In The Farming of Bones, Amabelle and her fellow Haitians work as manual laborers or domestic workers in the Dominican Republic, after leaving Haiti due to natural disasters. Due to their living conditions, many of the novel’s characters are dispirited, lonely, and homesick. As a result, they find solace and personal significance in their dreams, which feature their homeland or their family life. As these fantasies are often extremely tantalizing, they provide a means of escape; some characters within the story, therefore, begin to prioritize their dreams over reality. Danticat’s story thus illustrates the complicated nature of dreams. They provide happiness, which allows individuals to endure, but they can also seem better than reality, and so threaten one’s will to live. The story ultimately implies that getting lost in one’s dreams can be enticing, but real life is far more precious.
Danticat suggests that dreams are alluring because they offer alternatives to painful reality, or escape from unhappiness and grief. When Amabelle describes her mother, who drowned in a flood during her childhood, she emphasizes that her mother “didn’t show a lot of affection,” and “also didn’t smile often.” After her mother’s death, though, Amabelle’s dreams featured her mother “always smiling.” In this way, Amabelle’s dreams are more comforting than reality: they provide her with the motherly affection that she was deprived of in childhood.
Señora Valencia, Amabelle’s boss, is pregnant with twins and delivers them without a doctor’s assistance. In the midst of her delivery, she tells Amabelle that she has “been having more than [her] usual number of dreams,” and believes her mother was beside her during the birth. This exchange demonstrates how dreams substitute for reality in difficult times: dreams compensate for a missing parent’s love and comfort.
Additionally, Amabelle is plagued by nightmares about her parents’ deaths. When she describes this to Sebastien, he tells her to replace the nightmares with “a pleasant dream.” He tells her to dream that her parents “died natural deaths” and asks her to imagine that she left Haiti to “meet” him. By asking Amabelle to refashion her dreams in order to bring her peace, Sebastien illustrates an underlying implication about dreams: they are capable of providing alternate realities that overwrite tragedy.
As Danticat’s story continues, characters experience more frequent tragedies. As a result, dreams begin to offer more than a harmless, temporary escape: they offer an impossible fantasy of peace and happiness. When Amabelle returns to Haiti, she is unsure of Sebastien’s fate. She visits his mother, Man Denise, who informs her that he and his sister, Mimi, were killed. Man Denise then tells Amabelle to leave, as she wants to “dream up” her children. Amabelle later returns to see Man Denise’s house “bolted shut.” She is told that Man Denise likely “went someplace where only her children would find her if they come back.” Man Denise’s desire to dream about her children indicates that she is no longer willing to confront reality. Rather, she would prefer to get lost in her dreams and forgo the harsh truth of her children’s deaths, instead of experiencing life.
After Amabelle’s return, she creates a routine where each day is “exactly like the one before.” She adds that “new dreams seem [like] a waste.” Amabelle admits to being lost in a hollow, meaningless cycle; although she has survived, she repeats each day in a blur. This repetitive existence indicates that Amabelle has deprioritized her real life, and is content with her dreams. This eagerness to get lost in fantasies eventually begins to fade, however, and Amabelle begins to hope for self-growth. Through Amabelle’s gradual change of heart, Danticant complicates the idea of dreamsand how they entice people away from the difficulties of lifeby demonstrating their insufficiency.
After Amabelle settles into her friend’s house in Haiti, she allows herself to remember the other refugees who escaped. She thinks of them “going forward into their lives,” and wants to “ask” them how they could “walk into the future.” Amabelle’s wishes suggest that she is no longer content with the routine and comfort of her dreams. Instead, she wants to move forward, and learn how to embrace her future like her peers.
