La Negrura, "The Darkness"

The Dominican nickname for the unclassifiable disfiguring disease spreading though the Haitian relocation camps symbolizes the general attitude of dismissiveness of and disregard for the ongoing reality of the suffering and dehumanization of the Haitian people in the proverbial American backyard. The opening lines of the story admit how the news of the epidemic, which would give rise of giant zombies, the annihilation of Port-au-Prince and the subsequent international-scale electromagnetic failure, was initially greeted as a racialized joke. This derisive response from Haiti's Spanish-speaking neighbors, most of whom share African ancestry with the Haitian Creoles, goes beyond the narrator's admitted shallowness of youth to encapsulate the idea of how indifferent human beings can be to their neighbors, a point that applies to the rich and powerful United States as well as to the Dominican people at all levels of society.

Polaroid Photographs

The...