Divided Island

Danticat's Farming of Bones made me reflect on how island's are divided and what this can do to the relationships between people over money, poverty, power and hatred. Generalissimo Trujillo decided that the systematic massacre of Haitians in the Dominican Republic was the means by which Dominicans would be able to cleanse their land, economics, nationhood in 1937. From the symbol of the twins at birth, Danticat is able to draw out a narrative of a fight between love and the means to live. 

  The Birthing of Nations – even the birth certificates are noted that it is the “ninety-third year of independence and the Era of the Generalissimo.” Rafi's privileged place in Senor Pico's heart shows how racial pigmentocracy and patriarchal discrimination can even work against ones own daughter. Papi defensively argues that “pure Spanish blood” is of the highest quality in his daughter, Senora, the mother of the twins to Doctor Javier's “impolite assertion” of the twin having “a little charcoal behind the ears.” 

  The divisions between the two nations is something that Amnesty International have investigated in their 2013 report on the Dominican Republic. Haitian people are being intimidated and threatened in their plight of being denied identity documents. The UN have recently protected Haitian immigrants. In 2000 the state was found responsible for the killing of 7 Haitian migrants and mass deportations still continue. 

  With books like Danticat's and the work of organisations like Amnesty International, http://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/annual-report-dominican-republic-2013 awareness is being raised to the continuing plight of Haitians in the Dominican Republic and the conditions of cane workers who still see death as “lucky to no longer be part of the cane life, travail te pou zo, the farming of bones.”