Amabelle’s interactions with Man Rapadou, the mother of a surviving refugee, further prompt Amabelle to reconsider a life of fantasies. Man Rapadou claims that her life, like Amabelle’s, has “always been rich with dreams,” but warns Amabelle that “old age is not meant to be survived alone.” She advises Amabelle to reprioritize, implying that the choice to remain lost in dreams can harm one’s life and happiness. After receiving this advice, and thinking of the other refugees’ futures, Amabelle re-evaluates. She claims that life can be “a strange gift,” and admits that she initially chose “a living death.” She even acknowledges that she “looked to [her] dreams […] for relief.” By the story’s end, she chooses instead to look “for the dawn.” Amabelle’s admissions reveal that she has begun to understand the inadequacy of dreams, and that she has discovered a newfound willingness to respect her life and look towards the future.
In Danticat’s story, dreams are omnipresent: many characters use them to dwell upon the past, or escape from their unhappy lives. These fantasies are often alluring, cheerful, and comforting; in fact, they provide so much relief that characters begin to lose sight of real life’s importance. This escapism illustrates how dreams are often enticing alternatives to reality; ultimately, however, dreams are an inadequate substitute for life. Life, although it is difficult, is more valuable and worthwhile.
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Dreams vs. Reality Quotes in The Farming of Bones
“She didn’t show a lot of affection to me. I think she believed this was not a good way to raise a girl, who might not have affection the rest of her life. She also didn’t smile often.” […] “Her name was Irelle Pradelle,” I say, “and after she died, when I dreamt of her, she was always smiling. Except of course when she and my papa were drowning.”
“Give yourself a pleasant dream. Remember not only the end, but the middle, and the beginning, the things they did when they were breathing. Let us say that the river was still that day.”
“And my parents?”
“They died natural deaths many years later.”
“And why did I come here?”
“Even though you were a girl when you left and I was already a man when I arrived and our families did not know each other, you came here to meet me.”
“You never believed those people could injure you… Even after they killed Joël, you thought they could never harm you.”
[…] Perhaps I had trusted too much. I had been living inside dreams that would not go away, the memories of an orphaned child. When the present itself was truly frightful, I had perhaps purposely chosen not to see it.
“You call me Man Rapadou,” she said. “I know your story.”
Which story of mine did she know? Which story was she told?
“Everything you knew before this slaughter is lost,” she said. Perhaps she was encouraging me to […] forsake Sebastien, even my memories of him, those images of him that would float through my head repeatedly, like brief glimpses of the same dream.
“When you know you’re going to die, you try to be near the bones of your own people. You don’t even think you have bones when you’re young […] But when you’re old, they start reminding you they’re there. They start turning to dust on you, even as you’re walking here and there, going from place to place. And this is when you crave to be near the bones of your own people. My children never felt this. They had to look death in the face, even before they knew what it was. Just like you did, no? […] Leave me now,” she said. ”I’m going to dream up my children.”
Perhaps working the earth […] could make him believe that he had forgotten […] I imagined [other refugees] going forward in their lives, I wanted to bring them out of my visions into my life, to tell them how glad I was that they had been able to walk into the future, but most important to ask them how it was that they could be so strong […]
“How did you keep on with the planting, even when nothing was growing?” I asked Yves.
[…] “Empty houses and empty fields make me sad,” he said. “They are both too calm, like the dead season.”
You may be surprised what we use our dreams to do, how we drape them over our sight and carry them like amulets to protect us from evil spells.
My dreams are now only visitations of my words for the absent justice of the peace, for the Generalissimo himself.
He asked for “perejil,” but there is much more we all knew how to say. Perhaps one simple word would not have saved our lives. Many more would have to and many more will.
I thought that if I relived the moment often enough, the answer would become clear, that they had wanted either for us all to die together or for me to go on living, even if by myself. I also thought that if I came to the river on the right day, at the right hour, the surface of the water might provide the answer: a clearer sense of the moment, a stronger memory. But nature has no memory. And soon, perhaps, neither will I.
I slipped into the current […]with my shoulders only half submerged, the current floating over me in a less than gentle caress, the pebbles in the riverbed scouring my back.
I looked to my dreams for softness, for a gentler embrace, for relief from the fear of mudslides and blood bubbling out of the riverbed, where it is said the dead add their tears to the river flow.
