In October of 1937, Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered his troops to massacre as many as 15,000 Haitians living in the Dominican Republic.'The attack came as a complete surprise to these Haitians as well as to many Dominicans; no prior event had warned them of what was about to take place. The killings were swift and particularly brutal. 2 Trujillo ordered his soldiers to use machetes and other crude weapons instead of guns, a brutality captured by the name of the massacre: in Spanish, El Corte, the cutting, and in Haitian Kreyol, kout kouto, the stabbing. 3 Those who survived lived with permanent injuries, scars, and impairments as well as the psychological trauma of having experienced a massacre.

After visiting Haiti in order to research the testimonies of survivors, Haitian-born Edwidge Danticat wrote The Farming of Bones (1998), a historical novel that tells the story of one individual's experience of the attack and its devastating effects. Her novel is filled with wounded and disabled individuals whose marked, scarred bodies prevent them and those around them from forgetting what has happened. For disability studies scholars, the novel presents a complex perspective on the meanings of disability and the relationship of disability to trauma; yet to date, no literary scholars have explored the relevance of interpretive frameworks provided by disability studies. Instead, critics have discussed the novel's central issues-memory, testimony, nationalism, displacement, language, and corporeality-using a critical vocabulary