A boy born at Gonaives will give marvellous realism its name

Jacques Stephen Alexis was born in 1922 at Gonaives, the town where independence had been proclaimed in 1804, into a family already carrying literary and political weight. He trained as a doctor and became a novelist. His importance rests on two things. He was the leading Marxist writer of his generation in Haiti, and he was the theorist of what he called marvellous realism, the argument that the ordinary imaginative life of the Haitian countryside, its saints, its lwa and its way of telling the world, was working material for serious modern art. Latin American writers reached similar formulations later and collected the credit. Alexis put the case in Haitian terms first. He was born during the American occupation, came of age in the student movements that ended the government of 1946, and was killed in 1961 after landing on the northern coast to move against Francois Duvalier. The line from Gonaives to that beach is one Haitian century inside a single life.

The assembly elected in 1923 opened on 11 August, ratified the Lausanne treaty, and in October made Ankara the capital. On 29 October it amended the constitutional act passed two years earlier, and the country became a republic. The presidency went to Mustafa Kemal. Ismet Pasha took office as the first prime minister under the new arrangement. The change followed from the principle of national sovereignty that the assembly had claimed since 1920, and it began a new ideological direction. The nationalism of the war of liberation had grown out of populist ideas and religious loyalty and had served to fix the territory. The nationalism that came after the republic aimed to rebuild the state on a secular western model. From this point the words Turk and Turkey appear in the leaders' speeches in a national sense where they had previously carried a religious one, and pan Islamism and pan Turanism were both discarded.

On 10 March 1922 the old battleship North Dakota carried General John Russell down the Gulf of La Gonave toward Port-au-Prince. He had smelled the city once before, as a midshipman in 1893, and had written in his journal that it was the filthiest place he had ever set eyes on and that he hoped never to return. He went ashore the next morning as American high commissioner, met by the magistrat communal, an honour guard of gendarmes, the palace band and a crowd well practised at cheering new rulers of Haiti. His first directive settled the shape of the next eight years. All correspondence between treaty officials and the Haitian government, Washington or each other would pass through his office, and no statement of policy, draft law or budget line could issue without his approval. The Haitian president, his ministers and the Conseil d'Etat kept the ceremony. Russell kept the valve. He compared the arrangement openly to Lord Cromer's Egypt, one foreign race governing a second in order to rule a third.

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races put much of its money into sending investigators abroad, and the most consequential of those journeys was Addie Hunton's visit to Haiti in 1926. Her guides in Port-au-Prince were Eugenie Malbranche-Sylvain and Therese Hudicourt. Six years earlier those two had walked two hundred women through the same streets in protest; now they walked an American through the places where the occupation had done its damage. What came out of the trip was a report of 180 pages called Occupied Haiti. Its subtitle described the authors as six disinterested Americans, from organisations that were American through and through, who had looked at conditions on the ground themselves and wanted the independence of the republic given back. The conclusion was that the United States military should go, and go at once. The title alone did work that argument could not. Americans who had been told the occupation was a favour to Haiti were reading Americans who had gone to see and come home asking for withdrawal.