Dominicans, Haitians
Remember Parsley Massacre
October 1, 2012October marks 75 years since a dark period in the Dominican Republic's history. In 1937, President Rafael Leonidas Trujillo ordered the execution of thousands of ethnic Haitians. Guest host Celeste Headlee discusses the "Parsley Massacre" with two noted authors, one Dominican and one Haitian: Julia Alvarez and Edwidge Danticat.
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CELESTE HEADLEE, HOST:
This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. I'm Celeste Headlee. Michel Martin is away. Coming up, we talk to Keija Minor about becoming the first African-American editor-in-chief of a Conde Nast publication, Brides magazine.
But first, it's been 75 years since a dark and nearly forgotten period in the history of the Dominican Republic. In October of 1937, then president, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo ordered the execution of thousands of ethnic Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. It came to be known as the Parsley Massacre.
The two nations share the island of Hispaniola and a long and very stormy history of mistrust. Here to talk about the massacre and what some people are doing to bridge the cultural divide - two authors, one Dominican, one Haitian. Julia Alvarez is the author of the novel, "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents," and most recently, "A Wedding in Haiti." And Edwidge Danticat, the author of the novel, "The Farming of Bones," and more recently, "Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work."
Welcome to both of you.
JULIA ALVAREZ: Thank you.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Thank you for having us.
HEADLEE: Julia, we want to talk about Trujillo first. He ruled your country for decades, but many in this country may not have heard of him. Let's take a listen here. This is a clip that announces his assassination in 1961.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NEWSCAST)
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: A 31 year reign of terror and bloodshed comes to an end in the Dominican Republic as dictator Rafael Trujillo is shot down by seven assassins. His victims were numbered in the tens of thousands during his iron-fisted rule of the island nation, a rule which created fabulous wealth for a few and the grimmest of poverty for the majority. He ruled by the gun and died by the gun.
HEADLEE: So, Julia, tell us a little bit about this man and his importance in your country.
ALVAREZ: Wow, that just gave me goose bumps to hear that. Of course, we were elated. We were already in New York, but, you know, this was 31 years of an oppressive, bloody dictatorship and killed thousands of Dominicans and you've already brought up the Haitian massacre, a shameful atrocity that his soldiers committed. And they used bayonets to make it look like a popular uprising against the Haitian invader, but it was a military order to kill all Haitians.
HEADLEE: Well, Edwidge, let's talk about this from your side of the border. You've done a great deal of research about the Parsley Massacre. Can you explain to us what happened? And how is it remembered by Haitians?
DANTICAT: Well, the time of the massacre was a spread of Nazism throughout Europe and Trujillo was a great admirer, it turned out, of Hitler. And so there was an attempt with this massacre to try to whiten the Dominican Republic and reduce the Haitian influence there, so thousands and thousands of people, as Julia just mentioned, were killed. It's also called El Corte, the cutting.
And, from our side, unfortunately, people - my generation, even older - did not really know about this massacre. It's not something we heard about. It wasn't in the history books, I think, in part because it was a shame, this sort of collaboration among the elites of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. And this was basically done to a lot of poor people, so there was a silence about it over time.
HEADLEE: Edwidge, can you explain to us why it's called the Parsley Massacre?
DANTICAT: It's called the Parsley Massacre because a sprig of parsley was held in front of people and they were asked to say the word, perejil. And you can see by the way I'm saying it that I would not have made it and there is a difference between the way Dominicans and Haitians trill the R and certain linguistic differences, so it was a giveaway, a test.
HEADLEE: Well, let me hear it. You say the word again, Edwidge.
DANTICAT: Perejil.
HEADLEE: And, Julia?
ALVAREZ: Perejil. We trill the R and the Haitian Creole has a wide, flat R pronunciation, although it's pretty good.
DANTICAT: Ours is - I guess it would be like - more like a W, where...
ALVAREZ: Like perejil.
DANTICAT: Yeah. Perejil. Yeah.
ALVAREZ: Perejil. And we would say, perejil.
HEADLEE: That R was the difference between life and death.
ALVAREZ: My goodness, exactly, because there were Dominicans, dark-skinned Dominicans, who were massacred and many of them with Haitian backgrounds and that was the litmus test because, of course, Haitians would also say, but I'm really Dominican, so how would you pronounce this little sprig of green?
DANTICAT: That also shows, I think, how much people had blended, that you needed this kind of differential, that you needed them to open their mouths and speak before you could tell them apart.
