Novel Recalls Haiti’s Bloody History With a Deft Use of Language

History can be tricky for a novelist or poet. Its constraints crowd the free imagination. Its tempos impose beats that throw off the writer’s syncopation. Its enforced appointments fill up a calendar that asks to be left open for intuitive date-switches. Above all, its iron-track narrative discourages venturing cross-country. “This was” deflates “this might be.”

Of course there are splendid historical novels (though fewer poems). With creative arbitrariness, and if they don’t go smash, some writers are able to clear imaginative space for themselves.

It works best when the history is long past (Margaret Yourcenar’s “Memoirs of Hadrian”) or doubtful (Gore Vidal did better with the tenebrous “Aaron Burr” than the daylit “Lincoln”), or when the fiction works through add-on or interstice--stealing a ride beyond or between the scheduled stops (Pynchon’s “Mason & Dixon,” Penelope Fitzgerald’s “The Blue Flower”). And finally, when the writer is immense and history tucks inside him with plenty of room left over (Tolstoy, uniquely; thus the “him”).

Edwidge Danticat is a writer of a poetic imagination that is able to crack light out of the shadows of her Haitian background, and infuse English prose with the colors and winged wit of Creole. Her collection of stories, “Krik? Krak!” was a National Book Award finalist; her novel “Breath, Eyes, Memory” won an Oprah Winfrey endorsement--a present-day equivalent in reward, and sometimes in discrimination, to patronage by a Renaissance pope.

Danticat’s gifts are splendidly evident at times in “The Farming of Bones.” She has chosen a history, though, that strains not the gifts but an artistic arbitrariness that is not, or maybe not yet, fully developed. It is a terrible history; one she has felt challenged to tackle. In 1937 the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo capped a long conflict between Dominicans and Haitians--neighbors on the same island--by massacring thousands of Haitians living and working in the Dominican Republic.

Danticat tells of two lovers, Amabelle and Sebastien. He is a cane cutter on a Dominican plantation; she is maid and confidant to her former childhood playmate, Valencia, a Dominican of Spanish descent who is married to Pico, an ambitious army officer and fanatical follower of Trujillo.

When the first rumors of impending massacre begin--Pico is one of the officers in charge; Valencia tries, ineffectively, to shelter a few Haitians--Sebastien disappears. With a few other refugees, Amabelle treks to the border. On the way they witness the terrible evidence of the slaughter, and three of her companions perish.

Amabelle gets across, finds work as a seamstress and loses hope of seeing Sebastien. Many years later, after Trujillo is assassinated, she returns for a brief encounter with Valencia. Neither recrimination nor reconciliation, it is a tragic acknowledgment of history.

The story is awkwardly managed. The Dominican characters are particularly flimsy, even the good ones: a wise doctor, a martyred priest. Danticat tries to give some complexity to Valencia and even to the murderous Pico, but it is a complexity that provides more incoherence than depth. The last section is a blur; the author seems to have lost energy not only for the story but for the brilliance of language and image which, in the earlier sections, sometimes transfigures it.

There is the poetry and tenderness when Amabelle and Sebastien speak and think of each other. The lifeline in his right hand is rubbed smooth from wielding a machete; his chest and legs are scarred by the cane stalks. With the bitter splendor of Haitian folk speech, the title names the cruel work of cane-cutting: “farming the bones.”

There is a touching passage or two about Valencia, who bears twins, a boy and a girl. Pico rushes home to examine his son’s testicles, names him Rafael after the dictator and ignores his daughter. When the boy dies after a few days, Pico is brutishly desolate. Unlike her husband, Valencia dwells on life--her frailly surviving daughter--not death. “Tell me please,” she asks the doctor, “is she sad? Can they be sad so young?”

Evoking the speech and emotions of the Haitians, Danticat contrasts the redolence of Creole, magical, wry and elusive, with the more flatly emotive Spanish of the Dominicans. There is the haunting, graceful lament of an old Haitian for his dead son. There is airy Tibon, who thinks of himself as a bird when pursuers force him off a cliff; he consoles a woman over her missing husband: “Save some of your tears to weep for joy when we find your man.”

If “Farming the Bones” tends to illustrate history more than recreate it, there are passages that move it beyond. Language is more than decoration for Danticat. It is incantation: It makes something happen. The most powerful charge comes from a single word: “parsley.”

In Spanish it is “perejil”; in Creole, “pesi.” The Haitians cannot pronounce the harsh Spanish “j”; their Dominican pursuers identify them by making them speak the word, then stuffing their mouths with parsley and hacking them to death. “Pesi” sounds out here and there; sometimes with pathos, and then from a woman who dies crossing into Haiti, hurled back with a kind of triumph. There is eternity in a word; in life, only mortality.