The Healing Powers of Literature: Edwidge Danticat's Response to Genocide in The Farming of Bones

This article considers Edwidge Danticat's novel The Farming of Bones (1998)—a retelling of the 1937 massacre of thousands of Haitians under the Trujillo dictatorship—as a fictional testimonio , which seeks to capture individual, collective, and national memories. By doing so, Danticat reinvents the genre of testimonio , and decolonizes past and present anti-Haitian attitudes and practices in the Dominican Republic, employing three Aristotelian forms of speech, along with the four types of truth categorized by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. Danticat's work is exemplary of literature as a form of intellectual activism, through which one can speak truth to power and to the people, ultimately moving readers to reconsider historical silences and cultural mythologies.