A feminist paper and the noiriste Griots quote the same Turkish leader

Every number of La Voix des Femmes opened with the same epigraph, from Kemal Ataturk: a people split into two categories, men on one side and women on the other, will always be weak. The Griots, the ethnological circle around Francois Duvalier and Lorimer Denis, admired Ataturk too. In the mid 1930s the league, the Griots and the socialists agreed on more than that. All three backed anticolonial movements abroad and all three distrusted the transitional government of Stenio Vincent. In its issue of August 1936 the newspaper praised an essay by Duvalier and Denis attacking Haitian deference to French thought, which asked why Black students should be taught Clovis and Joan of Arc when they had Louverture, Dessalines and Henry Christophe. Madeleine Sylvain had made the same argument months earlier, blaming a national sense of inferiority on the country's fixation with France and asking what people could claim a better past. By the 1940s the two readings of Ataturk had separated, the Griots folding him into noiriste politics while the league stayed clear of party alignment.

A regional census in 1935 recorded more than fifty thousand Haitians living in the Dominican Republic. The count was low. Many more had crossed the border without papers and were never entered in any register, which is the ordinary condition of migrant cane labour anywhere. They were there because Dominican sugar needed cutters and Haitian land could no longer feed the people standing on it. The estates paid badly, the work was seasonal, and the population settled into the sugar towns near the mills and along the frontier. Dominican nationalists had by this point identified those workers as the country's central problem. The rhetoric coming out of Santo Domingo through the middle of the decade described the presence of Haitians as an invasion of the national body. The country's own sugar industry had arranged for them to be there. Two years after this census, Trujillo's soldiers began killing Haitians along the border in numbers no census taker ever established.

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.

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.