Comments on: How Deadly Was My Parsley

How Deadly Was My Parsley

jonp72 — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 17:13:35 -0800

Holding up sprigs of parsley, Trujillo's men queried their prospective victims: What is this thing called? The terrified victim's fate lay in his pronunciation of the answer. Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo spearheaded an anti-Haitian massacre in which armed thugs killed every Creole speaker who couldn't pronounce the trilled R in the Spanish word for parsley. (Using pronunciation to make ethnic distinctions is called a shibboleth, a tactic often used in wars.) The murders inspired Edwige Danticat's The Farming of Bones and Mario Vargas Llosa's Feast of the Goat, as well as a poem recited for Bill Clinton by poet laureate Rita Dove. Ironically, Trujillo's desire to "whiten" Hispaniola not only led him to order the 1937 massacre, but to lobby in 1938 for the settlement of Jews fleeing Hitler.

By: caddis

caddis — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 17:29:30 -0800

Lalapolooza

By: blahblahblah

blahblahblah — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 17:45:25 -0800

Fascinating, thanks.

By: Gator

Gator — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 17:45:45 -0800

I've always loved that poem. I love the villanelle.

By: nickyskye

nickyskye — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 18:01:21 -0800

Amazing post. Excellent, complex and multi-faceted history lesson, powerful. Moving poem. Thank you.

By: LarryC

LarryC — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 18:18:57 -0800

Superb post. I visited the Dominican Republic last year and was struck by the richness of the history, but also the way that every major theme of Latin American history is there: Columbus, Indigenes, sugar economy, slavery, military strongmen, dependency, U.S. bullying, tourism.

By: wrapper

wrapper — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 21:20:29 -0800

Getting ready to dive in.

By: y2karl

y2karl — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 00:27:11 -0800

Hell of a post added to rising clamor of approval.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 06:34:28 -0800

Superb post! I'm a little confused as to why the "pronounce the trilled R" link is titled "Perejil: the shibboleth myth," since the entry seems to suggest it wasn't a myth even if Trujillo later denied it. But that's a question for Trevor of kalebeul.

By: ibeji

ibeji — Mon, 07 Aug 2006 08:32:15 -0800

Great info in this post, thanks! More people could stand to know this part of history.