Speaking in Silences: Literary Interruptions and the Massacre of 1937
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Published:October 2016
Approaching the killing of more than twenty thousand ethnic Haitians and rayanos as remembered in four fictional accounts—the short story “Luis Pie,” published by Dominican exiled writer Juan Bosch (Havana, 1942); the Haitian novel Compère Général Soleil by Jacques Stephen Alexis (Port Au Prince, 1955); a testimonio, El Masacre se pasa a pie by Freddy Prestol Castillo (Santo Domingo, 1973); and the celebrated novel by Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones (New York, 1998)—the chapter traces the official discourse surrounding Massacre of 1937 back to the anti-Haitian literature of the nineteenth century examined in chapter 1, showing how diction became law and epistemic violence transformed into physical violence at the hands of the Trujillo regime. Contradicting anti-Haitian ideology, the literary works the chapter studies propose solidarity and compassion as an antidote to violence.
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