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Don Ignacio
Yves is a friend of Sebastien, and escapes the Dominican Republic with Amabelle as Dominican soldiers begin targeting Haitians for violence. Once Yves and Amabelle reach Haiti, Yves’s family takes Amabelle in as a guest and new family member, illustrating how the concept of family and home can shift over time. Yves’s life in Haiti is prosperous: he is an accomplished farmer, and expands his family’s agricultural business into a successful enterprise. Despite this accomplishment, Yves is unable to move beyond his grief. He has lost loved ones in Haiti, and is unable to cope with their deaths in a healthy way. Instead, he loses himself in hard work and monotony, and suppresses his sadness by exhausting himself in the fields. Yves’s inability to process death in a healthy way prevents him from properly memorializing his history: instead of taking the opportunity to tell his story, he acts skeptical of officials who seek to write down the testimony of Haitian refugees. Yves’s repression of grief and loss, and his unwillingness to act as a witness to Haitian history, leads him to live an unfulfilled and unhappy life.
Yves Quotes in The Farming of Bones
The The Farming of Bones quotes below are all either spoken by Yves or refer to Yves. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 34
Quotes
The priests at the cathedral listen and mark down testimonials of the slaughter […] They’re collecting tales for newspapers and radio men. The Generalissimo has found ways to buy and sell the ones here. Even this region has been corrupted with his money.”
[…] “Will you go yourself to see these priests?” I asked.
“I know what will happen,” he said. “You tell the story, and then it’s retold as they wish, written in words you do not understand, in a language that is theirs, and not yours.”
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Perhaps working the earth […] could make him believe that he had forgotten […] I imagined [other refugees] going forward in their lives, I wanted to bring them out of my visions into my life, to tell them how glad I was that they had been able to walk into the future, but most important to ask them how it was that they could be so strong […]
“How did you keep on with the planting, even when nothing was growing?” I asked Yves.
[…] “Empty houses and empty fields make me sad,” he said. “They are both too calm, like the dead season.”
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Yves Quotes in The Farming of Bones
The The Farming of Bones quotes below are all either spoken by Yves or refer to Yves. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 34
Quotes
The priests at the cathedral listen and mark down testimonials of the slaughter […] They’re collecting tales for newspapers and radio men. The Generalissimo has found ways to buy and sell the ones here. Even this region has been corrupted with his money.”
[…] “Will you go yourself to see these priests?” I asked.
“I know what will happen,” he said. “You tell the story, and then it’s retold as they wish, written in words you do not understand, in a language that is theirs, and not yours.”
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Perhaps working the earth […] could make him believe that he had forgotten […] I imagined [other refugees] going forward in their lives, I wanted to bring them out of my visions into my life, to tell them how glad I was that they had been able to walk into the future, but most important to ask them how it was that they could be so strong […]
“How did you keep on with the planting, even when nothing was growing?” I asked Yves.
[…] “Empty houses and empty fields make me sad,” he said. “They are both too calm, like the dead season.”
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
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