La Voix des Femmes taunts Haiti with Peru's record on women

The headline story of the March 1939 issue reported the Lima declaration in favour of women's rights, written after the Eighth International American Conference, and identified Peru as a leader in the field. Sylvain-Bouchereau then turned the comparison on her own government, recalling the solidarity of Pétion and Bolívar and the two countries' independence struggles, arguing that Haiti had been a pioneer in abolition and independence and that Peru had followed its example, and asking whether Haiti would now stay behind. She demanded to know whether the government would honour its signature in the Pan-American Union or persist in the politics of an ostrich recommending to others reforms it would not undertake. Sanders Johnson reads this as the League's core tactic: leverage the revolutionary past against the present government, and make regional embarrassment do domestic work.

James recalled fifty years later that one night in Manchester Robeson proposed that the play tour with James himself in the part of Dessalines. It opened at the Westminster Theatre in London. Jackson places it inside a decade of work that turned the revolution into material for black artists across several forms, including Arna Bontemps's novel of Gabriel's Virginia revolt in 1936, Guy Endore's book of 1934 based on the insurrections of 1791, Jacob Lawrence's series of prints on Toussaint begun in 1938, and Ralph Ellison's story in New Masses in 1941, in which the Haitian leader enters African American folklore alongside Stagolee and John Henry. Robeson himself returned to the figure in 1954, writing that Ho Chi Minh was the Toussaint Louverture of Indochina. Jackson uses the production to show how far the revolution had travelled as artistic material.

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.

In October 1937 Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, ordered his army to kill the Haitians living in the Dominican borderlands. Thousands died within days. They were farm workers, cane cutters and their families, many of them born on Dominican soil, some from households that had crossed the frontier generations earlier, when the line existed mostly on paper. Hispaniola holds two countries and one landmass, and movement between them had always been ordinary. Trujillo made that movement a capital matter and settled it with machetes. What the killing produced, past the dead themselves, was a permanent condition. Every question the two states have put to each other since 1937 is asked across that ground: labour migration, citizenship for children born to Haitian parents, deportation, the status of the border itself. The massacre did not close and become history. It became the terms.