Crossing Hispaniola: Cultural Erotics at the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands

Abstract

Haiti and the Dominican Republic share one of only two inland borders in the Caribbean.⁴ Historically the product of different colonial settlements – France in the west and Spain in the east – Hispaniola has experienced tumultuous intra-island conflicts since the seventeenth century, when Corsican pirates and other French traders began to settle the northeastern portion of what was then a Spanish colony. Conflict continues in the present with Haitians in the Dominican Republic being courted by human traffickers into abusive labor practices and framed in the public sphere as an abject presence, through which Dominicanness as a national identity and affect is oftentimes solidified. Initially tensions that arose did so from categorical differences based on the cultural, political, and economic distinctions of Spanish and French imperial enterprises in the Americas. With time, these tensions began to develop racial, oftentimes racist, border imaginaries, especially at the dawn of the nineteenth century when the success of the Haitian Revolution threatened an overthrow of colonial control over the whole island. What ensued was a series of affronts and counter-insurgencies over competing interests between the newly declared Haitian republic and France, between Spain and France, Spanish-descent criollos and France, the United States and the various governing parties across the Island, and ultimately Haiti and the Dominican Republic.⁵ Over the course of a protracted history of relations on the Island, the historical dynamics of the involved parties and their conflicts do not sustain an easy positioning. The region we know today as Haiti, for example, has assumed the role of affluent and influential neighbor, invading aggressor, rescuing partner, and vulnerable victim.⁶ Nonetheless, these tensions rendered the shifting political identities of the now Haitian-Dominican border­lands a hodge-podge of traumatic memories, reconfiguring loyalties that have marked significantly the intra-insular affects of Hispaniola into the present.

Between Haiti and the Dominican Republic flows a river filled with ghosts. This river is called, aptly enough, the Massacre River, and is one of several natural frontiers, dividing what is geographically one island into two independent nations.

—Edwidge Danticat, “Preface,” in René Philoctète

Massacre River²

They have so many things in common, share so many similar wounds and joys that trying to distinguish between two peoples violates their tacit understanding to live as one.

—René Philoctète

Massacre River³