The Migrant as ‘Ungrievable’ Life and ‘Bare Body of Exception’ in The Farming of Bones

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Notes

1 Butler, Frames of War.

2 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 174.

3 Carl Schmitt was a political thinker and Nazi collaborator.

4 Agamben, State of Exception, 32.

5 Ibid., 4.

6 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 9.

7 Ibid., 126–135.

8 Butler, Precarious Life, 36.

9 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 7.

10 Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 19.

11 Some might find fault in the logic of argument here: how can you grieve a life that is defined by its very ‘ungrievability’? In my understanding of Butler, ‘ungrievable’ is used in a similar manner in which we use ‘taboo’ or ‘unspeakable’: If we consider something ‘unspeakable’, it does not suggest that we cannot (physically) talk about it, but rather, that there are obstacles and gaps (in discourse) which hinder and deter us from discussing it. Therefore, you can grieve an ‘ungrievable’ life in the same way you can, in fact, speak the ‘unspeakable’.

12 I am taking up Butler’s claim here:

I do not simply mean that they [narratives] humanise the lives that were lost along with those that narrowly escaped, but that they stage the scene and provide the narrative means by which ‘the human’ in its grievability is established, Precarious Life, 38.

While (un)grievability clearly does not refer to the character/nature of the person in question, but to the character/nature of the (public) discourse on this person, the phrasing is still inherently problematic. See also Cope, who convincingly argues that it is highly problematic when Danticat’s works are framed as ‘humanising’ Haitians and instead suggests that Danticat’s works ‘humanize her readers by rendering them humane enough to see Haitians as their neighbors’, “We Are Your Neighbors,” 101. Cope refers back to an interview, in which Danticat summarises the ambivalence at hand:

I am uncomfortable with that idea, mostly because I think if people looked around them honestly, they wouldn't really need anything to ‘humanise’ a group of people. We are your neighbours – both when we live here in the United States and when we are still living in Haiti.[…]. On the other hand, I guess that's what is great about fiction. You get to understand the people you read about in a novel sometimes, more than you do your friends. You get their deepest thoughts, their aspirations, their pasts, their futures, so when you read you're getting into a very intimate relationship with a book and its characters, Danticat qtd. in Cope, “We Are Your Neighbours,” 100–101.

13 Butler, Frames of War, 2–3.

14 Cf. Puar, “Precarity Talk,” 164–166.

15 Butler, Frames of War, 31.

16 Ibid., Precarious Life, 35.

17 Ibid., Precarious Life, 67.

18 Judith Misrahi-Barak in her excellent “Biopolitics and Translation” similarly suggests that Haitian migrants are presented as homo sacer in The Farming of Bones. While clearly linked to Agamben’s concept, I prefer the use of Butler’s term of ‘ungrievable lives’ in my analysis for two reasons. First, Agamben states that a person who becomes homo sacer is solely included through exclusion, which Misrahi-Barak reflects in her article: ‘Trujillo creates this extreme form of relation that includes something or someone only through its exclusion in accordance with Agamben's observation’, “Biopolitics and Translation,” 354. While the life of Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic is strongly influenced and markedly characterised by exclusion (as I am also claiming in this paper), I am not fully convinced that exclusion is the only relation presented, which is one manner in which the text goes beyond Agamben’s theorisations, I feel. The Haitian migrants Sabine and Gilbert, for example, own not only an enterprise and land in the Dominican Republic, they furthermore employ Dominican personnel and manage to save their family and (some) of their workers from Trujillo’s troops, cf. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 71, 163. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, while Joël, for example, can clearly be considered homo sacer in that his killing goes unpunished (see footnote 19), which is a second main criterion in the definition of homo sacer, Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8, the extensive descriptions of burials, wakes, and other mourning practices and the novel’s overall focus on memory work and testimony suggest to me a crucial engagement with and contemplation of notions of (un)grievability.

19 I am referring to direct, legal and/or public consequences here. Clearly, the death of Pico’s son, Rafi, can be viewed as one consequence of Pico killing Kongo’s son, Joël, along the lines of karmic or poetic justice. Weir-Soley even suggests that

Rafi’s death stands out as particularly mysterious, and Kongo’s warning seems a veiled threat laden with symbolic significance. Did Kongo ‘send a dead,’ his son Joël, to take the life of Pico’s son? A fair exchange, as the character Mimi said, a life for a life?“Vodun Symbolism,” 175.

