Healing Cosmopolitanism in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones

Abstract

Edwidge Danticat’s 1998 novel The Farming of Bones is an articulation of ‘healing cosmopolitanism’. Amidst the 1937 genocide against French-speaking Haitians in the Dominican borderland, I focus on medical practitioners who attempt to save as many Haitians as they can by transporting them across the border to safety and share an ethos that binds them to each other as well as to their patients. Using Cheah’s and Robbins’s shorthand for cosmopolitanism, they are thinking, feeling and, most importantly, acting beyond the nation. As itinerants between nations, they create their own cosmopolitan affiliations as a decolonial counter-articulation vis-à-vis nation as ‘purity’. As author, Danticat actively participates in this project of healing cosmopolitanism through the act of writing that bears witness and helps treat the wounds on both sides by European-style nationalism. The Farming of Bones thus deals with the shadows of Hispaniola’s past in order to put the ‘post’ in postcolonial.