Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women's Writings

5 Power, Eros, and Genocide: Capitalism and Black Female Subjectivity in The Farming of Bones

5 Power, Eros, and Genocide Capitalism and Black Female Subjectivity in The Farming of Bones Rituals of Subjection: Re-membering Amabelle If the storyteller is, as Edouard Glissant maintains, “the handyman, the djobbeur of the collective soul” (Poetics 69), the transformative production of meaning through narrative must be essential in societies where the soul has been withered by the dead hand of totalitarianism. Richard F. Patterson, “Resurrecting Rafael: Fictional Incarnations of a Dominican Dictator” Like the three preceding chapters, this final one examines the healing potential of the erotic. Danticat’s Farming of Bones provides a useful framework from which to examine the recuperation of black female subjectivity after a historical trauma that took place in 1937, the same year Hurston published Their Eyes Were Watching God. In Farming of Bones, the female protagonist is a Haitian immigrant named Amabelle Désir. Amabelle is forced to flee Alegría after Dictator Trujillo orders the massacre of Haitian immigrants living in the Dominican Republic. Amabelle is an orphan and the Dominican family she lives with in Alegría is the only family she has known since her parents drowned when she was eight years old. Amabelle’s suffering can be usefully compared to Sethe’s, and like Sethe she bears the internal and external scars of her trauma. But the comparison with Sethe is relatively easy as both women are traumatized under totalitarian regimes that systematically impose state-sanctioned violence upon their bodies and total abjection of their personhood.1 But what, if any, are the continuities and discontinuities between Amabelle and Janie? Amabelle and Monica? Does Power, Eros, and Genocide: The Farming of Bones / 185 Amabelle’s survival and recuperation hinge on the same factors as the three fictional black women of Morrison’s, Hurston’s, and Adisa’s work? The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that there are clear linkages between these fictional black women and that the consubstantiating forces of spiritual and sexual energy that catalyze the subjectivities of the others also revive Amabelle’s. It is fitting that this study begins tracing the emergence of the “new black woman” in literature with Hurston’s Janie and ends with Danticat’s Amabelle. Hurston’s ties with Haiti have been long established , and as numerous critics have maintained, Hurston’s tour de force novel was written in Haiti in less than two months. Haiti seems to have provided a fertile breeding ground for Hurston’s formidable creativity and literary talent. Lamothe’s interrogation of Janie as an Erzulie-figure further establishes the spiritual linkages between Janie and Haitian womanhood. Erzulie, the patron loa of abused, victimized, and lesbian women in Haiti, is the spiritual and ancestral progenitor of both Janie and Amabelle and the aegis through which both characters will effect powerful transformative agency to emerge as triumphant survivors.2 Edwidge Danticat’s Farming of Bones uses a fictional framework to narrate the story of the massacre of roughly thirty thousand Haitians in the Dominican Republic in 1937. Critic Ifeona Fulani suggests that Caribbean authors (such as Edwidge Danticat) are political activists as well as authors, addressing the historical and contemporary issues in their nation-states through their creative work: A common feature of the work of this diverse group of Caribbean writers is a profound emotional and intellectual connection to their ancestral islands. Critics note the propensity of Caribbean writers in exile to repeatedly revisit their island of origins via their work. Many Caribbean writers . . . seem impelled to address the histories and legacies of colonialism, of capitalism and racism out of a sense of responsibility to their native community and culture. (Fulani 67) Ifeona Fulani clearly establishes the continuity between the literary output of Caribbean writers and the historical exigencies of the region. In that same vein, Edwidge Danticat’s Farming of Bones imaginatively recasts the 1937 massacre of Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic. Danticat’s novel explores the ways in which culture, ethnicity, and religion were used to damn Haitians to second-class citizenship, and later to deem them annihilable . 186 / Eroticism, Spirituality, and Resistance in Black Women’s Writings The critic Richard Patterson astutely observes in the epigraph above that it is indeed the storytellers (the poets, writers, and artists) who facilitate healing of the collective soul. Danticat’s narration of this historical trauma transforms the events of the massacre and its impact upon the Haitian people by breaking the...