Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Farming of Bones, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Power of Memory
Dreams vs. Reality
Language and Identity
Death, Grief, and Hope
Home, Family, and Belonging
Summary
Analysis
Amabelle returns to Yves’s house and meets Man Rapadou. She tells Amabelle that Amabelle does not require the help of the justice of the peace; instead, Man Rapadou will be Amabelle’s confessor, and she knows her tale. She tells Amabelle that Yves has told her about Sebastien, and she smiles at Amabelle.
Man Rapadou tells Amabelle that she knows Amabelle’s story, implying that Amabelle’s legacy will be preserved in her memory. Moreover, Man Rapadou also knows Sebastien’s story, and thereby commits his legacy to memory as well. This willingness to protect the memories of Amabelle and Sebastien is indicative of Man Rapadou’s ability to provide a new sense of belonging for Amabelle. Amabelle’s homes in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which disappeared due to violence and trauma, are being replaced by Man Rapadou’s home, which welcomes and protects Amabelle.
Themes
Amabelle rests in bed and cannot accept that she will never see Sebastien again; she compares this to never seeing her mother or father again. She admits that as she grows older, her parents continue to fade away, until all she can recall are their last moments of life. She wonders if this process will repeat with Sebastien.
Once again, Amabelle makes explicit the connection between memory and death. To her, memory is a means of preserving someone’s legacy after they pass away: memory prevents death from erasing someone’s existence entirely. Nevertheless, memory is not perfect: Amabelle’s memory of her parents is slowly eroding, and she fears the same will happen with Sebastien’s memory. Despite memory’s ability to protect a person from erasure, oftentimes death still triumphs, and even the most beloved people are forgotten.
Themes
Yves visits Amabelle and tells her that priests are also listening to the testimony of survivors. He claims they are collecting the stories for newspapers, and she asks if he will go and visit them. He responds that the priests will just take the stories they are told retell them in a language that is “theirs, not yours.”
Yet again, Yves’s fears illustrate how memory does not always protect the past. Sometimes, memory can be altered to hurt the legacy it is supposed to protect. If the priests take Amabelle’s memories and translate them into Spanish—a language that is meant to isolate her and her fellow Haitians from Dominican society—they are using her history to perpetuate the same divisions that caused her tragic story.
Themes
Yves begins to talk about making money on his farm, and Amabelle realizes that the past is less scary than the future. She imagines the survivors rebuilding their lives, and wants to express her gratitude for being able to “walk into the future.” At the same time, she wants to ask these survivors how they are so strong, and how they are able to escape from the past.
Amabelle begins to understand that the loss she has experienced has kept her tethered to her past.. Amabelle dwelled on her grief, giving into death’s power over her, in order to avoid her uncertainty about the future. Now, Amabelle is slowly becoming future-oriented, implying that she is gaining a sense of hope about her prospects, and that grief no longer weighs as heavily on her.
Themes
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Amabelle asks Yves how he is able to keep working the fields when no plants are growing. He tells her that empty houses and fields sadden him, because they feel like the “dead season.” He then recounts the story of Joël’s death, and tells Amabelle how Joël pushed him out of the path of the car and saved his life.
Yves reveals that, like Amabelle, he relies on fantasies to avoid confronting his grief. His fantasies involve work: he dreams of tending to the fields and creating a prosperous farm. He acknowledges that these work fantasies are a means of helping him avoid the emptiness of the fields, which reminds him of painful memories.
Themes
Yves then admits that he saw Sebastien and Mimi at the church the night that Amabelle was supposed to leave for Haiti. He recounts how the soldiers told Doctor Javier that they would “treat him like a Haitian” since he wanted to be Haitian, and how the soldiers told their detaineesincluding Mimi and Sebastiento start climbing up the cliffs to their deaths. Yves states that he wanted to save them as Joël had saved him, but could not. He adds that seeing people die has only taught him to guard his own life.
Yves recounts the death of Doctor Javier, Sebastien, and Mimi, revealing that he’s known these truths all along. Doctor Javier often transcended cultural boundaries by being bilingual and empathizing with both Dominicans and Haitians, but this open-mindedness gets him killed, showing again how rigid cultural boundaries can lead to violence. Meanwhile, Yves admits that death has had such a powerful impact on him that he has become paranoid and protective of his life. Instead of emulating Joël’s sacrifice, he gives into his fear of death and values his own life over all else.
Themes
Amabelle tells Yves how she could have been captured at the church like Sebastien and Mimi; she was only late to the meeting because she noticed that Señora Valencia was bleeding. Amabelle and Yves embrace one another, and Yves begins to cry; his tears drip over Amabelle’s body, and she says they “tasted like her own.”
This is the first scene where Amabelle and Yves cry over the deaths of their loved ones. Their tears suggest that they are slowly coming to terms with their loss rather than avoiding it through fantasy. Amabelle points out that their tears taste similar, suggesting that she realizes she and Yves are in some way united by the trauma they have experienced.
Themes
