-do Dominicans, is little more than a gritty survivor (her parents drowned years ago in the same river where the massacre takes place). She and her lover, cane cutter Sebastien Onius, are depicted in such broad, all-purpose strokes that it's hard to care, except in the most abstract way, when they flee for their lives toward Haiti. They are hard-working, brave, resourceful -- and utterly forgettable. Minor characters fill required roles wearing the husk of stereotype: the hateful Dominican military officer, his naive wife, the kindly Dominican who warns Amabelle of danger ahead.

This is by far Danticat's longest book, and the stretch shows. Her strategy of keeping the horrors at a distance (or in Amabelle's memories of childhood) slackens the pace and makes a reader uncertain about what's really going on. (Unlike the Holocaust, these are not such familiar historical events that avoiding direct description can actually heighten the tension.) Given the life-or-death excitements looming in the background, the book's longueurs are inexcusable. Oddly enough, by slowing things down for a loving -- and uncritical -- evocation of culture and community, Danticat has robbed her book of vitality. Only 29, Danticat has plenty of time to achieve her considerable potential. But overpraising her work won't help her get there.
Dan Cryer - Salon


Passionate and heartrending, Bones lingers in the consciousness like an unforgettable nightmare.
Entertainment Weekly


Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones, traverses a landscapes that is simultaneously lush and untamed, dark and predatory. . . it seeks simply, in the quiet retelling of a story, to humanize a tragedy that has been looked at only from a far and then only in relation to other tragedies. . . .Ms. Danticat has once again crafted a novel of significance, a novel that holds no stereotypes and is bound only by a history too soon forgotten. It is a story uncommonly placed in its advocacy of political and social justice because the retelling and the remembering of this holocaust story is its own reward, its own justice
Quarterly Black Review


In this, her second novel, Danticat re-creates a vanished world, memorializing these victims of nationalist madness who have long been ignored by the spotlight of world history. The Farming of Bones is about love, fragility, dignity, and the only triumph possible for the persecuted and the innocent: to endure. With quiet lyricism and atmospheric, at times dreamlike prose, juxtaposed with the passion and violence inherent in this epic tragedy, Danticat weaves a tale of insufferable loss and illuminates the hearts and souls of the Haitian people whose way of life was so undervalued. Realizing the promise evident in her two previous works of fiction, The Farming of Bones is a story told in an astonishingly mature voice with the assured hand of a major writer
Barnes & Noble Review


YA-At one time the people of Haiti and the Dominican Republic accepted and nurtured their interdependency. Trujillo's racist regime marked the end of this peaceful coexistence with the deplorable Massacre of 1937. This tragic and horrific ethnic cleansing is remembered by Amabelle, an aging Haitian woman who lived through this period as a young girl. Orphaned when her parents are swept away by a swollen river, she is cared for by the Haitian community across the river in the Dominican Republic. Eventually she falls in love with Sebastien Onius, a worker in the cane fields; their lives are forever entangled as the events of 1937 gather them in. She flees, becoming companion and nursemaid for the wife of Senor Pico Duarte, a member of Trujillo's inner circle. For the rest of her life, Amabelle searches for Sebastien, never completely able to accept his death. Danticat's lyrical writing propels readers forward. This is an emotionally charged story and a powerful historical account that helps readers understand the radical division that exists between two countries on a single island. —Dottie Kraft, formerly at Fairfax County Public Schools, VA.
School Library Journal

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Book Club Discussion Questions

1. What is the significance of the passage from Judges that opens the novel?

2. After Amabelle births the two babies for Señora Valencia, Dr. Javier says to her, "Many of us start out as twins in the belly and do away with the other." Does this foreshadow what will come later in the novel? How? Did Dr. Javier know that what he was saying had a deeper meaning? What about Amabelle?

3. As Pico races in his car to see his newborn twins, he hits and kills Joël, a friend of Sebastien's. While Pico and his father-in-law Papi insist that it was an accident, Sebastien and Yves are convinced that it is the beginning of the slaughter of the Haitians. What do you think? What does Amabelle think?

4. Is the death of Señora Valencia's baby boy just a coincidence, or is it an example of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth"?

5. Amabelle's parents drown during a hurricane, as did Sebastien's father, and in the 1937 slaughter, many Haitians were murdered on the bed of the river dividing the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Discuss the many functions of water in the novel, healing as well as destructive.

6. Do you think that Amabelle knew that the massacre was coming, or was she truly naive about the impending tide of events?

7. In many ways, The Farming of Bones is a meditation on survival. Each character in the novel—Amabelle, Sebastien, Father Romain, Man Denise, Man Rapadou, just to name a few—have different methods of survival. Can you discuss these? Are there any characters in particular that have survived with a better quality of life than others? What does it mean to survive?

8. Were Amabelle's dream sequences an effective narrative technique? Why or why not? Did they give you more insight into her character? Which ones did you find to be the most powerful?

9. How did you feel about Amabelle's relationship with Señora Valencia? Was it believable? Do you think that Señora Valencia would have been strong enough to protect Amabelle if she had stayed during the massacre? Were you surprised when Amabelle returned to visit her at the end of the novel?

10. Throughout The Farming of Bones—starting with the title—words are given many shades of meaning. What are some examples of this? Discuss the significance of "parsley" in the novel.

11. "Famous men never die, it is only those nameless and faceless that vanish like smoke into the early morning air." Why is this sentence so central to the theme of the novel?

12. "Unclothed, I slipped into the current. . . I looked to my dreams for softness, for a gentler embrace, for relief of the mudslides and blood bubbling out of the riverbed, where it is said the dead add their tears to the river flow." This is from the last page of the book. What is happening here? What lies ahead for Amabelle?
(Questions issued by publisher.)