The Farming of Bones Critical Essay | Critical Review by Jacqueline Brice-Finch

Critical Review by Jacqueline Brice-Finch

SOURCE: A review of The Farming of Bones, in World Literature Today, Vol. 73, No. 2, Spring, 1999, p. 373.

In the following review, Brice-Finch offers a positive assessment of The Farming of Bones.

Readers of Caribbean literature are no strangers to the harsh conditions of the cane field, particularly in the French Antilles during the early twentieth century. Joseph Zobel in La Rue Cases-Negres (1950; Eng. Black Shack Alley) and Simone Schwarz-Bart in Pluie et vent sur Telumee Miracle (1972; Eng. The Bridge of the Beyond) graphically related the degradation that workers endured to eke out a subsistence living. However, it is the second novel by Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones, which is the focus of another aspect of the history of cane workers, the massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic in 1937.

Due to a growing xenophobia under the rule of Generalissimo Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina,...
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