It is easy to say that one can better connect themselves to an enchanting and stimulating fiction novel over a dull, monotonous textbook. However, fiction and nonfiction are increasingly beginning to mock each other, as fiction tries to emulate the factual nature of nonfiction, and nonfiction tries to imitate the entertainment fiction provides. As the distinction between the two becomes less clear, so does the stigma that nonfiction is mind-numbing, tedious, and purely factual. On the other hand, fiction is now being used as a means to educate readers about the past. Pieces like “Farming of the Bones” by Edwidge Danticat and “Parsley” by Rita Dove, are not direct accounts, and yet they can teach so much about the brutal Parsley Massacre.…show more content… It provides a gateway for the reader to enter into the events of the Parsley Massacre and to not only learn about it, but to be entirely absorbed into it. After reading this piece, I was shocked to discover that Danticat was not a survivor of the massacre herself. I was so sure that this was a retelling of the events she lived through and witnessed, but she was not even alive at the time of the Parsley Massacre. In reality, this novel was published almost eighty years after the tragedy in the Dominican Republic took place. Although born in Haiti, Danticat spent the majority of her life living in the United States. She was inspired to write to “Farming of the Bones” after she made a visit to the “Massacre River” in the mid-1990s. When she arrived at this place that once saw so much brutality and bloodshed, she was appalled. Most of the natives were completely unaware of the terrible things that happened on the river less than a century ago. Danticat was taken aback that the Trujillo regime, and the destruction it brought, had been forgotten. Impassioned, she decided to write a novel in order raise awareness of this forgotten massacre