White Supremacy and Genocide: The 1937 Haitian Massacre in Fiction and History

The massacre of Haitians in 1937, was part of the racist campaign which promoted Spanish culture and abandonment of African Culture. The butchery characterizes the White supremacy order which in the Dominican Republic is called “Dominicanismo.” It entailed the whitening of the race for the purpose of distinguishing Dominicans from Haitians. 

Works such as short story “El día de los hechos” from the collection of short stories Encancaranublado y otros cuentos de naufragio (1994) by Ana Lydia Vega, the novel La fiesta del Chivo (2000) Mario Vargas Llosa, and the novel The Farming of Bones (1998) by Edwidge Danticat center on testimonies of the historical proceedings related to the massacre of Haitians.   Linda J. Craft in Novels of Testimony and Resistance (1997), claims that the novel becomes a contested space for debating historical narratives.

I theorize that these writers through these testimonies expose the incidence which subsequently proposes a “denunciation of the injustice” and of the racism reflective of the colonialist epoch’s emphasis on white superiority. Different in style, Vega, Vargas Llosa, and Danticat are comparable in revitalizing the memory of the slaughter, which I postulate was founded on the medieval quest for “purity of blood” and transported to and intensified in the Americas by Spanish colonialist. More pressing in all of these works is the supposed legality of the incident based on racial ideas of national identity. With race as a defining feature for citizenship, these novels debate the impact of constitutions and laws in foregrounding such a catastrophic event. A truncated view of the past, in which the Haitian occupation is seen as worse than Spanish colonialism is at the heart of these novel’s presentation of the 1913 Massacre. Myth becomes legend and legend obliterates a past when the Dominican pardos did not see Haitians as racial enemies.