… One Saturday in 1980, I was sitting with other writers in a bookshop in West Berlin, when a book on the opposite side of the room caught my eye. I might not have noticed this book if I hadn’t been slightly bored by the literary gossip of our group, many of whom had been meeting for brunch every Saturday for years — actually, a brunch consisting of nothing more than champagne and strong coffee, laced with the pungent strains of chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes. Gasping for fresh air, I got up and crossed the room.
The book was oversized, displayed at the hip level on a shelf of art books,. I was intrigued not only by its striking coloration — brilliant green on white — but by its peculiar title as well: PETERSILIE — which, in English , means parsley. What could a book with such a title possibly be about?
Hubert Fichte, a respected German novelist, was the author. The book was studded with photographs of palm trees and tanks; the accompanying text chronicled the atrocities committed during the reign of General Raphael Trujillo, longtime dictator of the Dominican Republic. And the title? On the frontispiece, finally, I found Fichte’s laconic explanation: On October 2, 1937, Trujillo had ordered 20,000 Haitian cane workers executed because they could not roll the “R” in perejil, the Spanish word for parsley.
That was it, no further explanation of why the general chose this particular word, or what the Haitians were doing in the Dominican Republic in the first place. No mention of the French Creole spoken by the Haitians that rendered there “R’s” softly guttural, incapable of fluttering at the tip of the tongue. No description of the kind of execution, what instruments were used and how quickly the terror proceeded, no clue to the General’s state of mind at the time. Just the bald facts: 20,000 dead, over a word.
That’s from the beginning of a beautiful essay, Writing “Parsley” by Rita Dove from the book, Introspections: American Poets on One of Their Own Poems, edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini (1993).
-Julie
Language Log mentioned this a while back – HMMs at the fords of Ephraim – and the Wikipedia article. This is the so-called Parsley Massacre: ethnic cleansing of the border region between the Dominican Republic and Haiti to establish political/economic control (inasmuch as any practical motive is discernable – the long history of antihaitianismo is pretty relevant too). The word was a shibboleth – the ability to pronounce a flapped/trilled “r” – to distinguish Spanish-speaking Dominicans from Creole-speaking Haitians.
Comment by Ray Girvan — April 16, 2009 @ 10:11 am
Thanks Ray. Very interesting additional details.
Dove said she researched and verified, but she didn’t go into exactly what she found.
Comment by unrealnature — April 16, 2009 @ 11:06 am