HEADLEE: If you're just joining us, you're listening to TELL ME MORE from NPR News. We're taking a look back at the massacre of thousands of Haitians that took place 75 years ago in the Dominican Republic. Our guests are the authors, Julia Alvarez and Edwidge Danticat.
As you say, Edwidge, there wasn't a lot of reporting on the massacre. We looked back and tried to find some. There's not a lot, but it ended up having a pretty big impact on the people, on the culture, the literature and even the poetry. We want to play you a piece of Rita Dove reading her poem, "Parsley."
RITA DOVE: (Reading) El General has found his word: perejil. Who says it lives. He laughs, teeth shining out of the swamp. The cane appears in our dreams lashed by wind and streaming and we lie down. For every drop of blood, there is a parrot imitating spring. Out of the swamp, the cane appears.
HEADLEE: So that's Rita Dove and you, of course, wrote a book, as well, "The Farming of Bones." Why choose this as your subject matter and why approach it through fiction?
DANTICAT: Well, there's a very strong element of testimonial, even in the poem, even in Julia's work and other work that concerns this era, you know, this era of massacres through Trujillo and fiction and poetry, I think, is a way of bringing all these different voices into one voice in which you can tell so many different stories through a kind of testimonial that fiction and poetry and even song allows.
HEADLEE: Julia, your most recent book, "A Wedding in Haiti," is actually a non-fiction. It talks about your visits to Haiti and it talks a lot about the cultural divide between the two countries. Some of that branches back to Trujillo. He banned any reference to Haitian culture. What kind of influence has that had on the relationship between the two people?
ALVAREZ: Well, as Edwidge pointed out, there's been this enormous silence, so I grew up not knowing about this. It took coming to this country and connecting with Haitians and Haitian-Americans and with my own Dominican people that were here that I began to learn more and more of the history and I think that's when this revulsion for something that had happened that had never been addressed or redressed properly filled me.
And, from way back, we started talking about doing this border gathering to commemorate and give voice and shine a light on that history because, even though it happened in the way past, that same massacre mentality is there to this day with the way that the human rights of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian origin are denied in the Dominican Republic. So it's an important moment and it's something that we of the diaspora can bring back and there are many people on the ground that are going to join us.
HEADLEE: You're talking about the Border of Lights event, which is meant to commemorate the 75th...
ALVAREZ: Exactly.
HEADLEE: ...anniversary of this massacre. So there's Julia talking about how it was removed from the history books in the Dominican Republic. How about on your side of the border, Edwidge? Do Haitians - do Haitian children learn about this in their schools?
DANTICAT: Well, the thing is, you know, the Dominican Republic is probably Haiti's biggest trading partner in all of these - you know, for a lot of border people, you can walk across and back and forth. As I mentioned, it's not something that we talked about, but it was transmitted through all history. I had people in my family who went to work in the sugar cane in the Dominican Republic, and it is an atrocious situation that's current. It's not one of those situations where you say, this is over.
You know, but there are still things that, even as we come together to remember, the fact that people can be in the Dominican Republic for generations and not get a birth certificate and they can't go to school and all, these things that are sort of part of the current migration, so the history sort of overshadows the present at the same time and there's always a fear of repeats, which is why it's so important when people come together to talk about the past, not just for the sake of talking about the past, but also to talk about how we can create a different future with what we know of the past.
HEADLEE: Is that the solution here, Julia? It's been 75 years and yet you felt revulsion when you first learned about it. Does it require a real examination with a microscope of this massacre and what happened in order to kind of put it behind you?
ALVAREZ: Of course, it does. I mean, it requires us acknowledging it, giving testimony. One of the things we're going to do during the Border of Lights gathering is have a kind of StoryCorps booth where people can tell their stories; what they knew of the massacre, if they heard anything from their families.
We can't change the present or the future unless we acknowledge what's happened and, also, you know, acknowledge some of the collaborations that have happened because we are - you know, I say that in "A Wedding in Haiti." We're - Haiti - when I went on those travels to Haiti, Haiti was the sister I never knew. You know, it was this other side, right on a small island, and it was kept out of my history books and out of our stories, and this is something that I think there's no place on this planet anymore where that should be happening. It's time that the people themselves - and this is why this is a people's movement - say, that's enough. And, you know, we have to do - we have to collaborate and we have to face the past.
HEADLEE: Julia Alvarez, novelist, poet, essayist. She's also a writer in residence at Middlebury College and she joined us from their studios in Vermont. And Edwidge Danticat is also a writer. She joined us from Miami, Florida. Thanks to both of you.