20 Butler, Precarious Life, 36.

21 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 108.

22 Ibid., 210, 153, 167.

23 Ibid., 109.

24 Ibid., 63. Bathing together in the stream before their workday starts becomes Joël’s unofficial wake.

25 Ibid., 48.

26 Ibid., 60.

27 Butler, Precarious Life, xiv–xv.

28 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 93.

29 Neither adhering to socialist notions, which advocate the abandonment of the ‘nuclear’/traditional family structures in favor of a family-relation towards the political movement (expressed in Brecht’s writings, see Die Mutter, for example), nor addressing the political (solely) by presenting an estranged personal realm (cf. Enzensberger’s discussion of Brecht’s “Der Radwechsel” in “Poesie und Politik,”132–133), Danticat combines the personal and the political in a new manner, as scholars such as Nesbitt in “Diasporic Politics,” Munro in “Writing Disaster” or Vargas in “Writing Testimony,” for example, have suggested. On the one hand, Danticat employs the family as a metaphor for the state to highlight the irrevocable interconnectedness of the political and the personal, on the other hand, I would stress, she uses the notion of family and family structures as one strategy of establishing ‘ungrievable’ lives in their grievability.

30 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 56. Interestingly, this is a term that, in representations of U.S.-Mexican border crossings, has also been used to refer to undocumented Mexican immigrants, Fox, Fence and the River, 103.

31 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 110. While Amabelle and Valencia’s kinship is clearly limited (as François and Laforest, for example, have pointed out with reference to Amabelle’s declaration that Valencia and her ‘had always been dangling between being strangers and being friends’, “Gendered Use of Violence,” 300), this does not negate their sisterly/family relation as sibling-relationships are often characterised by exactly this oscillation between kinship and rivalry/estrangement. The novel further suggests close family relations, when it begins the plot by Amabelle and Valencia successfully birthing (Valencia’s) twins and having Valencia repeat this notion of shared parenthood among the two women (rather than among Valencia and her husband), Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 12, 15.

32 One of the first actions Pico takes after ‘taking over’ the house is to teach Valencia to shoot a weapon that he significantly aims at a tree right in front of Amabelle’s room at which occasion Amabelle is nearly hit by a bullet, ibid., 135.

33 Ink, “Remaking Identity, Unmaking Nation,” 800.

34 Alexander, “Bearing Witness,” 65.

35 See also Sabine Broeck, who advocates for a ‘recognition of a continuity between the enslavist white Euro-American abjectorship of the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and contemporary practices of anti-

Black racism on both sides of the Atlantic’, “Legacies of Enslavism,” 109.

36 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 53.

37 Cf. Agamben, State of Exception, 1–31.

38 Spijkerboer, “Migration Emergencies,” xx.

39 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 213.

40 Misrahi-Barak, “Biopolitics and Translation,” 353–355. For a discussion of abused and commodified bodies and biopolitics in Krik?Krak! and The Dew Breaker (with reference to examples from The Farming of Bones), see Misrahi-Barak, “Reconstructive Textual Surgery.” For a discussion of biopolitics in Brother, I’m Dying and Claire of the Sea Light, see Chancy, “(Black) Immigration Discourse”; and Evans Braziel, “Terre-Natale of Ville Rose,” respectively. In addition, reading my article in connection to discussions of necropolitics in The Farming of Bones, see Alexander, “Losing Your (M)Other”; or Nzengou-Tayo, “Writing Death in Danticat’s Fiction,” for example, published in the Bloomsbury Handbook to Edwidge Danticat when this article was in its final rounds of editing, might prove productive.

41 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 7, 8.

42 Ibid., 29.

43 One way to analyse police brutality in the U.S., then, for example, would be to suggest that police act as ‘as-if-sovereigns’ whose actions are automatically already ‘pardoned’ based on a tradition of exception from punitive law that often transforms into de facto sovereignty.

