negritude

Strengths and Limits of Negritude

Negritude is a term that may not be used very often but is significant; by definition it is a cultural word that represents “black” culture. The term is looked at deeply within the novel from Edwidge Danticat The Farming of Bones. This novel goes into depth on the strengths and weakness of the concept of Negritude through the culture and lives of Haitian and Dominican people. The novel circulates around a few major themes these being birth, death, identity, and place and displacement. An inanimate object represents each of the aspects. Water, birth, death, and masks make up these symbols. Haitians are known for speaking’s a more French Spanish in comparison to Dominican’s that at the time seemed to cause a great ordeal to Generalissimo Trujillo. The novel The Farming of Bones it displays the language of the Haitians versus the Dominican’s it displays the limitations of negritude through many different sugar cane field workers and the major constraints they had. Negritude as well has strength and limits and Edwidge Danticat’s Novel helps makes pros and cons clearer. Through the Novel Danticat shows how Negritude is not a negative word and the strengths and come along with Negritude.

Negritude although may seem as a racial slur it is a word to represent Caribbean culture. Edwidge Danticat's novel, The Farming of Bones is a depiction of the relationship between Haitians and Dominicans under the ruling of Generalissimo Trujillo before the massacre of 1937. The symbolism, which is prominent throughout the novel, can change with ones interpretation. The Farming of Bones focuses on negritude from the beginning and continues to show the progressive side of negritude. The view of the progress of neg...

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...spoke a Spanish Creole. This made a clear distinction between the two and made it easy for the government to identify the difference. The reader sees how such themes of Birth and Death show so prominently throughout the characters that one must focus on how birth and deaths affect the concept of the individual relating to their own Negritude. It is culture, not skin tones but rather the beliefs and values that each country be it Haiti or Dominican Republic relate to. Danticat’s novel helps us understand the strengths and limits that Rene Depestre states in The Birth of Caribbean Civilisation “there is a progressive ‘negritude’ that expounds the need to rise above all the alienations of man . . . and there is “an irrational reactionary and mystic version of ‘negritude’ which serves . . . as a cultural base for neo-colonialist penetration into our countries” (244).