After her parents drown in the flooded Massacre River that marks the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, young Haitian Amabelle Desir becomes a housemaid to Dominican landowner Don Ignacio, and a companion to his daughter, Valencia. As the book opens, Valencia and Amabelle are grown women, and Amabelle attends the birth of Valencia's twins. Valencia is now married to a Dominican army officer seeking to rise in the ranks, and he is soon assigned to assist in the brutal slaughter of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Amabelle's lover, Sebastien, works in Ignacio's sugar cane field, a brutal job known to workers as ‘‘farming the bones’’ because of its killing, exhausting harshness. Amabelle has a pleasant but distant relationship with the family she serves, and the novel juxtaposes her moments in their home with her conversations with other Haitian workers in the cane fields, as they slowly realize that Dominican
Laming Report (2003) Victoria Climbie Details: In 2000 in London, an eight-year-old girl Victoria Adjo Climbié was tortured and murdered by her guardians. Her death led to a public inquiry and produced major changes in child protection policies in the United Kingdom. Victoria Climbie was born in November 1991 in the Ivory Coast. She died in February 2000 in London aged eight. To escape the poverty of Africa, her parents entrusted her to her great aunt who brought her to Europe.
"In a 30-year dictatorship there are so many silences, fears," she says. "I try to fill in the gaps, at least for myself." The massacre, "just a line in my textbook", was "still so real to people: Haitians working in the Dominican Republic in the 1970s and 80s were afraid it could be repeated." She met an artist whose grandmother had survived it. "Incorporating these stories anchors it for me; it's keeping them alive by retelling."
Antoinette wakes up several weeks later at the home of her Aunt Cora in Spanish Town. She learns that her brother has died and that her mother has had a mental breakdown. Aunt Cora enrolls Antoinette in a convent school, where she spends several years learning how to be a lady. During this time Antoinette is largely alone; her mother is confined to the home of a care-taking
Born in the French countryside, in the small town of Saumur on August 19, 1883, Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel was orphaned of mother (who was a seamstress) to thirteen years old. His father, Albert Chanel, sent her to a boarding of the French city of Auvergne, where he remained until the end of adolescence. However, the simple life of the country town did not match the eagerness of Coco Chanel. Worked as a clerk in a fabric store (where you learn the profession of seamstress and wield the needle to perfection) and even a cabaret called Cafe de la Rotonde Beuglant, where he sang the song "Qui qu'a vu Coco dans le Trocadero?" (responsible for the origin of his nickname Coco).
Samuel Steinberg English 150 Friday class 7:00-9:40PM The Farming of Bones Second draft The Farming of Bones a novel by Ewidge Danticat is about a young Haitian woman living in the Dominican Republic; its about her trials and tribulations from the death of her parents, to falling in love with Sebastian and to the Haitian massacre by the Dominicans. She tells the story in a very vibrant way to keep the reader enthralled in the story and the sadness of said truths throughout the novel going back to the massacre of 1937 in the Dominican Republic. Annabelle's haunted dreams, her love for Sebastian, and of her being Haitian in the Dominican Republic leads to her early demise and lose of life. Annabelle speaks of her parents as if the traumatic events of the death of her mother and father in the great hurricane that caused the river to swallow them throughout the novel; it causes her to have faulty judgment when coming down to life changing decisions. Annabelle
Amabelle - orphaned at a young age when her parents drowned in the river that separates the two countries - is a housekeeper for Valencia and her husband General Pico, who is supremely devoted to Generalissimo Trujillo. Sebastien cuts cane, the act from which Danticat draws the title of her book. It is called "the farming of the bones" because after a day in the searing heat of the fields, anticipating snakes and rats, brushing up against the razor sharp edges of the cane, the workers find their skin is shredded, their bones closer to the surface than the day before. Indeed, The Farming of Bones abounds with complex shades of meaning. In the first few chapters of the novel, Amabelle helps
Danticat explores the memory of the place where the characters are exiled through assimilation. Indeed, Danticat’s theme of exile reveals the psychological effects on the individual characters of Amabelle and Don Ignacio also known as Papi through traumatic memories. Exile stimulates the memory of these characters that is cut-off from her family or home by death or distance. Haiti makes up only 1/3 of Hispaniola with an inhabitant of 500 people per square mile resulting in the exiling of Haitians onto the border of the Dominican Republic. The Haitian massacre, also known as the parsley massacre, the cutting, el corte, or kouto-a, a secretly ordered genocide of over 15,000 Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic that occurred between October 2nd and 8th of 1937.
The term “slavery” is used metaphorically and literally throughout the book. It all began with Ogbanje Ojebeta. Her family was well off and she was living a comfortable life until felenza struck. Both of her parents succumbed to the epidemic and the result was fatal. She was left with only her brother, Okolie.
Her husband left early on in Emily’s life and her mother was forced to leave her with friends or send her to day care. “…and I did not know then what I know now- the fatigue of the long day, and the lacerations of group life in the kinds of nurseries that are only parking places for children” (Olsen 707). Emily got nowhere near the amount of attention she needed. Maggie, on the other hand, was always with her mother. Maggie’s mother was also older and better suited to be a mother because she was older and more experienced however, Maggie’s father also left the family.