ABSTRACT
Chapter 2, “Homes, Wombs, Tombs, and Historical Fiction,” engages with historical fiction and the authors’ attempts to speak to the silences in Hispaniola’s history. The chapter dissects both writers’ forays into historical fiction; I focus on the various ways that “home” and “country” are depicted in Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies and the representation of the 1937 Massacre in Danticat’s The Farming of Bones. The chapter highlights how both fear and upheaval can define both physical home sites and imaginary ones and suggests that the concept of “neighborly violence” emerges as a consistent theme in Danticat’s and Alvarez’s work in relation to the massacre and to broader experiences of migration and diaspora.
