Perez picks the butterfly over the moth and means it

Perez told her niece to be baptised again and again in the heat of the revolutionary promise. The creature she chose to carry that image repays attention. A writer reaching for an animal drawn to flame would ordinarily take the papillon de nuit, the moth. Perez wrote papillon, the butterfly, which flies in daylight. That leaves a very narrow opening, and Grace Sanders Johnson thinks Perez knew how narrow it was. One small family of butterflies, the Hedylidae, carries dark brown and black wings through Caribbean nights toward light. Perez was born in Haiti and had travelled the country for her work in law, education, literature and theatre, so its animals were within her reach. The distinction decides what happens at the flame. A moth is destroyed by the light it goes to. The lovers of light Perez described came away from the fire charged.

American oil operations in the Arabian peninsula expanded steadily from 1935, finding new fields, building refineries and laying pipelines from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Revenue on that scale reached the governments of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq and gave them something no ruler in the region had held before, which was money enough to develop their own resources, raise living standards and lend to Arab states that had no oil. The same oil was a large source of income for the foreign companies and a matter of importance to the economies of western Europe, so protecting it became part of western politics in the Near East. Zeine lists oil production alongside the founding of Israel, the arrival of the United States and the Soviet Union in the region, and the Egyptian revolution of 1952 as the five things that shaped everything afterwards.

For three days and nights beginning 2 October 1937, Trujillo's forces killed Haitians along the Dominican frontier. Estimates run from fifteen thousand to twenty thousand. The border river is the Massacre, named in 1728 for the killing of a band of boucaniers by Spanish colonists, so the place had the name two centuries before it earned it again. Machetes were used rather than rifles so the state could describe it as a spontaneous act by Dominican farmers. The parsley test, making people say perejil to catch a Kreyòl speaker's r, is remembered because it turned language into a death sentence. Haiti eventually accepted a settlement of about thirty dollars a head, of which very little reached any family. I want the two facts adjacent: a river already named for a massacre, and a payment of thirty dollars per person. Both are things a state chose.

The river dividing Ouanaminthe from Dajabon has been called the Massacre since 1728, when Spanish colonists cut down a party of French buccaneers on it. Beginning on 2 October 1937 the Dominican army and national police spent three days and nights killing Haitians along that river and as far off as Samana Bay, Barahona and San Pedro de Macoris. Heinl puts the dead at fifteen to twenty thousand. Orders specified clubs and machetes over rifles, so that nothing recovered from a body would point at the state, and at Santiago the killing squads worked in shifts as their arms tired. Men were marched down the customs wharf at Montecristi and clubbed into deep water. Others were told they were boarding ships for Haiti. There were no ships. President Vincent said nothing until 9 October. Trujillo settled in January 1938 for 750,000 dollars, thirty a head, then talked it down to 525,000 in cash. Survivors received about two cents each. A good pig sold for thirty dollars that year.