Jeanne Perez ties antifeminism to being against the revolution

The league's writers made feminism familiar by routing it through the revolution of 1804, which every Haitian already accepted. In an essay asking whether one would be a feminist in Cap-Haitien, the editor Jeanne Perez used a recruiting drive to lodge the idea inside the memory of the old capital. Cap was a place of intellect, she wrote, so why would it not be feminist, and who would boast of opposing a movement whose whole demand was that women be better fed and better regarded? She closed with a cheer for the city of the great king and for feminism in the same breath, which made hostility to women's rights a form of stupidity and of disloyalty at once. A man might try to convince women they were fit only for servitude to male opinion, she added, but the qualities they were born with would wake like a giant. Perez also named the harm she was fighting. Someone wanted the memory of Sanite Belair, Marie-Jeanne Lamartiniere, Henriette Saint-Marc, Claire Heureuse and the women known as Madame Chevalier and Madame Pageot drowned, so that no later generation could copy them.

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.