Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola [Hardcover]

Michele Wucker (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 080903719X | ISBN-13: 978-0809037193 | Publication Date: January 1999 | Edition: 1st

An eye-opening report on two hostile neighbors.

Like two roosters in a fighting arena, the Dominican Republic and Haiti are encircled by barriers of geography and poverty. They share one Caribbean island, Hispaniola, but their histories are as deeply divided as their cultures: one French-speaking and black, one Spanish-speaking and mulatto. And just as the owners of gamecocks contrive battles between their birds (a favorite sport in both countries) as a way of playing out human conflicts, Haitian and Dominican leaders often stir up nationalist disputes and exaggerate their cultural and racial differences as a way of deflecting other kinds of turmoil.

Michele Wucker's vivid account of these struggles both on Hispaniola and in the United States takes us to the haunted mountains where, sixty years ago, the Dominican dictator Trujillo ordered 30,000 Haitians to be killed; to Vodou rituals in Dominican sugarcane fields where Haitians work as virtual slaves; and to the ringside of cockfights in all three countries. She focuses especially on the features in Caribbean history that are still affecting Hispaniola today, including the often contradictory policies of the United States toward both nations.

Wucker's report on the life of Dominican and Haitian migrants in the United States is essential if we are to understand their contribution to the politics of our hemisphere.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Caribbean island of Hispaniola is home to historic, ongoing strife between two countries deeply divided by race, language, and history yet forced constantly into confrontation by their shared geography. In her first book, American journalist Michele Wucker reports from both Haiti and the Dominican Republic on the complex relations between these two cultures and sheds light on the sources of their struggles both in their island home and in the United States.

This book is charged from the start with the violence and posturing of blood sport, as Wucker observes her first Haitian cockfight: "The air cracks with the impact of stiffened feathers as each bird tries to push the other to the ground. Around the ring, the Haitian men shout to one another and wave dirty wads of gourdes in the air, seeking bets.... Soon, the feathers of both cocks are slick with blood." Popular in both countries, these fights become a totemic image for the author, who finds in them, as in the many clashes between Hispaniola's two cultures, "both division and community, opposite sides of the same coin." This is a fine historical primer, buoyed along by Wucker's graceful, observant prose style. --Maria Dolan

From Publishers Weekly

The U.S. has sent troops to Haiti and the Dominican Republic four times in this century, twice to each country. In the last 20 years, reports Wucker, one-eighth of the population of the island of Hispaniola has emigrated to the U.S. Wucker, a freelance journalist, delves much deeper than mere numbers and chronology, supplementing her knowledge of the island's history with a great sense of the fabric of everyday life in the two countries. While each chapter is discrete enough to stand alone, cumulatively they create a passionate mural of the often bloody relationship between wary neighbors. Among the critical issues and events Wucker addresses are the role of geography as a barrier, European settlement, slave revolts, the role of the sugar industry and the experience of Dominican and Haitian immigrants in the U.S. Wucker's treatment of Dominican racism toward Haitians is particularly good, capturing the nuance and ambivalence at work when two peoples who are not nearly as different as they would sometimes like to believe are stuck together on a small piece of land with limited resources. Throughout the book, Wucker uses the metaphor of cockfighting, presenting the countries as two roosters forced (sometimes by the U.S.) to battle in a small, enclosed ring. If she relies a bit too heavily on this trope, Wucker more than makes up for the minor indulgence with her insightful treatment of many cultural issues, particularly the politicized nature of language, to which she brings an understanding of Creole, Spanish and French. Clear prose and vivid scenes of life at street level make Wucker's first book a marvelous immersion experience in the clash and conciliation of cultures on a small, embattled island next door. (Jan.) FYI: Why the Cocks Fight makes good companion reading to Edwidge Danticat's novel, The Farming of Bones (Forecasts, June 8.)
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 281 pages
• Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub; 1st edition (January 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080903719X
• ISBN-13: 978-0809037193
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (26 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #203,932 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

