In The Farming of Bones, Amabelle Désir and other Haitians have left Haiti to make new lives for themselves in the Dominican Republic. Many of these characters have lost their homes, or lack a sense of belonging; as a result, they attempt to make the Dominican Republic their homeland. The Haitians are eventually driven out of the Dominican Republic by violence and racism, and attempt to return to Haitithe ones who survive rebuild their homes once again. Through these multiple restructurings, characters learn that home is not a fixed place; rather, it is a feeling or circumstance that can change, grow, or be taken away. Danticat’s story demonstrates that concepts of home and family inevitably transform over time; moreover, each recreated version of home is different, and one can never truly return to the original.
Danticat begins the story by describing how characters’ childhood conceptions of home have changed as a result of their circumstances. In her childhood, Amabelle lost her parents in a flood, which forced her to find a sense of home elsewhere. She was brought to a house in Alégria, and became a domestic worker for Señora Valencia. The two women grew up together: as “girls,” they “slept in the same room” and would “play with [their] shadows, and pretend” they were a family. Amabelle’s childhood with Señora Valencia offered her a different version of family; instead of remaining an orphan in Haiti, she joined another household.
Sebastien describes how the overseers in the cane fields call Haitians “an orphaned people” who “don’t belong anywhere.” To Sebastien, however, Haitians are a unified group of “wayfarers.” Sebastien refuses to accept the idea that Haitians are merely “orphaned”rather, he demonstrates how Haitians, as a group, redefine the feeling of home for themselves through travel. To Sebastien, rebuilding homes in the Dominican Republic brings Haitians together; despite being far from their home country, and sometimes far from their blood relatives, these Haitians have recreated families and community bonds for themselves.
After Amabelle and other Haitian refugees flee from the violence in the Dominican Republic, they attempt to rebuild their lives and households in their home country, which they originally fled. These homes take unexpected forms, however, and thereby illustrate how home is not always defined by birthplace; rather, home can also be a feeling of belonging.
During her escape, Amabelle claims that she knows exactly what she plans to do when she “crosse[s] the border”: she plans to “look for a little house” near the “citadel road,” as she wants to be close to the place she “lived as a child.” She hopes to “claim the land” as her “birthright.” Despite these fantasies of a home on her childhood property, however, she ends up traveling to the home of her fellow refugee, Yves. Yves’s home is comprised of “mismatched pieces of timber and rusting tin,” foreshadowing how Amabelle’s domestic future is misaligned with her expectations. She is taken in by Yves and his mother, Man Rapadou, who becomes a surrogate mother for Amabelle. In fact, during their first meeting, Man Rapadou feeds Amabelle “as though” she is a “bedridden child.” Amabelle domestic aspirationsof living with Sebastien, her lover, and of living near her childhood homedo not manifest; instead, she is taken in by a family of strangers.
Regardless of this alteration, Amabelle’s new home still provides a sense of belonging. Man Rapadou, who treats Amabelle like a daughter, describes Amabelle’s “sudden arrival” through metaphor: “From time to time, life takes you be surprise. You sit in your lakou eating mangoes. You let the mango seeds fall where they may, and one day you wake up and there’s a mango tree in your yard.” Amabelle is the mango tree that sprouted up unexpectedly in the family dynamic, but Amabelle and Man Rapadou have quickly created an unconventional family together, illustrating that the idea of home transforms over time, often in unforeseen ways.
As Amabelle continues to rebuild her life with her new family, memories of the Dominican Republic overwhelm her. She returns to Alégria, only to realize that the home she remembers is no longer intact. Amabelle notes that “Alégria [is] now a closed town,” and she feels like an “intruder.” She admits that Alégria feels like a place she has “never seen before,” indicating that she no longer feels at home. Amabelle’s lack of connection to the town demonstrates how one’s original sense of belonging is irretrievable after a departure. By leaving the Dominican Republic and rebuilding her life in Haiti, Amabelle has inexorably transformed her idea of home; eventually, she understands that one’s concept of home must always be evolving.
After this painful realization, Amabelle returns to Haiti. One day, she stands by the river where her mother and father drowned and lowers herself into the water to float in “the current.” While feeling the water’s “less than gentle caress,” she imagines being carried into her “father’s laughter” and her “mother’s eternity.” Although her idea of home has changed since her parents’ diedand her future in Haiti will be completely dissimilar to her childhoodAmabelle’s return to the river symbolizes her acceptance of Haiti as her home.
In Danticat’s story, home is a feeling that changes over time. Characters are forced to rebuild their families and homes multiple times: first, they leave Haiti and recreate livelihoods in the Dominican Republic; afterwards, violence forces them to return to Haiti after many years away. With each successive homecoming, characters’ homes and families transformimportantly, the original vision of home is never fully recreated. Amabelle, the only character to make two trips to the Dominican Republic, eventually realizes that the initial idea of home is irretrievable. Despite this, she returns to Haiti and the river that took her parents. Amabelle is able to create a new family with Yves and Man Rapadou, and reimagine a home for herself despite all that she has experienced.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Home, Family, and Belonging ThemeTracker
Home, Family, and Belonging Quotes in The Farming of Bones
Señor Pico Duarte bore the name of one of the fathers of Dominican independence […] His eyes lingered on his son, his heir […]“I will name him Rafael, for the Generalissimo,” he said as Juana reswaddled the children even more securely than before. The señora agreed to this name with a coy nod. And so the boy became Rafael like the Generalissimo, the president of the republic.
I did something I always did at times when I couldn’t bring myself to go out and discover an unpleasant truth. (When you have so few remembrances, you cling to them tightly and repeat them over and over in your mind so time will not erase them.) I closed my eyes and imagined the giant citadel that loomed over my parents’ house in Haiti. […] As a child, I played in the deserted war rooms of Henry I’s citadel. I peered at the rest of the world from behind its columns and archways, and the towers that were meant to hold cannons for repelling the attack of ships at sea. From the safety of these rooms, I saw the entire northern cape […].
The water rises above my father’s head. My mother releases his neck, the current carrying her beyond his reach. Separated, they are less of an obstacle for the cresting river. I scream until I can taste blood in my throat, until I can no longer hear my own voice […] I walk down to the sands to throw [myself] into the water […]
Two of the river boys grab me and […] pin me down to the ground until I become still. “Unless you want to die,” one of them says, “you will never see those people again.”
“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.”
“Sometimes the people in the fields, when they’re tired and angry, they say we’re an orphaned people,” he said. “They say we are the burnt crud at the bottom of the pot. They say some people don’t belong anywhere and that’s us. I say we are a group of vwayajè, wayfarers. This is why you had to travel this far to meet me, because that is what we are.”
“I pushed my son out of my body here, in this country,” one woman said in a mix of Alegrían Kreyòl and Spanish, the tangled language of those who always stuttered as they spoke, caught as they were on the narrow ridge between two nearly native tongues […]
“To them we are always foreigners, even if our granmèmès’ granmèmès were born in this country,” a man responded in Kreyol, which we most often spoke—instead of Spanish—among ourselves.
“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.”
“Old age is not meant to be survived alone,” Man Rapadou said, her voice trailing with her own hidden thoughts. “Death should come gently, slowly, like a man’s hand approaching your body […] From time to time, life takes you by surprise. You sit in your lakou eating mangoes. You let the mango seeds fall where they may, and one day you wake up and there’s a mango tree in your yard.”
I knew she meant this as a compliment to me, a kind word for my sudden arrival at her house some years before.
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.
