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Erzulie is there in the work by both absence and presence, I guess. She watches over all the women in my stories. She's not openly here this time, however. The goddess of this story is Metres DIo, the female spirit of the river, to whom Amabelle dedicates and tells the story.
Edwidge Danticat 1
In 1937, under the regime of Dominican dictator General Rafael Trujillo, over 30,000 Haitian migrant farm workers were murdered in the Dominican Republic. Edwidge Danticat's The Farming of Bones imaginatively recasts the 1937 massacre and explores the ways in which culture, ethnicity and religion are used to damn Haitians to second-class citizenship, and later to deem them annihilable. In the face of overwhelming historical evidence that confirms the mixed racial origins of the people of Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo attempted to reconstruct Dominican nationality by disavowing any and all claims to an African ancestry. Dominicans were reconstituted as White and/or Indian, despite the existence of large populations of dark-skinned Dominicans whose ancestry was clearly linked to the presence of African slaves in the former Spanish colony. Trujillo devised a method of distinguishing Haitians from Dominicans by forcing them to say the Spanish word for parsley, perejil. Under Trujillo's orders those who were not able to trill the "r" or pronounce the "j" were forced to swallow mouthfuls of the parsley and were instantly murdered in the most brutal manner imaginable.2
Significantly, the use of parsley as both linguistic and cultural marker demonstrates Trujillo's obsession with rooting out the folk identity that is linked to African culture as constituted by the Haitian presence in the Dominican Republic. Trujillo and his regime literally pushed Haitian culture down the throats of Haitians, killing them with it, for it, as it were. The parsley ("perejil") that is stuffed into the mouths of the victims of the massacre is the agent that links language, culture, religion, and folkways of being with the trauma of the massacre. Why parsley? Because it is the most commonly-used herb. But what is the link between the herb parsley and the Haitian culture? Parsley has so many uses: Haitians bathe with parsley, season their food with it, purge their insides, cleanse their bodies, even wash their dead with it (Danticat 62).