Kelly Winters is a freelance writer. She has written for a wide variety of academic and educational publishers. In the following essay, she discusses themes of remembrance, racism, and hope in The Farming of Bones.

In her afterword to The Farming of Bones, Danticat writes:

In The Farming of Bones, Amabelle is similarly
obsessed with the loss of the past, and the unrecorded
or forgotten stories of thousands of lives cut short or
stunted. Even before the slaughter, she ritualistically
tells herself the story of her parents' drowning, keeping
alive every word and gesture; but she realizes that
the older she gets, the more her memories of them are
fading. At the end of the book she knows, painful
though it is, that her memories of her lost lover
Sebastien will fade in the same way.

She is not the only one who believes in the importance...