An advertisement makes one scholar the pivot of Haitian feminism

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain returned to Haiti in 1937 after studying in Europe, where she had taken a doctorate in letters. In April the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale ran a notice in La Voix des Femmes announcing her arrival. She was their one distinguished doctor of letters, the notice said, and her thesis showed the intellectual capacity of women and men alike. Then the League said what it wanted from her. It hoped Madame Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain would become the pivot point around which Haitian feminism would evolve. That is an unusual thing for a political organisation to print about a single researcher. The League was staking its direction on a method. If Haitian feminism was going to have a centre, that centre would be a scholar working on the language and the daily life of the rural majority, which settled in advance what kind of movement this was going to be.

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.

Dominican soldiers moving through the northwest of their country in October 1937 could not tell by looking which of the people in front of them were Haitian. So they used language. A person was made to say perejil, the Spanish word for parsley. Haitians whose first tongues were Kreyol and French handled the sounds differently, and the ones who failed were killed. Around fifteen thousand died. Trujillo's stated grievance was cattle theft. His actual programme was a culturally uniform Dominican nation, reached by removing the people who complicated it. Parsley carries weight in Vodou ceremony, in baths and cleansings, so the plant chosen to identify Haitians for slaughter was already sacred to many of them. Trujillo later agreed to pay 500,000 dollars to the families of the dead, and officials of President Vincent's government took most of it. Vincent tried to keep the massacre out of the Haitian press. Noirisme gained a generation of recruits from his silence.