The 1937 racist massacre of ethnic Haitians and dark-skinned Dominicans in the Dominican Republic is the subject of a new film, Parsley (Perejil), from Dominican producer and director José María Cabral. The film premiered March 6 at the 2022 Miami Film Festival (MFF).
This ugly history is not simply a past atrocity, since it sheds light on events taking place between the Dominican Republic (DR) and Haiti today, which includes the current construction of a wall between the two countries, which share an island.
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As NBC Miami reports, this year’s MFF features a wealth of films from the Caribbean, including five films from the DR alone.
[T]he 2022 edition is back in full strength and for the first time ever, the Dominican Republic is getting the spotlight, with five films being featured. "All the five films are different in a way,” said Andres Farias, who directed “Candela," one of the featured Dominican films. “You have history, you have a Caribbean pop film, you have a comedy."
Farias calls "Candela" Caribbean film noir and says the mixture of genres from the selected films is a good symbol of what’s going on in the island, creatively speaking. Laplante agrees. "The Miami film festival has always been a big proponent of cinema from Latin America,” he said. “We follow trends in international cinema every year. This year, it was just a big breakthrough for the Dominican Republic. We’ve been watching that cinema evolve for the last couple of years. These five films, collectively, made a really strong series. We created the spotlight 'Quinteto Dominicano' to celebrate that and to honor this great wave of energy coming from the Dominican Republic."
The comedic offering didn’t pique my interest, but after watching the gripping trailer for Parsley, it has gone to the top of my list of films to see this year.
Miami Herald journalist Jacqueline Charles explored the history covered in the film.
It is called “El Corte,” or the cutting. The 1937 massacre on Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is one of the darkest periods in both nations’ tense history. Yet, the ethnic cleansing by Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, who ordered the killing of thousands of Haitians along the border separating the Dominican city of Dajabón from it Haitian neighbor, Ouanaminthe, and elsewhere inland, has long been shrouded in silence despite being a catalyst for the anti-Haitian and anti-Black sentiment that permeates Dominican society today. Thousands of Haitians, as well as dark-skinned Dominicans were killed after they reportedly failed a litmus test involving the Spanish word for parsley, perejil. Those who pronounced it properly by trilling the R were spared. Others who failed were hacked to death, their left ear cut off as proof by soldiers that they had killed Haitians.
Coverage from Miami public radio station WLRN notes that former dictator and forever mass murderer Rafael Trujillo had a Haitian grandmother, and powdered his face to appear whiter.
"I hope the film makes us see the horror of racism and xenophobia.”
Cabral agrees his film comes at a relevant moment. Not only because in recent years the Dominican Republic has enacted laws targeted at Haitians in the country that are widely decried as racist — including a constitutional reform that stripped millions of Haitian-Dominicans of citizenship — or that it’s now building a wall along its border with Haiti. But also because xenophobia is erupting around the world, from the U.S. southern border to South America, and from Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia.
“For me it’s a story about a family," Cabral said of his film. "It’s this community and how, because of things that they do not control, they were separated and things ended up tragically.
"I just want people to empathize with this human story.”
I covered some of the history mentioned here in 2013, while exploring the racist decision by the DR to make many Black Dominicans stateless. I included the 1983 poem Parsley by Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate of Virginia Rita Dove.
You can read it here, or watch the poet read it below.
Here’s hoping that this film helps open the eyes of more people to this horrific massacre, enabling them to gain a deeper understanding of current events in the DR and Haiti—which are rooted in a deep-seated history of racial animus and death.
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