PAPER Topics

Start of Term Paper
Towards the end of Edwidge Danticat's new novel The Farming of Bones, a man says "Famous men never truly die... It is only those nameless and faceless who vanish like smoke in the early morning air." The time is 1937, the place the island which ....

Middle of Term Paper
... do have names and faces. The Farming of Bones is a term the Haitian field workers use to describe their life of cutting cane. While Amabelle is fortunate enough to be working as a household servant to a wealthy Dominican family, most of her friends toil for the sugar mill owners. They have left Haiti and come to the Dominican Republic because their job prospects at home are even bleaker than in their adopted country. And so this book is very much about exile, what it means to live in one place and yearn for another. Amabelle's lover Sebastian says, "Sometimes the people in the fields, when they're tired and angry, they say we're an orph ...