Close Encounters: Haitians in Dominican Literature

Abstract

In his article “Primitive Borders: Cultural Identity and Ethnic Cleansing in the Dominican Republic” (2000), Fernando Valerio-Holguín traces the development of Dominican discourse on Haiti and Haitians. In Dominican history, literature, journalism, and sociology, he argues, the Haitian has been cast as a primitive Other: the Haitian appears as a figure of barbarity, misery, degradation, and superstition. The barbarization of Haitians in this discourse confirms ethnocentric prejudice, but it also fulfills a sociopolitical purpose: that of defining a Dominican national identity negatively; that is, by asserting that identity’s difference from that which it purports not to be—the Haitian seen as the opposite or antipodes of what is considered authentically Dominican. Valerio-Holguín’s thesis draws theoretical support from the concept of primitivism as defined in the postcolonial cultural critique of Marianna Torgovnick (1990). For Torgovnick, primitivism is a specialized discourse that has an ideological role in the colonizers’ project of subordinating the colonized; it is “an ensemble of diverse and contradictory tropes that construct a grammar and vocabulary with reference to the Other.” ² In Valerio-Holguín’s account, Dominican tropes of Haitian primitivity, operating powerfully in culture and consciousness, have set the boundary between the Haitian Other and the Dominican Self, such that Haitians are identified with the inferior term in a series of significant binary oppositions: civilized/savage, cultural/natural, Vodoun/Catholic, and Hispanic/African, among others. Such barbarization in and through Dominican discourse has served to legitimize Dominican claims to territory and border delimitations; it has also justified the exploitative treatment of Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic and acts of violence against them, most notably the Trujillo-ordered massacre, in 1937, of at least 20,000 Haitians in the Dominican borderlands.

The world was once whole, and now behold, it opened up in two halves,

Sunk in the expanse of the sea and of the skies that are Falling down.

—Manuel Rueda, “Song of the Rayano”¹