Suzanne Sylvain traces Haitian grammar to a West African language

In 1936 the Haitian linguist Suzanne Sylvain published Le Creole Haitien, Morphologie et Syntaxe, the first serious study of the language nearly every Haitian spoke. Her conclusion was that the grammar of Creole derives largely from Ewe, a West African language of the coast that runs through present day Ghana, Togo and Benin. That placed the structure of the language on the African side while the vocabulary came mostly from French, which is the account linguists have worked from since. It cut against a view widely held by educated Haitians, that Creole was a simplified form of French at best and a mixture of languages without a grammar at worst. Later work by Haitians and by foreign linguists went on to origins, phonetics, phonology, syntax and lexicography without shifting that public perception much. Sylvain was writing two years after the American occupation of Haiti ended, in a period when Haitian intellectuals were arguing hard about how much of the country was African.

The Foyer was the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale's attempt to work on the city directly. Port-au-Prince in the 1940s was crowded, expensive and hard on any woman who arrived alone, and the league's answer took the form of a room. The same people came back to it. A woman's absence would be remarked on. Care was expected there and could be asked for out loud. Recognition, care and accountability, built up slowly by repetition rather than declared. Grace Sanders Johnson describes what the room was for in one sentence. The Foyer was a place where somebody might see another woman looking out toward the sea for too long, and offer her other possibilities. Everything the league argued about wages, marriage, the law and citizenship sits behind that sentence. In front of it is a specific afternoon, a specific woman at a window, and the ordinary act of walking over and starting a conversation.

Just after 1900, West Indian immigrants made up about one percent of the Black population of the United States, and most of them lived in New York City. By 1930 there were 72,000 Afro-Caribbeans in the country and more than half were in New York. The flow then stopped almost completely. A federal immigration law passed in 1924 and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 cut Caribbean arrivals through the 1940s and 1950s. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 removed the quotas that had done the blocking, and the numbers recovered fast enough that by 1980 more than 50,000 West Indians of various origins were entering the United States each year. They came mainly from Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Haiti and Martinique. The concentration of that migration in one city is why Black politics in New York has never been a single constituency, and why coalitions there have to be built rather than assumed.

Two Haitians living in Paris founded La Revue du Monde Noir in 1930 to argue for solidarity and self-respect among black people across the world. The setting matters. Paris in 1930 held students and writers from the French Caribbean, from West Africa, from Madagascar and from the United States, all of them educated in the same language and all of them discovering that the education had not made them French. A magazine in that city could reach the whole empire at once, which no journal published in Port-au-Prince or Dakar could do. The review is a direct ancestor of negritude, the movement that Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedar Senghor and Leon Damas would build over the following decade and that shaped black writing in French for fifty years. Haitians reached the argument early because they had been having a version of it at home since 1927. A country independent since 1804 had a longer run of experience with the gap between formal freedom and European contempt.