The Survivor’s Dilemma in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones

silpiya nur aldiyah;

The essay examines Edwidge Danticat’s imaginative retelling of the ill-documented 1937 Haitian massacre in her 1998 novel The Farming of Bones. The novel, as well as Danticat’s work more generally, considers what it means to speak on behalf of the dead, especially victims of atrocity or other injustice. I identify the dilemma of the testifying survivor, who may be received primarily as a voice of the past, more ghost than fellow citizen. I turn to human rights theory, in addition to trauma studies, to seek a model of reading such imaginative
literature that can incorporate both memory and the future in a survivor’s postatrocity life.