In October 1937, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, one of Latin America's most brutal dictators, directly ordered the execution of all Haitians then living in the Dominican-speaking Republic Spanish. People suspected of being Haitian were asked to say the Spanish word for parsley (“perejil”). If the suspect had failed to pronounce the consonant "r" and thus revealed his Creole accent, he would have been shot on the spot. Although the numbers are uncertain, historians estimate that between 1,000 and 35,000 died this way (Ayuso 51). In her 1999 novel The Farming of Bones, Caribbean author Edwidge Danticat meticulously chronicles this event. Although the plight of the Haitian people is the focus of the work, Danticat devotes a substantial portion of the novel to the political climate of the Dominican Republic, which allowed this brutal massacre to occur. Danticat depicts Haitians and Dominicans as stuck in a discursively constructed binary, the sole purpose of which is to strengthen Dominican national identity and assuage the nation's internalized racism at the cost of dehumanizing and eradicating Haitians—a purely dichotomous relationship that, in the spirit of La Orientalist and Western philosophy says more about the Dominican characters in the novel than about the Haitian ones. I will begin by examining the tenets of nationalism and Orientalism and then explore how these separate ideologies work in tandem to compose the novel's distinctly unique political landscape. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The terms “nationalism” and “national identity” have proven notoriously difficult to define. Etene Balibar, in his essay “Racism and Nationalism”, argues that this difficulty arises in part because “the concept never works alone […] it is always part of a chain of which it is both the central and weak link”. (Balibar 164). Balibar states that “[t]his chain is constantly being enriched (the detailed modalities of such enrichment vary from one language to another) with new intermediate or extreme terms [such as] civic spirit, patriotism, populism, ethnism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, chauvinism , [and] imperialism [...]” (164). Perhaps the best and most concise definition of nationalism as it is understood today can be found in Franz Fanon's monumental essay, “On National Culture.” Fanon describes nationalism as the “passionate search for a national culture that existed before the colonial era” – a search motivated by the “anxiety […] to move away from that Western culture in which [the formerly colonized] all risk being submerged ” (Fanon 119). A national culture, according to Fanon, “is not a folklore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover [a] true nature of a people, [but rather] the set of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe , justifies and praises the action through which that people created itself and maintains its existence […]” (120). In other words, national culture refers to how a nation comes to understand and ultimately repair its fractured identity. But the question remains: how exactly does a nation create and subsequently maintain its own national culture and identity? There are, of course, several ways in which this goal can be achieved. Fanon proposes two methods, rigorously condensed: 1) creating a national literature or a "combat literature", in the sense that it "invites all the people to fight for their existence as a nation" and "shapes the national consciousness [by] giving it shape and contours and opening up new and boundless horizons before it"), and 2) creating a mythology that"reinvents" a nation's pre-colonial past as a glorious, utopian time of dignity and cultural pride – a claim that Fanon claims will "rehabilitate[s] that nation and serve[s] as a justification for the hope of a future national culture" (120). Balibar, however, introduces a third, more insidious method: the use of racist ideologies inherited from Western imperialist discourse in order to “produce a sense of national identity acquired through the exclusion and denigration of others” (McLeod 133). That is, a false binary is created by privileging what a nation considers its “legitimate” subjects over those whom Balibar calls “false nationals” (133), thus allowing the use of Orientalist representations that help consolidate these dichotomous roles.Orientalism , as defined by Edward Said, is the system by which the West comes to understand the East by “making statements about it, authorizing visions of it, describing it, teaching it, establishing it: in short, […] dominating, restructuring and have authority over [it].” (Said 25). In other words, Orientalism as an ideology seeks to define the East and, in doing so, allows the West to exercise authority over it. According to Lois Tyson, the purpose of Orientalism “[...] is to produce a positive national self-definition for Western nations in contrast to Eastern nations onto whom the West projects all the negative characteristics it does not want to believe exist among They. his own people” (Tyson 402). Thus, “European culture [gains] strength and identity by contrasting itself with the East as a sort of surrogate and even subterranean self […]” (Said 25), a self “governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repression, investments and projections” (26). In the context of this essay, replace “Europe” with the Dominican Republic and “Orient” with Haiti and the reader will begin to develop a sense of how these political and cultural philosophies interact and inform Danticat's text. The narrator of Bones' Farming, Amabelle, is a young Haitian woman employed as a maid in the home of a prominent Dominican army officer. By placing the narrator in this position, Danticat offers his readers the opportunity to observe the complexities of Dominican/Haitian race relations. The effect is initially subtle: the attentive reader will notice small details such as Mrs. Valencia's disappointment when she sees the dark skin of her newborn daughter Rosalinda: "Amabelle," she says, "do you think my daughter will always be her color?" Now? […] My poor love, what if she were mistaken for one of your people?” (Danticat 12). Likewise, Mr. Pico, Valencia's husband, ignores his newborn daughter when she reaches out to him, looking at her with a “biting expression of disapproval [that becomes] more and more pronounced [...] every time he lays his eyes on her” (112 ), and doesn't bother to stop his car after accidentally hitting a working Haitian stick, causing it to fall into a ravine and effectively killing him. For the historically aware reader, Pico's connection to Trujillo and the Dominican Army should immediately raise red flags regarding his role in the novel. This is not an unfounded hypothesis: Pico would later become a key figure in the Parsley Massacre and is undoubtedly responsible for numerous deaths of innocent Haitians. Pico is not a singular case. Such figures flourished under the regime of Trujillo, whose political philosophy made it very easy for nationalist ferment and anti-Haitian sentiments to ferment in the patriotic minds of Dominicans. In The Farming of Bones, Trujillo is simply referred to as "the Generalissimo" throughout most of the text. he is depicted as a formless presence and.