A gingerbread mansion becomes the most famous hotel in Haiti

The Hotel Oloffson opened in Port-au-Prince in 1935 in a nineteenth century Gothic Revival gingerbread mansion that had been the home of a former president, Tirésias Simon Sam. During the occupation the Americans used the building as a military hospital. A Swede named Werner Gustav Oloffson leased it afterward and turned it into an inn for foreign visitors. Its fame arrived through a novel. Graham Greene used it as the model for the Hotel Trianon in The Comedians, published in 1966, a book that put the terror of the Duvalier regime in front of an international readership which had been paying no attention at all. The doors of the rooms carried the names of famous former occupants. The Oloffson kept its trade through dictatorship, coups and embargo, and it came through the 2010 earthquake standing, one of the few landmarks in Port-au-Prince that the collapse left intact.

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.

Trujillo gave a reason for the October 1937 killings. The frontier had to be de-Africanised, and Dominican life, which he described as European, had to be protected from what lay on the other side of it. Thousands of Haitians in the borderlands died to serve that sentence. The reasoning repays a moment's attention, because it inverts the geography it claims to defend. Both halves of Hispaniola were built by enslaved Africans and their descendants. Santo Domingo was receiving captives from the Atlantic trade before the French colony on the western third existed. The population Trujillo was defending was substantially African in descent, and his own family was no exception, which is precisely why the killers on the ground needed a pronunciation test to tell one dark-skinned person from another. A state can declare itself white by decree. It then has to go hunting for the people the decree is aimed at, and it cannot see them.

In March 1932 the Paris journal La Revue du Monde Noir carried an article by Georges Hardy on what Black artists across the world had contributed. The journal was short lived and it mattered out of all proportion to its run. It appeared in French and English, which let Haitian writers, African American writers and Africans living in Paris read one another without a translator standing in between. That readership is what an article of this kind served. It presented a body of Black artistic achievement as a single subject rather than as a set of local curiosities, and it fed a sense of racial pride among an international group of intellectuals who had until then been working inside separate national conversations. For Haitians, whose country was under American military occupation, the journal supplied evidence that their own indigenist argument belonged to something larger. Ideas that later hardened into political movements were circulating first as literary criticism.