So very much of what I write about goes back to the summer I spent with my great-aunt and -uncle in Belgium the year I was 16. Our family spoke French but lived in a Flemish suburb of Brussels, where the simplest purchase at a store involved a moment of hesitation over what language to speak. Since then, I have been fascinated by the ways that differences in culture and language affect how people get along. My French studies led me to Haiti, which shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic, and thus to a study of the politics of language and culture. Immigration --from Haiti to the Dominican Republic and from both countries to the United States-- was central to these questions, which are explored in my first book, WHY THE COCKS FIGHT. In turn, Dominican and Haitian immigrants' stories led me to investigate my own family's immigrant past. Expecting to write about the differences between a hundred years ago and today, I was stunned to find far more similarities than I would have thought based on everything I learned. My new book, LOCKOUT, is the result of my surprising findings and an account of the price that we are paying for the wrong lessons we have been taught.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A+, September 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (Hardcover)

The author bravely tackles a tricky, thorny subject that (as you can see from one of the reviews below) is bound to offend many on the island of Hispaniola but in truth is not a condemnation of Dominican culture from a supposedly superior perspective. In point of fact, the author's lucid analysis of the interplay of race and identity on this small but historically seminal island has much to say about the unspoken interplay of race and identity in our own country and throughout the New World. One of the finest of the many rhetorical maneuvers on the part of Ms Wucker is a description of the many supernatural beings thought to inhabit the border between these two countries: blue-skinned ciguapas, the souls of dead Taino women who fled to these mountains to escape the rapacious Spaniards, and bien-bienes, the ghosts of escaped slaves whose cry inflicts all who hear it with perpetual melancholy. Through the clarity of her analysis, Ms Wucker shows us how the ghosts of European conquest and African slavery still haunt all of our cultures five centuries after Columbus.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Almost, October 23, 2003

By 

Kevin L. Nenstiel "omnivore" (Kearney, Nebraska) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (Hardcover)

We've needed a book that addresses Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the context of one another. Both keep cropping up in the news, and both keep trying to tear chunks out of each other. A meaningful study of the two nations together would make all the difference in the world in sorting out the important issues. But this isn't that book.

Oh, it's informative. It's also very close to being up to date, having been published in 1999. Wucker, who has written for Dominican newspapers in the U.S., knows whereof she speaks. But this book doesn't really treat both nations.

There's a great deal on the Dominican Republic. The convoluted history of the nation in the Twentieth Century has never been so eloquently explicated. It's a history of shifting alliances, powerful people, anger, justice, injustice, and more. And every bit of it helps in understanding the ins and outs of why so many Dominicans are coming to America and why we should care.

But Haiti glides by under the radar screen. Most of the material about Haiti in this book is actually about Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. The political information on Haiti seems to come almost entirely out of history books. Wucker travelled extensively in the Dominican Republic, but to judge by the contents of this book, she may have made one or two day trips across the border into Haiti, that's it.

Striking the balance between Dominican and Haitian issues is difficult, both on Hispaniola and in studies thereof. Ms. Wucker has tried to do so, and she's to be commended for that. Indeed, she's come closer to succeeding than anyone else in recent memory. However, this book is almost entirely one-sided, and just can't quite make the leap into usefulness.

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the single most important book on the subject in recent time, June 3, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola (Hardcover)

I wish my review to stand as a rebuttal to the earlier mean-spirited and mis-informed commentary (all in caps, in true froth-at-the-mouth illiterate style) that is less of a genuine review and more of an ad hominem attack upon the author, her methods and her intentions.

First, my prejudice and qualifications.

I'm a former professional colleague of the author of Why The Cocks Fight. I've known the author Michele Wucker for about 11 or 12 years since we first worked together on a newspaper in the Dominican Republic and then later in New York for a Dominican newspaper. During that entire time I've watched her diligent and careful gathering of information and interviews for this book.

The most casual reading of the book will reveal genuine and deep affection for both the Dominican and Haitian people. Her book is clearly intended to illuminate and enrich the dialog between those people and to serve their best interests with the hope they will enjoy a better future. She offers no excuses for the failings of the United States in the past and present that have aggravated the problems of the people of Hispaniola. Likewise, she does not spare those in those two lands who have and continue to fail themselves and betray their own peoples. Most important of all, she does not make the mistake of offering some well-intentioned simplistic solution as a substitute for one that only those who must live with it can develop and employ.

The book does all of this in excellent style. One may, if one wishes, quibble about the significance of any single reported event compared to another event not mentioned. One may disagree with her emphasis or analysis. But her facts are solid and complete. Her language is rich and evocative.

As someone else has said, if you have any love of the island of Hispaniola and entertain any hopes for its future, this is the single most important book on the subject that has been published in recent times in this country or there.