Finished
a great one this week! I had my copy of The Farming of Bones signed by Danticat when she came to visit UWM. It was a
used book which she had actually signed for someone else more than ten years
earlier. The autograph from 1998 says To
Paul, It was wonderful meeting you. I hope you enjoy this book. Kembe la,
Edwidge Danticant. (Kembe la means "stay firm" or "stay there.")For me in 2009: To
Ann, Best of luck with your novel Edwidge Danticat. The writing didn’t
change, but the voice did so many novels later. Yes it has taken me six years
to read a book that she wrote in 1998. But I’m glad I finally did.
The
novel takes place in the Dominican Republic at the time of the 1937 “Parsley Massacre” in which hundreds and probably thousands of Haitians were slaughtered
by order of the Dominican president. So it makes a fantastic historical novel
for a class on historical fiction, particularly related to genocide or
holocaust or African diaspora. But it also got my mind buzzing about some
classes I’ve been hoping to teach when I get a chance.
I’d
like to teach a class on labor, especially domestic labor. The narrator of the
story, Amabelle, is a Haitian domestic servant in a wealthy Dominican home. The
book contains some amazing observations about the perspective of these workers
that I think any laborer can really relate to, especially those working as
housekeepers and personal assistants. Here are some examples:
Working for others, you learn to be
present and invisible at the same time, nearby when they needed you, far off
when they didn’t, but still close enough in case they change their minds.
Working for others, you were always
rushing to or away from them.
Working for others, you are immediately
inspected when you enter a room, as if the patrón or the señora is always
hoping to catch you with some missing treasure in your hands.
With the distant gaze, Sylvie stood
devotedly at her side. And in Sylvie’s eyes was a longing I knew very well,
from the memory of it as it was once carved into my younger face: I will bear
anything, carry any load, suffer any shame, walk with eyes to the ground, if
only for the very small chance that one day our fates might come to being
somewhat closer and I would be granted for all my years of travail and duty an
honestly gained life that in some extremely modest way would begin to resemble
hers.
I’m
amazed at how her language captures what it means to be a worker, particularly
a worker who job takes place in a wealthy person’s home. I also would put this
on a list of good environmental fiction, like this one here, because the
landscape plays such a huge role in the events of the story. (In particular,
just seven years before the Parsley Massacre, there was a historic hurricane in
the Dominican Republic.) Danticat uses environmental language whenever
articulating Amabelle’s memories and feelings, like the below passage about the
man with whom she is madly in love, Sebastien:
Death to Sebastien Onius was as immense
as a tree-tossing beast of a raging hurricane. It was an event that split open
the sky and cracked the ground, made the heavens wail and the clouds weep. It
was not for one person to live alone.
…
His name is Sebastien Onius and his
spirit must be inside the waterfall cave at the source of the stream where the
cane workers bathe, the grotto of wet moss and chalk and luminous green fresco
– the dark green of wet papaya leaves.
The
language of nature and landscape is interwoven with language of labor, just as
the two are inextricably linked in reality. My discussions about migrant and
global labor in ETH 255 often can’t avoid this relationship with the
environment. The same processes that destroy the landscape also destroy the
people trying to live there. For that reason too, the landscape is also the
location for history and memory, especially memories related to imperialism and
suppression of indigenous and enslaved peoples. The environmental parts often
drift into moments that describe the insistence of memory, like the below:
The ground was slipping beneath my feet;
the sun seemed to be moving closer until I felt like it was stationed next to
my face, melting my skin and blinding my eyes. The rocks on the ground became
as large as pillows and finally I fell, making of the earth a warm bed.
…
I remember once, when I was a girl,
watching an infant boy my mother and father had midwifed into this world. A
month later, the mother left the boy with us when she went to market. While he
was sleeping, he rolled himself into a ball and spun around on the bed. I watched
him do this for some time before I called for my father, who was cutting wood
outside, and my mother, who was washing clothes behind the house.
I think this baby has the evil in him, I
told them.
