The emperor's daughter puts on a nurse's cap and Haiti takes the lesson

News reached Port-au-Prince that a daughter of Haile Selassie had joined other Ethiopian women nursing the wounded of the Italian war. La Voix des Femmes celebrated her and tied her service to its own campaign to expand nursing training for Haitian women. Some months later Jeanne Perez ran three pages under the title Our Nurses, arguing that any woman, whether enslaved or an artist or a worker or a queen, is pulled toward a sick person by an impulse she cannot explain, and that women are born nurses as they are born mothers. Making the work sacred also made it national service. It reopened a problem the league never solved. Its members were unsure how to praise women's care without conceding that self-sacrifice was women's nature. Darlene Clark Hine's research on Black nurses shows why the work was so easy to celebrate: it threatened no existing arrangement between men and women. League members reached for motherhood because the available language offered nothing better. Perez called the nurses battalions and their white uniforms armour.

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.

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.