44 It seems that Black and Brown bodies have historically been purposefully maintained in a notion of ‘crisis’ in order to naturalise the notion of ‘pardon’ in White bodies. See also Spijkerboer, who suggests that European courts recently decided that certain right’s violations (subaltern migrants faced) were ‘excusable’ in a moment of ‘crisis’, for example, “The 2015 Migration ‘Crisis’.”

45 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 60–61.

46 Ibid., 168.

47 Ibid., 206–207.

48 In the storyworld of the novel, only two genders (male and female) are presented.

49 Truth qtd. in Crenshaw, “Intersection of Race and Sex,” 153.

50 Crenshaw, “Intersection of Race and Sex,” 153.

51 Cf. ibid.

52 After the massacre, Haitians lament:

When Dessalines, Toussaint, Henry, when those men walked the earth, we were a strong nation. Those men would go to war to defend our blood. In all this, our so-called president says nothing, our Papa Vincent – our poet – he says nothing at all to this affront to the children of Dessalines […]; he shouts nothing across this river of our blood’, Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 212.

53 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 178.

54 In her keynote address at the international conference on Migrant States of Exception, Alicia Schmidt-Camacho gave some further examples of such (eerie) alignment of political and economic forces. She called attention to the fact that migrants from the Americas, who are seeking refuge in the U.S., are at risk of being taken hostage by Mexican gangs and held for ransom on the Mexican side of the border, while on the U.S. side, migrants are imprisoned and only released against bail. Schmidt-Camacho links both operations by alluding to the fact that the average ransom and the average amount of bail are markedly similar – the money these migrants and/or their relatives have to pay to free these bare bodies of exception (from legal incarceration or illegal kidnapping) is nearly identical. She suggests that, on both sides of the border, the market has established a price for these lives and appraised how much money can be extracted from such a bare body. Her analysis asks us to (re-)consider the role, not merely of certain economic players but of global capitalism as a system in questions of migration. In other words, she urges us to ponder capitalism’s role in creating poor post-colonial bodies as bare bodies of exception. Cf. Schmidt-Camacho, “Migrant Justice.”

55 Díaz, The Wondrous Life, 2.

56 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 97.

57 Reece Jones, Violent Borders, 39.

58 Butler, Frames of War, 31.

59 This reading is in line with much theory on (Western) identity-making processes, see Spivak’s notion of Othering (based on Lacan, cf. Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Post-Colonial Studies, 154–158), for example, which Butler reflects in Precarious Life: ‘dehumanization becomes the condition for the production of the human to the extent that a “Western” civilization defines itself over and against a population understood as, by definition, illegitimate, of not dubiously human’, 91.

60 Véga-Gonzàlez, “Sites of Memory,” 10–11, 19.

61 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 79–80.

62 Ibid., 216.

63 Ibid., 310. Furthermore, in the context of the U.S.-Mexican border, which has shaped much U.S. discourse on borders, border crossings are often presented as rites of passage (from life to death, from childhood to adulthood) and associated with spiritual or actual death (Fox, Fence and the River, 103), which strengthens the notion of the border as passageway to a new life.

64 This arguably hierarchizes the female god over the male earthly sovereigns and possibly also Vodun religion over Christianity. Chancy argues that choosing Metrès Dlo as her ‘protectress’ enhances Amabelle’s capacity to traverse borders, “Violence, Nation & Memory,” 138.

65 As noted by Misrahi-Barak, “Exploring Trauma,” 173.

66 For a discussion of trauma in The Farming of Bones, see Novak “‘A Marred Testament’”; Munro “Writing Disaster”; Dhar “Memory, Gender, Race and Class”; and Vega-Gonzàlez, “Sites of Memory.”

67 On this emphasis of the exceptional character of the massacre, Misrahi-Barak notes, ‘The last embedded chapter is Chapter 40, the only even chapter, as if the order of things, and their timing, had been permanently altered and thrown off balance’, “Exploring Trauma,” 174.

68 Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 207–208. See also Misrahi-Barak, “Exploring Trauma,” 173–175.

