Piquion starts translating Langston Hughes into French for Haiti

In June 1933 René Piquion began publishing his translations of Langston Hughes in the literary journal La Relève. Hughes was the most widely read poet of the Harlem Renaissance, a writer who used the rhythms of the blues and the speech of working people and refused the polite subjects expected of Black writers in the United States. Piquion put him into French for Haitian readers at a moment when Haitian writers were arguing about that exact question, whether a literature should be built from the language and life of the majority or from European models. Translation was the argument conducted in practice. Hughes later visited Haiti and knew Jacques Roumain, whose novel Gouverneurs de la rosée he would translate into English after Roumain died. The traffic ran in both directions across the water. A generation of Black writers in two countries held by the same American power were reading, translating and answering one another.

Sténio Vincent named Tuesday 21 August 1934 the day of the second independence. Nobody waited for it. The balls started on the 18th at the Cercle Bellevue, carried on the next night at the Port-au-Princien, and the country went into days of bamboche. At midnight on the 20th a gun sounded from Fort National and the cheering ran from Bel Air to Morne l'Hôpital. In the morning monsignors Conan and Le Gouaze sang a Te Deum where the clergy stood white and the altar boys Black. Then the president drove through the city scattering freshly printed gourde notes into the crowd, laid wreaths at the statues of Toussaint Louverture and Dessalines, and ran up the colours himself at the barracks. At the review that followed, a new Garde Présidentielle appeared under Major Durcé Armand, a relative of the president. Colonel Calixte led the officers in an oath of personal loyalty to Vincent. The oath the Americans wrote had bound them to the constitution.

James arrived in London and moved in May to the Lancashire cotton town of Nelson to stay with the family of the Trinidadian professional cricketer Learie Constantine. He was there officially to help Constantine write his autobiography, but it was Constantine who arranged for a local Nelson printing firm to publish James's own book on the Trinidad labour leader Cipriani. Hogsbjerg stresses that this was the manuscript James had carried from Trinidad and that once it was sent back to the West Indies he considered himself free for his real work, which he expected to be a second novel. The play displaced the novel instead. James later put it that fiction writing drained out of him and was replaced by politics, a shift driven by his campaigning for West Indian self-government.

These identifications were collected in the north of Haiti and hold for that region, since the pairings shift from one part of the country to another. Legba, the great master, the father, the familiar god of the Dahomeans, became Saint Anthony, probably Anthony the hermit, since the saint is shown with a black cock in place of a pig. Ougou Balindjo became Saint James the Greater. Agomme Tonnerre became John the Baptist. Daguy Bologuay became Saint Joseph, prayed to in words asking him to lead the petitioner as he led Mary into Egypt. The King of Aoueseau became Saint Louis, king of France. Grande Mambo Batala became Saint Anne. Maitresse Erzulie became the Virgin, and specifically the Virgin of the Nativity. La Sirene became the Assumption. Pierre d'Ambala became Saint Peter. Lesser deities found their own counterparts among the blessed, and a whole literature of written prayers followed the same road.