Environment and the Somatic Body in Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints and Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones

Abstract

The paper offers a cross-cultural literary analysis of Chicana Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1992) and Haitian American Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998) and compares the play and the novel on the basis of their shared thematic link of interwoven environmental and racial violence directed against marginalized people of color. Despite the works’ geographically distant contexts—set in the US Southwest and the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, respectively—and the differing collective traumas of genocide the texts dramatize, I highlight that both narratives foreground the motif of violated nature as a primary critical lens to unveil and critique the ongoing practices of colonialism permeating twentieth-century US and Caribbean politics. The interlocking images of women-of-colors’ disfigured bodies and the environmental devastation caused by (post)colonial violence underline the pervasiveness of harm done to both earth and the somatic body.