The first full length novel in Haitian Creole is published

In 1975 Franketienne published Dezafi, the first full length work of prose fiction ever written entirely in Haitian Creole, and it sold heavily. Creole is the language every Haitian speaks. French, the language of the schools, the courts and the publishing houses, was fluent for a small minority. A novel of that size in Creole put the reading public and the speaking public in the same room. The book takes the zombie as its central figure, a person emptied of will and set to work, and follows the process by which that condition is undone. Franketienne later wrote Les Affres d'un defi, a French rewriting of the same book. Jean Jonassaint reads the French version as a tribute to two earlier Haitian novelists, borrowing the deserted night courtyard from Jacques Stephen Alexis and echoing the closing lines of Jacques Roumain's Gouverneurs de la rosee in its own final paragraphs.

Haitians who reached the United States by boat at the end of the 1970s were held in detention camps, some of them in the deserts of the Southwest. They were given hearings and deportation orders without access to lawyers. Children were imprisoned. Detainees reported being fed food laced with drugs that caused men to develop breasts. Most of those affected had no permanent resident status and little protection, and they held public demonstrations and pickets anyway. The protests worked far enough that Haitian refugees were granted a temporary category called Entrant, and for a period the imprisonment and the deportations stopped. Through the 1980s the community organisations that had run those pickets began working with American legal groups such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, and busloads of Haitians travelled to Washington to demonstrate in support of cases being argued in court. That combination of street mobilisation and litigation became the standing method of Haitian politics in the United States.

Patrick Lemoine entered Fort-Dimanche on 10 January 1974 and survived it. He recorded 2 June 1975 as the day nine deaths were registered inside the prison. Fritz Dezagon, called Castro, died suddenly. After prayers and songs the men in his cell knocked on the door and shouted death, death, death. Voices from another cell answered at once that one of theirs had just gone. An hour later a third cell took up the same call. The man who removed the bodies had barely left with one when a fourth death was declared. The day went on that way, with blows against doors and walls added to the shouting, and after the ninth announcement the whole prison panicked and began to cry that they were being killed. Lemoine was certain the shouting carried the three kilometres to the sugar works at HASCO. Nobody outside reacted.

Tanbou Libete was founded in New York in 1971 by Michel-Rolph Trouillot and other Haitian activists. It was a theatre group and its purpose was political education. The plays and songs were in Kreyol, which meant they addressed the whole of the emigrant population rather than the small share of it schooled in French. New York by then held tens of thousands of Haitians, many of them people the Duvalier government had driven out, and it was one of the few places where Haitians could organise without the militia arriving. Groups like this one supplied what the country itself no longer had: a public argument, conducted in the language people actually speak, about who should govern and by what right. The work was cultural because nothing else was available. Trouillot became a historian, and the questions about power and silence that run through his later books were first worked out on those stages.