DANTICAT: Thank you so much for having us.
ALVAREZ: Thank you so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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Background
The 1937 Haitian Massacre was a policy of mass murder that occurred in the Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic that shares an island with Haiti. From late September to late October in 1937 approximately 9,000 to 18,000 ethnic Haitians (we will never truly know the exact number) were systematically rounded-up and killed in Dominican territory. The orders were given by the Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, seven years into his 30 year rule.
About the 1937 Haitian Massacre
courtesy of Edward Paulino, Ph.D.
Why did Trujillo order the killings?
As Richard Turits has written in the Foundations of Despotism, the specific motives that drove Trujillo to order mass murder remain “obscure.” Over the years, however, several hypotheses have emerged to try and explain what exactly provoked the bloodshed. One is that Trujillo aimed to reclaim more lands that lay beyond the control of the state for export crop production, therefore expanding a land colonization program taking place throughout the nation.
Another reason was revenge. Prior to the massacre a Dominican spy ring in Port-au-Prince had been discovered and dismantled by Haitian authorities—a blow to Trujillo who felt threatened by the Haitian capital’s site as a safe haven allowing Dominican exiles to reside and plot against his overthrow. According to this version, he became so irate that he responded with mass murder to get even with Haitian officials.
There is also the story that Trujillo conceived of the massacre after visiting the border region on horseback and became angered at seeing such a disproportionate number of Haitians living on the Dominican side of the border especially after definitive territorial boundaries were established in 1935. In the absence of tangible evidence pointing to a specific motive it is clear that by 1935 Trujillo was in a much stronger position to carry out a massacre, than say, in 1933. Nearly a decade after taking power and eliminating his political opponents both in-country and abroad through cooptation, arrest and murder, he had consolidated his power.
By the late 1930s he had, as Valentina Peguero has written in The Militarization of Culture in the Dominican Republic, gained absolute control of the army and police forces. Moreover, by 1937 the US had withdrawn its occupational forces from Haiti removing a well-organized counter-force at the ready on the ground, if asked, to cross the border eastward, and investigate the killings. The possibility disappeared when the US officially withdrew from Haiti in 1934—nearly a decade after its forces left the Dominican Republic.
What is the Massacre’s Legacy?
What makes the 1937 Haitian Massacre different from other genocidal massacres is as written in “Estudios del terror y los terrores de la historia,” is that an ideology of hate demonizing Haiti and Haitians as state doctrine appeared after the mass murder violence not before. Usually, campaigns of genocidal violence proceeds an ideological state rhetoric dehumanizing the targeted group that eventually concludes in mass murder. In the Dominican case, the opposite is true. Months before the massacre Dominican-Haitian relations were at an all-time friendly high. Anti-Haitianism as state doctrine appeared after the violence. But, if the goal of the massacre as the subsequent government ideological rhetoric suggested was to cleanse the Dominican border of Haitians, it failed. A year after the massacre border markets resumed and the historic collaborative ties that marked the region for centuries were stronger than ever, according to reports from Trujillo’s own government border agencies and officials like agentes culturales fronterizos (Border Cultural Agents). The real legacy of the massacre was the crystallization of a historic anti-Haitian sentiment in the Dominican Republic that was never countered with the same level of institutional and cultural investment where Dominicans would be constantly bombarded with a positive counter state ideology where Haitians could be viewed as historic friends rather than historic enemies. In other words, the massacre cemented Haitians into a long-term subversive outsider incompatible with what it means to be Dominicans. Unlike, in the United States, Germany and Rwanda where after a long history of discrimination was combated through the state laws, commemorative events, and public service announcements to embraced historically marginalized and underrepresented communities, no similar institutional or cultural mass program or space has been created in the Dominican Republic where Haitians and their descendants can form and be acknowledged as part of the Dominican nation. Today, Haitians (whose population has been said to reach a million out of population of 10 million), and who have settled in the Dominican Republic residing for thirty, forty, even fifty years as well as their descendants, are systematically denied Dominican citizenship—in many ways a de facto stateless group. One can say that the current political situation of the Dominican Republic’s largest ethnic and racial minority is a direct legacy of the massacre where they continue to be pushed out and excluded from forming part of the Dominican melting pot. The more profound question for the Dominican nation whose governments have consistently argued that a country its size cannot support current levels of Haitian migration is: will Haitian ethnicity ever be compatible with Dominicanness? Can the children and grandchildren of Haitians, like descendants of Dominicans in the United States or Spain who are teachers, lawyers, soldiers, politicians, even ambassadors and who also contain undocumented persons, be integrated as full and contributing citizens of the nation? This legacy of Haitian exclusion and their socially constructed incompatibility with Dominican culture is an ideological legacy bequeathed by Trujillo’s intellectuals following the massacre. It is the reason why the late Dominican human rights activist Sonia Pierre struggled so much to compel the nation to see her and her community of Dominicans of Haitian descent as part of the Dominican nation much like Dominicans of Spanish, Italian, Arab, Jewish and even West Indian descent.