My father laughed and slapped the little
boy’s bottom which made him stop his spasms. Then he explained, my father, that
sometimes in the first year, babies remember their births with their bodies and
had to repeat it many times before they could forget. When they did this, you
were to help them recollect the whole thing, especially their coming out, by
tapping them on their bottom as had been done to them after their birth.
How
amazing is the description of the relationship or conflict between Amabelle’s battered
body and the landscape as they attempt to escape the slaughter. Then the
description of trauma and the way it remains in memory unless you repeat it
enough times to forget it, hence the compulsion to repeat that Freud talked
about. Apply that to history, and you have the desire to bring to light what
the dominant culture wishes to suppress. No matter how you try to forget bad
memories, they make themselves known. No matter how those in power want you to
forget their crimes, the truth lives: in the earth, in the water and in the
collective memories of a people. I loved this passage:
It is perhaps the great discomfort of
those trying to silence the world to discover that we have voices sealed inside
our heads, voices that with each passing day, grow even louder than the clamor
of the world outside.
The slaughter is the only thing that is
mine enough to pass on. All I want to do is find a place to lay it down now and
again, a safe nest where it will neither be scattered by the winds, nor remain
forever buried beneath the sod.
I just need to lay it down sometimes.
Even in the rare silence of the night, with no faces around.
This
reminded me of the part in the Julie Dash film Daughters of the Dust, which is also about Caribbean women, when Yellow Mary talks about
putting her bad memories in a jewelry case in her mind and “locked them there.
So I could take them out, and look at them when I feel like it…” I like the
idea of a place where memories are located. The description of immediately
after the trauma reminded me of this film, too, because DOTD also focuses on a
specific natural resource as a location for trauma. In DOTD it’s indigo, and in
FOTB it’s parsley, obviously.
He watched as Odette spread of course,
itchy blanket over me while I shivered from the fever slowly rising from the
hollow of my bones. My chipped and cracked teeth kept snapping against the mush
of open flesh inside my mouth. All the pain of first being struck came back to
me. I reached up to touch my misshapen face. Odette moved my hands away from my
jaws. Wilner was pacing back and forth speaking to himself under his breath. The
hand he lay on my forehead when he stopped smelled of parsley. Odette’s clothes
smelled of parsley. I closed my eyes and entered a darkness of parsley.
This
seems like a beautiful way of describing the perception of a person just having
survived a trauma. A lot of this book exists between reality and a fantastical
space, particularly Amabelle’s interactions with Sebastien, but also in her memories
of her parents, who were killed in the hurricane. I like the notion of dream
characters, or figures that appear to a person still half-submerged in the
past. These figures are grotesque and a little scary, like the “Sugarcane Woman”
who appears to Amabelle in a fluffy dress with a silver muzzle on her face. There’s
a bit of the Gothic in this novel, which is probably why I like it so much in
the end. Horror fiction is about trauma,
and the intersection of Freud’s Uncanny, and Todorov’s Fantastic.
Finally,
my favorite passage made me think of my mom, and although this is another kind
of creepy moment for Amabelle, in which her dead mother appears to her, it
comforted me. So much of it expresses what I feel and what I know she would say
if she could.
She is wearing a dress of glass, fashioned
out of the hardened clarity of the river, and the stress flows like raised dust
behind her as she runs towards me and enfolds me in her smoke-light arms. Her
face is like mine is now, in fact it is the exact same long, three-different-shades-of-night
face, and she is smiling a both-rows-of-teeth revealing smile.
…
And what of that time when I was dying
and the doll came? I asked her. Why did you not love me then?
You were never truly dying, my precious
imbecile, she says. You were unbalanced in the head, as you are now. Your heart
was racing and your blood was on fire, as it is now. So you felt like you were
dying but you were not. It was never as hot as you remember. It could not have
been. I would not have let it be.
I will never be a whole woman, I say,
for the absence of your face.
Your mother was never as far from you as
you supposed, she says. You were like my shadow. Always fled when I came to you
and only followed when I left you alone. You will be well again ma belle, Amabelle.
I know this to be true. And how can you have ever doubted my love? You, my
eternity.
I
miss you Mom!
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