A Port-au-Prince journal warns about the rhetoric crossing the border

On 30 October 1935 L'Assaut ran an editorial on the racial tension between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, warning that the anti-Haitian rhetoric coming from the far side of the frontier carried real danger. The warning was two years early and entirely correct. Fifty thousand Haitians or more were then cutting cane and living on Dominican territory, and Rafael Trujillo's government was building a nationalism defined against them, in language about blood, colour and the purity of the border provinces. Haitian writers could read Dominican newspapers. What they could not do was much about it. Haiti in 1935 had a president occupied with extending his own term, an army the Americans had trained and left behind, and no leverage of any kind over its neighbour. The editorial appeared in a journal read by a few thousand people in the capital. In October 1937 the Dominican army began killing Haitians in the border provinces, and estimates of the dead start in the thousands.

The Stage Society mounted two performances at the seven hundred and thirty seat Westminster Theatre, a Sunday evening show followed by a matinee. Hogsbjerg identifies what made them a first. Black professional actors from across the diaspora, led by Paul Robeson and including Robert Adams as Dessalines and Orlando Martins as Boukman, appeared on the British stage in a play written by a black playwright. Admission required at least a guinea, the annual subscription to a society founded in 1899 to evade the Lord Chamberlain's censorship through private performances. To fit two shows James had cut three scenes from the eleven-scene script, which removed Toussaint's wife and sons entirely. At the second performance James stepped in himself for the absent actor playing Macoya and took the applause as author from the stage.

The mountains that became the commune of Kenscoff were thin country under the French. The large sugar planters held the plains, and the estates up here belonged to men like Robin de Kenscoff and Lefebure de Fourcy, with few installations and few slaves. Most of those slaves came from the Lower Congo. Some had come from further up the river and been sold on the lower stretch, which is why a small settlement near Furcy was still called Nan Congo in 1937, and why a distinctive type of hut was found there. Many of them had arrived recently and were proud of having been born in Africa. In the lineage cemeteries of the region the inscriptions read like this: the person's name, the word African, a date of birth and a date of death. After the revolution some of their descendants obtained state grants of sixty to ninety acres and farmed them as owners.

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.