The Parsley Massacre

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.

Madeleine Sylvain's father had campaigned for Haitian sovereignty and the country had followed him. Her own campaign for women's rights drew almost no attention, and where it was noticed people treated feminism as something shipped in from Europe or North America. One critic wrote that equality between the sexes was a chimera and would never become real. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale answered in print. In October 1935 it issued the first number of La Voix des Femmes, the first newspaper in Haiti run by women with a declared purpose of covering women's political and intellectual lives. By February 1936 the editors had found their footing. The paper carried political editorials, foreign affairs, and above all historical and sociological essays about women. Its ethnographic reporting was the unusual part. Roumain and Price-Mars had written about peasant life, but nobody had yet put the daily existence of peasant women in front of a national readership. Printing those lives beside the lives of city women made the shared parts visible.

American troops had been in Haiti since 1915, and Jackson traces the black American response through the whole period, from Du Bois writing that the country was more civilised than Texas, through the protest of 1920 against the occupation, to the Pan-African Congress that Du Bois presided over in Paris in 1919. The withdrawal did not end the literary consequences. Langston Hughes had described the country for New Masses in 1931 as a small tropical place of mountains and sea, marines, mulatto politicians and a world of black people without shoes, while calling the Citadel a splendid monument to the genius of a black king, and his poem of 1932 argued that conditions would be the same for black people everywhere until black workers united. The occupation also produced a wave of sensationalist American fiction and travel writing.

The occupation had begun in 1915, ostensibly to collect loans and restore civil order after five presidents in four years were assassinated or driven out, and had revealed its imperial character through control of the customs houses, institutional racism and the revival of the corvee. The caco guerrilla movement under Charlemagne Peralte was crushed in 1919 and its leaders executed. At Cap Haitien the American flag was lowered and the blue and red Haitian flag hoisted. Eleven months after his New Year message Vincent validated his nationalist credentials by holding a state funeral in the same city for Peralte. The book treats both ceremonies as political theatre that could not conceal the splits inside the nationalist movement, and dates the beginning of the postoccupation conflict to this moment. Nineteen thirty-four therefore closes one struggle and opens another that runs to 1957.