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Introduction: Point Counterpoint

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Book cover Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint

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Abstract

They are separate and unequal: Haiti has a predominantly black, French patois-speaking population; the Dominican Republic, a predominantly mestizo or mulatto, Spanish-speaking population. Apart from one another, yet each one occupying a part of the same island, the two countries of Hispaniola have been called “two tragic twins sharing the same craggy rock,” and “conjoined siblings” so dissimilar that, between them, “no dialogue can be established.”3 The two countries’ “shared insularity,” comments another observer, “has been fraught with a history of antagonism.”4

And all of this happens on an Antillean island divided into two countries, and in each one people are scourged by man and the whips of those who rule.

—Freddy Prestol Castillo, El Masacre se pasa a pie1

Ahora mismo y aquí

Están buscando su yo

Santo Domingo y Haití.

—Manuel Cabral, “La Isla Saqueada”2

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Notes

  1. Freddy Prestol Castillo, El Masacre se pasa a pie (Santo Domingo: Ediciones de Taller, 1989), p. 49. The translation of this quote is mine, as are all other translations of quotes from the original French or Spanish except for those otherwise indicated under “Notes” and “Bibliography.”

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  2. Manuel del Cabral, Obra Poética Completa de Manuel del Cabral ( Santo Domingo: Editora Alfa y Omega, 1987 ), pp. 486–8.

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  3. The first quote is from Carlos Augusto Sánchez i Sánchez, El caso domínicohaitiano (Ciudad Trujillo: Editora Montalvo, 1958), p. 3;

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  1. Eugenio Matibag
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© 2003 Eugenio Matibag

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Matibag, E. (2003). Introduction: Point Counterpoint. In: Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403973801_1

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