Why the Cocks Fight

¶ … Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola The American writer and free lance journalist Michele Wucker in her first book has written about both Haiti and the Dominican Republic complex relations in terms of their cultures and on the sources of their great effort both in their island home as well as in the United States. According to the book, the Caribbean island of Hispaniola is home to historic, where this continuing conflict between two countries has been intensely separated by language, race and history.

However, at the same time it has been forced continuously into argument by their shared geography. The book is emotional from the beginning with the fighting and posturing of blood sport, as observed by the writer in her first Haitian cockfight (1): 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 (1)." The journalist Wucker has used the metaphor of cockfighting throughout the book, portraying the countries as two roosters forced to combat in a small and enclosed cockpit. Her clear writing style and brilliant scenes of life at street level make her book a wonderful fascinating feel and experience in the fight and pacification of cultures on a small, beleaguered island (1).

About the book On the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, there exist two countries: the Dominican Republic - Spanish-speaking and mixed-race; and Haiti- Francophone, black and mulatto. Even though, they have vital similarities, yet their differences are more major and considerable. And despite their rivalry, both share a national symbol in the rooster which is an important activity and favorite sport in the cockfight (1).

Michele Wucker asks: If the symbols that dominate a culture accurately 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?" Thus, Wucker basically has looked at this cultural divide that is between these two neighbors right from the colonial period to the current period.

According to her, the root of the conflict is the politically sensitive issue of immigration from Haiti to the Dominican Republic and claimed that this racial difference between the two populations has & is still intensifying the crisis. Both Haiti and the Dominican Republic surrounded by wall of geography and poverty are just like two roosters in a fighting stadium. They together inhabit the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, but with separate histories in their cultures (1).

In addition, the author studied not only the cockfight ritual in significant detail, but she has also focused as much on the civilization and past of these two countries as of that period lifestyles and politics. She has given well-cited and complete volume that explored the relations of both nations toward the United States, which during the twentieth century twice occupied both Haiti in 1915 and 1994 and the Dominican Republic in 1916 and 1965 (2).

Wucker argued that just as the owners of gamecocks arrange fights between their birds as a method of playing out human conflicts. In the same manner Haitian and Dominican leaders regularly trigger up nationalist disagreements and overstress their cultural and racial differences as their way of repelling other types of turmoil. Thus, in other words "Why the Cocks Fight" emphasizes the factors in Caribbean history that even now affect Hispaniola, which also includes the frequent clashing policies of the United States (2).

In addition to many positive points of the book, one negative aspect of the book is that Wucker's focus is the repeatedly tortured relationship between Haitians and Dominicans. Wucker contends these cocks fight for territory and control in a ring of an island. Their bets are cultural and psychological to the extent that these are sometimes a matter of life and death - a fight that has been going on for centuries (2).

Analysis of the Book This book, along with the island's gruesome and horrid past and the constant sadness, has more to it, as Wucker neither idealizes nor fiends Haitians and Dominicans. She shows the other side of the island, that fashioned Papa Doc and Baby Doc, also as the fostering ground for the thorough Catholic mystic and ex-president Jean Baptiste Aristide, or the melody of Boukman Eksperyans and Jean Luis Guerra, or Sammy Sosa, the previous shoeshine boy who triumphed baseball and America's compassion last summer (3).

Wucker's expression grips you in taking you into the world of its characters making them real e.g.

In the miniature rooms of Haitian traders behind the bazaar in Santo Domingo, prepared to disappear at the sounds of the arrival of the authorities; or in the cockfighting grounds on either parts of the island as birds slash at each other while men hysterically gamble, the probability always shifting during the match (3), expertly using it as a metaphor for the changing and complex dynamics of the two estranged societies; or in the bamboo pastures where Haitian men yield bamboo under an unremitting sun for a few dollars per day (3).

Not only that, she also expertly depicts the people that influenced her life on the island creating solicitous and challenging environment for their lives, delving the often-conflicting facts that these amalgamated societies present (3). Most of the matter particularly the political facts about Haiti in this book, coming almost wholly from the history manuscripts, is in reality about Haitians residing in the Dominican Republic.

But even though Wucker had toured widely in the Dominican Republic, it seems from the context that she may have had a couple of daytime drives athwart the limit into Haiti, only. Verily this book is about how the Haitians live under the constant but struggling domination of the Dominican Republic and how the Dominicans scrutinize the civilization or quite, the less than creature grade of the Haitians (3).

The approach that the Haitians took against the Dominicans was not discussed at all in this book as it only centered on the connection between the two cultures presenting the Dominican Republic as oppressors, even possible executioners of the Haitians. Conclusion The name is.