Parsley

 PTSD is an acronym for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.  These past few days, I feel like I'm suffering from PTSD, after reading Danticat's historical novel, The Farming of Bones.  This is a story told by Amabelle Desir.  Amabelle was an orphan who was rescued and brought to live as a companion/handmaid to Valencia.  It is a tragic story of a massacre that took place in 1937 on the island of Hispaniola.

I didn't know what the story was about.  I didn't read the back cover, or anything.  I started with the story that I assumed was about living on a sugar cane plantation in the Dominican Republic.  Within an hour of reading, I was racing for my life.  It is a fast-paced novel.

The story begins with Valencia screaming.  Her labor has begun.  She gives birth to twins.  One of the dies a few days after being born.  This is a foreshadowing of what is to come.  

Amabelle is Haitian, and so is the love of her life, Sebastien.  He is a cane-cutter.  The title of the book comes from the sound of cutting sugarcane.  This life is called travay te pou zo, the farming of bones.  Sugar cane when cut sounds like breaking dry chicken bones. Sugar cane is the main export in the Dominican Republic.  The Dominicans use Haitian workers because they work cheaply and are treated poorly.  

At the time of our story, 1937, Generalissimo Rafael Lionidas Trujillo Molina was the president of the Dominican Republic. Suddenly, a purge is ordered and the Haitians have to leave.  They are driven out mercilessly.  

How do you tell a Haitian from a Dominican?  There was a simple test.  One had to pronounce "parsley" in Spanish.  For French or Creole-speaking Haitians, this was impossible.  The Spanish word for parsley is "perejil."  The trilled or rolling "r" does not exist in French, so Haitians would pronounce the word as "peweril" rather than "perejil."  Who can say it, lives.

When the massacre starts, Amabelle flees across the mountains to Haiti.  Sebastien never makes it.  Amabelle waits and hopes but it is all in vain.  The physical descriptions are so vivid that it is understandable that the last chapters demonstrate the psychological trauma Amabelle and others lived.  

There is an Afterward at the end of the book.  In it, President Roosevelt states that he is appalled at the systematic campaign of extermination that took place, in the Dominican Republic.  Strange isn't it, the year is 1937, and there is a systematic campaign of extermination being planned by the Nazis.  

Why does man always look for a scapegoat?