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The Farming of Bones

by Edwidge Danticat

The 1937 massacre the Dominican Republic buried.

For you if

you want to understand how a government erases an atrocity and what the survivors carry

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In 1937 Trujillo ordered the massacre of Haitian workers on the Dominican side of the border — up to 30,000 people killed, many by machete, identified by their inability to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley. Danticat tells the story through Amabelle, a Haitian domestic worker who survives. The most important fictional account of an atrocity that the Dominican Republic has spent decades minimizing. A dispatch about what happens to a community's memory when the state decides the event didn't occur.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
Dominican Republic • Caribbean
Voice
Written by a Dominican author
Themes
genocidehistorical memory
Topics
parsley massacretrujillo regime

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