86 contemporary poetry
interrogate history and reconstruct different narratives to those
archived or in historical textbooks.^65 Dove’s poem ‘Parsley’ shows
the horrifi c and absurd logic of a tyrant while using a formal poetic
pattern as a way of subverting hierarchy and authority. ‘Parsley’
approaches the horrifi c history of the Dominican Republic dictator
Rafael Trujillo’s command to massacre 20 , 000 Haitians for failing
to roll the letter ‘r’ in 1937. This act of genocide later became known
as the Parsley Massacre. To distinguish the Haitians, Trujillo’s
troops asked the inhabitants to pronounce perejil (the Spanish word
for parsley). Dove examines the political brutality of Trujillo’s
dictatorship and the politics of language. Her exploration of poetic
form raises important questions about the acquisition of tradi-
tions, and even their use as possible political subversion. Using the
strict form of the villanelle, the opening of the poem presents the
massacre from the Haitians’ point of view. This traditional form
with its governed metre and repetition of lines may seem coun-
terintuitive, but the constant echoing of key words such as ‘cane’,
‘imitating’, ‘parrot’ and ‘spring’ (p. 133 ) reinforces a sense of
claustrophobia and containment. Moreover, situating the Haitians’
words within a lineage of poetic tradition highlights the barbarity
of the incident, challenging Trujillo’s perspective of Haitians as
subaltern.
Controversially, ‘Parsley’ presents the absurd and perverted
logic of the dictator’s actions. Dove mentions: ‘It was important
to me to try to understand that arbitrary quality of his cruelty.’^66
The dictator’s equating of linguistic control with the assertion of
authority is clear, yet his voice in the poem is worked through in
free verse. One perceives the desperate attempts of the Haitians
to speak Spanish and save their lives – they sing ‘without R’s’: ‘mi
madle, mi amol en muelte’ (p. 135 ). Dove has written that ‘Parsley’
was a response to her fi rst encounter of the historical account of
the Haitian massacre; she explains that there was no explanation of
why Trujillo chose the word:
No mention of the French Creole spoken by the Haitians that
rendered their ‘R’s’ softly guttural, incapable of fl uttering at
the tip of the tongue. No description of the kind of execution,
what instruments were used and how quickly the terror pro-