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Literature, Tattoos... ...continued from page 11
by various audiences and imbued with personal significance. I have an Atwood quote tattoo, but mine is from her 1971 novel Surfacing . It reads, “This above all, to refuse to be a victim.” Precolonization, the Māori of New Zealand covered their faces with tattoos, known as moko , to designate their social status. The practice has been revived in more contemporary times. Alternately, tattoos are also subject to misinterpretation and willful manipulation. The Nazis tattooed concentration camp prisoners with numbers, removing their names and rendering them data to be fed into the machines of the Final Solution. In March of 2025, the Trump administration used tattoos to target immigrants, deporting over 230 Venezuelans to a brutal prison in El Salvador based on their possess - ing what it deemed to be gang-related tattoos. And according to CNN reporter Eric Levenson, last year the Texas Department of Public Safe - ty identified tattoos it deemed to be connected to [the gang] Tren de Aragua, noting that many of those were “relatively common: stars on the shoulder, royal crowns, firearms, trains, dice, roses, tigers and jag - uars. A photo collage of the tattoos even includes a Nike ‘Jumpman’ logo and Michael Jordan’s number 23 jersey number as an identifier of gang membership.” Parallels and Possible Futures In my Literature and Resistance class, we also read Edwidge Danti - cat’s The Farming of Bones (1998), a novel about the historical Pars- ley Massacre in the Dominican Republic (DR) in 1937, a five-day peri - od that constituted the genocide of 20,000 plus Haitians at the hands of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, the dictator who peddled fear of the Haitian immigrant population to the residents of the Dominican Republic. In Danticat’s novel, Trujillo speaks: “Tradition shows us a fatal fact . . . that under the protection of rivers, the enemies of peace, who are also the enemies of work and prosperity, found an ambush in which they might do their work, keeping the nation in fear and menacing sta- bility.” The Massacre River, the liminal space between the two coun - tries on the island of Hispaniola, is the space of the genocide; it is at once the wall and the safe passage. The pronunciation of “pési, perejil, parsley” was the shibboleth that determined whether one was killed, cut down with machetes, or lived. The Dominicans believed that the Haitians couldn’t roll the letter “r” correctly, so the words that the Hai- tians spoke became the text that condemned or saved them. I recently had a student from the DR. Her grandfather was tortured by Trujillo’s regime; she told us how Trujillo’s men pulled out her grandfather’s fingernails while interrogating him. “My grandmother has more stories, if you want them,” she said. In the novel, the Haitian protagonist Amabelle is tortured as she tries to escape, and she notes years later, “Now my flesh was simply a map of scars and bruises, a marred testament.” Her resistance is written on her body by hands other than her own. Such a thing could happen here, I told the student. During the Parsley Massacre, Trujillo’s government made the Hai - tians disappear. Last week, someone I know was stopped by a cop for speeding and vanished. He is an immigrant from Mexico, and I have no idea where he is. The similarities between Trujillo’s pronounce- ments of the Haitians and Donald Trump’s policies targeting refugees and immigrants should not be lost, here. The line between dehuman- ization and elimination was already thin, and I’m afraid that we have now crossed it. I want to end with another work by Margaret Atwood. Her 2003 novel Oryx and Crake is a dystopian work of speculative fiction like The Handmaid’s Tale that engages with catastrophic human-made crises that are already happening: mass extinction, global warming,
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34—PATHWAYS—Fall 25
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