The Healing Power of Narrative The 1937 Haitian Massacre and Two Literary Representations

Date of Award

2005

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Wallace, Miriam

Keywords

Danticat, Edwidge, Alexis, Jacques Stephen, Borderlands, Haiti

Area of Concentration

Literature

Abstract

In October of 1937 Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic ordered the massacre of an estimated twenty thousand Haitians living in the ambiguously defined 'Dominican' frontier region along the Dominican-Haitian border. In this thesis I examine the critical connections between history and literature: studying both the narrative history of the 1937 massacre (to use Hayden White's terminology) as well as two literary representations of the massacre. Jacques Stephen Alexis, a Haitian and member of the Parti Communiste, wrote his first novel, Compére Général Soleil, in 1949 (p. 1954) as a Marxist explanation for the massacre. Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian- American author whom I argue straddles both the Haitian and contemporary American literary canons. Furthermore, I argue that Danticat's 1998 novel The Farming of Bones not only revises the history of the massacre, but also responds to Alexis's Compére through a feminist awareness of personal experience and embodiment. Gloria Anzaldúa's concept of borderlands, the place of grating contact where two or more cultures meet and overlap, weaves together my thesis. Ultimately, I argue that the trauma of the massacre is the trauma of the impossible task of separating the multiple identities that those of us who live in the borderlands negotiate daily -- a trauma that plays out on both the level of the individual and the nation-state in the stories of Hispaniola.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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