How and where were the killings carried out?
The killings were carried out by Trujillo’s army and conscripted civilians. Both soldiers and civilians used mostly machetes. Because Dominicans could also be black a linguistic litmus test was sometimes used to distinguish between Haitian and Dominicans since the Spanish rolling r is difficult to pronounce in Haitian Kreyol. Thus victims were asked to repeat words like perejil (parsely) to mark their insider (Dominican) and now outsider (Haitian) status. But this strategy was applied intermittently and not at all efficacious: Dominican machete-wielding men could not have asked this same question to each of the thousands of people they killed in the relatively short amount of time that the killings occurred.
The Dominican government told the world the massacre was a spontaneous skirmish by Dominican farmers protecting their property and livestock from Haitian thieves. For the most part machetes were used in order to support this subterfuge. Yet there were instances (virtually absent in the historiography of the massacre) where civilians were given shotguns to kill Haitians. The ammunition was documented by military officers. For every bullet Dominicans were required to bring back one ear for each Haitian they killed.
There was also a systematic pattern whereby Haitian corpses were burned or buried throughout the rural countryside. The murders not only occurred throughout the border region but non-border towns as well, some as far east as Moca, Santiago, Puerto Plata and San Francisco de Macorís. Archival correspondence collected by Vega, Cuello, Roorda, Derby, Turits and Paulino show, as US Ambassador Henry R. Norweb’s October 1937 diplomatic communiqué to President Franklin D. Roosevelt shows, that a “systematic campaign of extermination” occurred in the Dominican Republic. Something the Trujillo government always denied.
And yet, another forgotten strand of history seldom underscored during the killings is a pattern were Dominicans risked their lives to save Haitians and their descendants who were often their neighbors, their relatives. During those days of October 1937, if you were a Haitian immigrant, long-term Haitian resident, native Dominican born person of Haitian or Dominican parents and lived outside of the safe US-owned sugar mills your goal was to reach the border and cross into Haiti. Depending on the location it could take a few hours or eight days to reach and cross the border into Haiti.
Was Trujillo or the government ever punished?
No high ranking Dominican government official was ever prosecuted or sentenced for the massacre. Indeed, after the Dominican and Haitian governments reached a peaceful resolution in early 1938, a published League of Nations report stated that neither Trujillo nor his government shared any present or future responsibility for the massacre—the official report, in essence, (a legal precedent) made it practically impossible for the Dominican government to be prosecuted absolving the regime of mass murder. Ironically, in the months following the massacre a sham trial was held by the Dominican government of those thought to be responsible for the killings. The men on trial were called reservistas, reservists, men of well-repute in the community and loyal to Trujillo. The men were found guilty but after several months were set free. The trial was a farce and the Dominican government was never punished.
Trujillo capitalized on World War II (as Eric Roorda writes in The Dictator Next Door) and the US need through the Good Neighbor Policy to project strong western hemispheric solidarity against an imperialistic Germany in Europe and an imperialistic Japan in the Asia. In declaring his government’s support for the United States against Germany, Trujillo’s crime was forgotten. Later on in the 1940s Trujillo ingratiated himself even more to President Roosevelt by accepting several hundred European Jews fleeing the Nazis who eventually settled in the northern Dominican coastal town of Sosua and revealing one of the 20th century’s deepest of ironies: one group viewed as racially inferior and insufficiently Aryan in one country arriving in another country where they, as Caucasians, were now viewed as agents of whiteness to “improve the race” settling near the same region where black Haitians less than ten years before their arrival were hunted and killed for their perceived racial inferiority.
Resources
Haitians, Magic and Money: Raza and Society in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands , 1900 to 1937, by Lauren Derby
The River Massacre: The Real and Imagined Borders of Hispañola, 1998, by Michele Wucker
by Robin L.H. Derby & Richard Turits
The Genocide Next Door, 2009 by Eric Paul Roorda
>via: http://www.borderoflights.org/#!commemorate/cmbr