69 Ibid., 207.

70 Misrahi-Barak, “Biopolitics and Translation,” 365.

71 Véga-Gonzàlez, “Sites of Memory,” 20.

72 Ibid., 265–266.

73 Ibid., 282.

74 Véga-Gonzàlez, “Sites of Memory,” 11–12. Insights from Zombie studies might be fruitfully applied if we consider that Zombie narratives similarly ponder and transgress the binary between life and death and that ‘in Haitian religious practices, art, and cultural mythology […] the zombie serves to index the excessive extremes of capitalism, the overlap of capitalism and cannibalism, and the interplay between capitalism and race in the history of the Americas’, McAlister, “Slaves, Cannibals and Infected,” 462.

75 An example of the former can be found at the beginning of the novel, when Amabelle, noticing a few stems of parsley on Doctor Javier’s hair, stops her instinctive reaction and partakes in introducing and upholding a border:

I reached up to flick them away but stopped myself in time. It would be too forward of me to touch him; he might misunderstand. Working for others, you must always be on your guard. Doctor Javier always addressed me kindly, but I could not presume that he would enjoy the feel of my hand wandering through his hair, Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 18.

Here, a natural instinct is suppressed and a (productive) moment of interaction stopped by internalized racism. That the protagonist Amabelle has internalized racist and classist notions can be seen in other situations, for example, when Amabelle worries about Valencia musing that ‘[a]nything could happen in my absence, the worst of it being if a lady of her stature had to push that child out alone, like a field hand suddenly feeling her labor pains beneath a tent of cane’, ibid., 7.

76 Fuchs, “Plátanos and Perejil,” 58.

77 Several scholars have commented on the use of the word perejil as shibboleth in the novel. As Fuchs argues:

The novel recounts how the Spanish word perejil (parsley) was (ab)used as an identity marker or shibboleth to differentiate hispanophone Dominicans from Kreyòl-speaking Haitians who could not pronounce perejil like a Spanish speaker. In the novel’s epigraph, Danticat links Dominican-Haitian history to the Biblical conflict of Gilead and Ephraim in the Book of Judges. She likens the Massacre River to the Jordan River due to the similar abuse of pronunciation as identity marker. The word shibboleth has henceforth been used to describe the phenomenon of exclusion via linguistic particularities, “Plátanos and Perejil,” 62.

The novel illustrates how dark-skinned Dominicans, who do not speak French or Kreyol, end up in Haiti having fled Trujillo’s troops, therefore obviously not having been given the opportunity to pronounce the shibboleth ‘correctly’.

78 The latter, of course, upholds Trujillo’s efforts to ‘whiten’ the country.

79 As mentioned before, Amabelle’s loyalty to Ignacio, Valencia and Pico can be viewed as a sign of internalised racism and must therefore be viewed critically. Quoting McDowell, Jean-Charles posits convincingly that Amabelle’s flight to Haiti can be viewed productively through the lens of ‘the journey’, which McDowell claims is a recurring motif in Black women’s writing, Jean-Charles, “Danticat,” 59. If we consider Amabelle’s flight ‘a personal and psychological journey, the state of becoming part of an evolutionary spiral moving from victim to consciousness’, McDowell, The Changing Same, 13, this would suggest a state of unconscious internalised victimhood/racism at the beginning of the novel.

80 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 11.

81 Ibid., 18.

82 Ibid., 11.

83 Ibid., 60.

84 Chancy, “Violence, Nation & Memory,” 138.

85 Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 19; and Fuchs, “Plátanos and Perejil,” 59, 65.

86 Fuchs, “Plátanos and Perejil,” 59.

87 Danticat, Create Dangerously, 11.

88 Cf. Spengler, “Art as Engagement.”

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Julia Wewior

Julia Wewior is a researcher in the field of American Studies at the University of Wuppertal and is currently working on her PhD project tentatively entitled “Narrating Precarity in Adichie’s and Danticat’s Writing”. She holds a Magister degree from Goethe-University Frankfurt and studied American, English and German Studies in Frankfurt, in Olomouc (Czech Republic) and, as a stipendiary of the State of Hessen, at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh (USA). Her research interests include Caribbean Studies, African American Studies, Ethics and Aesthetics, Precarity, Narratology, Gender Studies, Women Writers and Postcolonial Studies. Email: [email protected]