A Saint-Marc committee with officers and a treasury takes the league inland

The Saint-Marc branch of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale was run by Carmen Marcelin as vice president, Myrta Lanier as secretary general and Marie Aline Ade as her assistant, with Dina Jumelle holding the money and Vida D'Meza assisting her. Marie Coliman, Marie Nahoum, Beatrice Verna and D. Alexis completed the committee. The detail is worth recording for what it rules out. A national organisation can put its name on a provincial town by writing a letter. This one had officers, a treasury and members on the ground, which meant decisions could be taken at Saint-Marc without waiting on Port-au-Prince, and money could be raised and spent there. Haitian political life ran through the capital and always had. The league was assembling a second layer underneath it, in towns where women had no vote, no seat in the chamber and no prospect of either, and it was giving the members of that layer titles and duties in writing.

At a rally in Trafalgar Square James, as chairman of the International African Friends of Abyssinia, declared that the Ethiopian crisis had produced a union of sentiment among black people in Africa, America, the West Indies and everywhere else, and that its cause was theirs to defend by every means available. Hogsbjerg shows the Haitian material feeding directly into the campaign. James argued that Toussaint had beaten European armies through a ruthless guerrilla war fought from the mountains and that the Ethiopian victory at Adwa in 1896 had been won in a comparable way, by scorched earth and retreat into high ground before falling on a cut-off Italian column. He urged an Ethiopian audience to destroy their country rather than hand it over. The committee even considered raising an international brigade in Britain.

In 1937, two years after the border treaty was signed, Haitians living on the Dominican side of the frontier were killed in large numbers. Jean Price Mars called it an abominable drama, a sinister episode and a terrible butchery, and read it as a challenge and a provocation to war. The official Dominican account described painful incidents among Haitian marauders who had been looting settlers. What puzzled Price Mars most was how readily the Haitian government accepted a settlement with the Trujillo administration, and he reported a conversation with a Dominican public figure suggesting that eminent Haitians had connived in it. The killing became a fixed point in Haitian popular memory and, for many Dominicans as well, a symbol of barbarism. It also fitted a policy. Trujillo was planting agricultural colonies along the border to make the zone Dominican, while Dominican migration law went on permitting Haitian labour in the sugar industry.

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.