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

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Description

Like two roosters in a fighting arena, Haiti and the Dominican Republic are encircled by barriers of geography and poverty. They co-inhabit the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, but their histories are as deeply divided as their cultures: one French-speaking and black, one Spanish-speaking and mulatto. Yet, despite their antagonism, the two countries share a national symbol in the rooster–and a fundamental activity and favorite sport in the cockfight. In this book, Michele Wucker asks: “If the symbols that dominate a culture appropriately express a nation’s character, what kind of a country draws so heavily on images of cockfighting and roosters, birds bred to be aggressive? What does it mean when not one but two countries that are neighbors choose these symbols? Why do the cocks fight, and why do humans watch and glorify them?”

Wucker studies the cockfight ritual in considerable detail, focusing as much on the customs and histories of these two nations as on their contemporary lifestyles and politics. Her well-cited and comprehensive volume also explores the relations of each nation toward the United States, which twice invaded both Haiti (in 1915 and 1994) and the Dominican Republic (in 1916 and 1965) all through the twentieth century. Just as the owners of gamecocks contrive battles between their birds as a way of playing out human conflicts, Wucker argues, Haitian and Dominican leaders frequently fan the flames of nationalist disputes and exaggerate their cultural and racial differences as a way of deflecting other kinds of turmoil. Thus Why the Cocks Fight highlights the factors in Caribbean history that still have an effect on Hispaniola today, including the frequently contradictory policies of the united states

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 affect 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 grow to be a totemic image for the writer, 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 can be a fine historical primer, buoyed along by Wucker’s graceful, observant prose style. –Maria Dolan

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