It's Called History for a Reason
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| Newspaper Story of Parsley Massacre, 1937* |
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| Rafael Trujillo |
The talented Haitian fiction writer, Edwidge Danticat, rescues history from itself by embedding it in works about her homeland. For an example, you need read no further than her story "Nineteen-Thirty Seven" if you really want to understand the terrifying human cost of tyranny.
In the story, the narrator, Josephine pays prison visits to her mother who has been wrongly accused of witchcraft (in an absurd manner that recalls the darkest hours of the Puritans). It's revealed that three generations of Josephine's family were forever altered by the 1937 date of the story's title. In that fateful year, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo commits an atrocity that rises to the level of genocide when he orders soldiers to massacre a minimum of nine thousand Haitian migrant workers by chopping up their corpses and throwing them in the river separating the two countries. Although Josephine's grandmother dies that evening in the horrifically violent purge, Josephine's mother (pregnant with Josephine) dives below the surface and heroically swims to the Haitian shore, rising dramatically like a phoenix to save two lives.
This is just one example and one facet of the history that our senior class learned in the course of reading Danticat's collection. If you are as unfamiliar with the history of Haiti as I was, you owe yourself an astonishing tour of its places, times, and rulers that figure in the lives of everyday people (most especially, women). --fg
*Why is this event called the Parsley Massacre? Because Haitian people are linguistically aligned with their French colonizers, they are not raised speaking Spanish. Reportedly, Trujillo's hooligans asked suspected Haitians on the Dominican side to say the Spanish word for parsley (perejil). Betrayed by their identifying French accents, the Haitians who responded were murdered.
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