In October 1937, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, one of the most brutal dictators in Latin America, directly ordered the execution of all Haitians then living in the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic . Those suspected of being Haitian were asked to say the Spanish word for parsley (“perejil”). If the suspect did not pronounce the consonant “r” and thus reveal his Creole accent, he would be shot dead on the spot. Although the numbers are uncertain, historians estimate that between 1,000 and 35,000 people died in this manner (Ayuso 51). In her 1999 novel, The Farming of Bones, Caribbean author Edwidge Danticat meticulously recounts this event. Although the plight of the Haitian people is the focus of the work, Danticat devotes a substantial portion of the novel to the political climate of the Dominican Republic, which allowed this brutal massacre to occur. Danticat depicts Haitians and Dominicans as being locked into a discursive binary construct, whose sole purpose is to strengthen Dominican national identity and appease the nation's internalized racism at the cost of dehumanizing and eradicating Haitians - a purely dichotomous relationship which, in the spirit of Orientalist and Western philosophy, says more about the Dominican characters in the novel than the Haitian characters. I will begin by examining the tenets of nationalism and orientalism, then explore how these distinct ideologies work in tandem to compound the novel's decidedly unique political storyline. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why violent video games should not be banned"? Get an original essay The terms "nationalism" and "national identity" have proven notoriously difficult to define. Etiene Balibar, in his essay "Racism and Nationalism", maintains that this difficulty comes in part from the fact that "the concept never works alone [...] it is always part of a chain of which it is both the link central and the weak link. (Balibar 164). Balibar states that “[t]his chain is constantly enriched (the detailed modalities of this enrichment varying from one language to another) with new intermediate or extreme terms [such as] civic spirit, patriotism, populism, ethnicism, ethnocentrism , xenophobia, chauvinism, [and] imperialism [...]” (164). Perhaps the best and most concise definition of nationalism as it is understood today is found in Franz Fanon's monumental essay, “On National Culture.” Fanon describes nationalism as the “passionate search for a national culture which existed before the colonial era” – a search motivated by “anxiety [...] to withdraw from that Western culture in which [the former colonized] all risk being submerged” (Fanon 119). A national culture, according to Fanon, "is not a folklore, nor an abstract populism which believes it can discover the true nature of a people, but rather the totality of the efforts made by a people in the field of thought to describe , justify and praise the action by which this people was created and maintains its existence [...]” (120). In other words, national culture refers to how a nation comes to understand and ultimately repair its own fractured identity. But the question remains: How exactly does a nation create and then maintain its national culture and identity? There are of course various ways to achieve this goal. Fanon proposes two very condensed methods: 1) by creating a national literature or a “combat literature” in the sense that it “calls the entire people to fight for its existence as a nation” and “shapes national consciousness [ by ] giving it shape andcontours and opening up new and limitless horizons"), and 2) by designing a mythology that "reinvents" a nation's precolonial past as a glorious, utopian period of dignity and cultural pride – a claim that Fanon supports that “rehabilitate[s] this nation and serve[s] as justification for the hope of a future national culture” (120). Balibar, however, introduces a third, more insidious method: the use of racist ideologies inherited from Western imperialist discourse in order to “produce a sense of national identity acquired through the exclusion and denigration of others” (McLeod 133). In other words, a false binary is created by privileging what a nation considers to be its "legitimate" subjects over those whom Balibar describes as "false nationals" (133), thus allowing the use of orientalist representations which help to solidify these dichotomous roles. , as defined by Edward Said, is the system by which the West comes to understand the Orient by "making statements about it, authorizing views about it, describing it, teaching it, establishing: in short, […by] dominating, restructuring and having authority over [it]. (Said 25). In other words, Orientalism as an ideology seeks to define the Orient and, in doing so, allows the West to exercise authority over it. According to Lois Tyson, the goal of Orientalism "...is to produce a positive national self-definition for Western nations, as opposed to Eastern nations onto whom the West projects all the negative characteristics it does not want." believe that they exist. his own people” (Tyson 402). Thus, “European culture [gains] strength and identity by opposing the Orient as a sort of substitute and even subterranean self […]” (Said 25), a self “governed not only by reality empirical but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments and projections” (26). In the context of this essay, replace "Europe" with the Dominican Republic and "the Orient" with Haiti and the reader will begin to develop a sense of how these political and cultural philosophies interact with Danticat's text and l 'illuminate. The narrator of Bones' The Farming, Amabelle, is a young Haitian woman employed as a servant in the home of a prominent officer in the Dominican army. By placing the narrator in this position, Danticat offers his readers the opportunity to observe the complexity of Dominican/Haitian racial relations. The effect is at first subtle: the attentive reader will notice small details such as Mrs. Valencia's disappointment when she sees the dark skin of her newborn daughter Rosalinda: "Amabelle," she says, "do you think will my daughter always be the color she is? NOW? [...] My poor love, what if we take her for one of yours? (Danticat 12). Similarly, Senor Pico, Valencia's husband, ignores his newborn daughter when she reaches out to him, looking at her with a "scathing expression of disfavor [that becomes] more and more pronounced [...] every time he lays eyes on her” (112). ), and doesn't bother to stop his car after accidentally hitting a Haitian cane while working, knocking him into a ravine and effectively killing him. For the historically conscious reader, Pico's connection to Trujillo and the Dominican army should immediately raise red flags regarding his role in the novel. This is not an unfounded assumption: Pico would later become a key figure in the Parsley Massacre and is undoubtedly responsible for many of the deaths of innocent Haitians. Pico does not represent a unique case. Such figures flourished under the regime of Trujillo, whose political philosophy made it very easy to.