When the Historical and the Fictive Converge: Mediating Dis/ease, Historical Trauma, and Genocide in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones

Abstract

Edwidge Danticat’s novel, The Farming of Bones, imaginatively recreates the mass massacre of migrant black Haitian cane cutters in the neighbouring country of the Dominican Republic in 1937. Based on historical narrative, the novel explores how the nexus of race, ethnicity, and cultural “othering” in the context of migration has historically not only led to individuals’ ontological dislocation and identity crisis but also to the most heinous of crimes—genocide. As such, the narrative qualifies as both a historical novel and a trauma narrative because it deploys a strategy that does not only rely on official historical information but also the memory and imagination to reinsert individual and collective histories of the silenced into living memory. The article deploys critical textual analysis and postcolonial lens to explore how the convergence of history, memory, and fictive imagination is used to unsettle official historical amnesia in the interest of a better understanding of genocidal trauma.