1934 to 1937 · Haitianspan

Two constitutional conventions pass and women's legal status does not move

The women who financed the nationalist campaign against the occupation were paid in indifference.

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1934 to 1937 · Haitianspan

Blocked from the direct road, the League walks just off it

Sylvain told a Canadian reporter in 1937 that two years of work had produced almost nothing visible.

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1934 to 1935 · Haitianspan

A hundred students in two night schools by November 1934

Sylvain told the government the League only wished to assist, then built the institutions anyway.

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1934 to 1935 · Haitianspan

Four Sylvain sisters: a lawyer, a doctor, a social worker, a linguist

Madeleine founded a welfare agency at twenty-two; Yvonne was the first woman through the medical school.

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1934 to 1938 · Haitianspan

The occupation built the roads and the League used them

Every journey report printed in La Voix des Femmes turned a military road into an organising route.

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1934 to 1938 · Haitianspan

Invoking 1804 pulls the readership together and shows where it splits

The vocabulary chosen to unify women in print kept marking the distance between writer and subject.

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1934 to 1938 · Haitianspan

The League invents the publicly visible Haitian woman intellectual

Its editors were known in the cities and unknown to the country, so they built their own fame.

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1934 to 1938 · Haitianspan

Before this paper no monthly image showed a Haitian woman thinking

The women in Haitian newspaper advertisements were white and imported from France and the United States.

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1934 to 1938 · Haitianspan

Academic regalia is the costume and accomplishment is the beauty

The paper photographed its leaders in professional dress and called the result beautiful.

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1934 to 1938 · Haitianspan

The paper prints fiction so its members can imagine other women

Short stories let the League write mothers, daughters, lovers and leaders it could not report on.

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1934 to 1956 · Haitianspan

Forty eight children in one town are registered with no father

Twenty three of the mothers had been with the same man for between five and twenty four years.

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1934 · Haitianyear only

The medical faculty opens to women and Yvonne Sylvain walks through

Law had taken them in 1929, dentistry in 1930, and a girl had sat the baccalaureate in 1932.

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1 January 1934 · Haitian

Haiti marks 130 years of independence under a foreign flag

On the anniversary that matters most, the stars and stripes still fly over the Champs de Mars.

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February 1934 · Haitianmonth known

A hundred women organise in three weeks and write a platform

Sylvain called a meeting in February; by March there were six subcommittees and a programme.

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March 1934 · Haitianmonth known

The League asks the government for a licence and Vincent turns suspicious

Garoute had hosted the president's family at Jérémie, which counted for nothing once the marines packed.

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3 March 1934 · Haitian

Haiti's first feminist organisation is banned within days of its founding

The committee rewrote the programme down to one harmless sounding line and got its licence.

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March 1934 · Diasporamonth known

A lecture in Nelson turns the empire's racism back on the metropolis

James damns British racism at home as well as abroad and predicts a rising in Africa.

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April 1934 · Haitianmonth known

Vincent rejects the petition and the first League dissolves

The programme named brothels, equal pay and a women's labour department, and the palace took offence.

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10 May 1934 · Haitian

Ten women refound the League with a programme the palace can sign

The name stayed and the platform was rewritten around poverty, hygiene and the care of children.

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12 June 1934 · Haitian

Le Nouvelliste announces the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale

The organisation that would win Haitian women the vote surfaced in the daily press in 1934.

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13 June to 14 July 1934 · Haitianspan

Four weeks of lectures on feminism at the Union Club, entry 2.50 gourdes

Price-Mars, Bellegarde and Dartigue spoke, and the League wanted the arguing out of the abstract.

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1934 · Diasporayear only

The last marines sail and the NAACP claims a share of the credit

Fourteen years of meetings, appeals to four presidents and pamphlets against a policy that outlasted them all.

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1934 · Haitianyear only

Roumain founds a communist party and calls colour a symptom

The fight against the occupation was to be a fight against international capital.

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1934 · Haitianyear only

Russell says Haitians are little better fitted to govern than in 1915

Roads, hospitals and a solvent treasury, with no political foundation under any of it.

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1934 · Haitianyear only

The marines take a payroll worth a tenth of the budget with them

A bank owned in New York, an army of uncertain loyalty, and Trujillo at the door.

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1934 · Haitianyear only

In 1934 a young Duvalier writes what Duvalierism would later enact

Signing himself Abderrahman, he described the contempt of the elite and the rage it produced.

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1934 · Haitianyear only

The League speaks for all classes and its officers come from one

A president who practised law, a vice president married to a high court judge, three Sylvain sisters.

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1934 · Haitianyear only

Price-Mars gives elite women the peasant woman as proof of authenticity

Celebrating African ancestry left the contempt for the people who carried it completely intact.

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1934 · Haitianyear only

Two rivals share a bill because the secretary general knew it would sell

Fernande Bellegarde invited her own father and the man who spent a career disagreeing with him.

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5 July 1934 · Haitian

A US president lands at Cap-Haitien six weeks before the marines go

Roosevelt was the first sitting American president to set foot in the country his marines had run.

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5 July to 15 August 1934 · Haitianspan

The American colours come down and Haiti fires forty two guns

Roosevelt came ashore at the Cap in July and the last marines marched to the transports in August.

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1 August 1934 · Haitian

The marines leave once local surrogates can do the same work

Withdrawal followed the Forbes findings and the Good Neighbor Policy, and began army rule.

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1 August 1934 · Haitian

The lecture series ends on the day the occupation officially does

Education was the common thread, and the road to it was different for every class of woman.

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6 August 1934 · Haitian

The last American flag comes down at Cap Haitien

Nineteen years of occupation end in a ceremony at the northern city, and the fissures open at once.

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14 August 1934 · Haitian

The marines sail and leave behind an army they trained themselves

Nineteen years of occupation ended with roads, a telegraph line and a national guard for hire.

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14 August 1934 · Haitian

The occupation ends in 1934 and the finances stay American

Vincent called himself the second liberator while Washington kept the customs house.

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15 August 1934 · Diaspora

The American occupation of Haiti ends after nineteen years

Du Bois had defended Haiti in print and black Americans had protested the landing since 1920.

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15 August 1934 · Haitian

The last marines leave, and the machinery they built stays behind

Financial supervision continued to 1942, and the centralised state outlived the withdrawal by decades.

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18 to 21 August 1934 · Haitianspan

Gourde notes fly from the president's car on the second independence

Four days of bamboche, a Te Deum with white clergy and Black altar boys, and a new oath to Vincent.

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1935 to 1937 · Haitianspan

Floods drown two thousand, coffee falls forty percent, bananas go up

Vincent hunted money in Paris and in Hitler's Berlin, and France closed the Havre market on him.

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1935 to 1941 · Africanspan

Italy invades the one independent African state and Black protest goes global

Haile Selassie told the League of Nations it would be Ethiopia today and Europe tomorrow.

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1935 to the 1950s · Haitianspan

Garoute says the work goes on whether or not the men grant citizenship

The League read the split between state and nation as a split between men and women.

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1935 to the 1960s · Haitianspan

The League calls women a labouring class and the code calls them minors

Jeanne Perez refused to go on being a reproduction machine and a servant of the lord and master.

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1935 to 1957 · Haitianspan

Two decades of petitions produce Article 8 and a vote in 1957

The 1950 congress gave women over twenty-one the ballot; they first used it seven years later.

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1935 to 1946 · Haitianspan

The League calls itself abolitionist and doubts that all the men are heroes

Told to wait until women were educated, they answered that slavery would still exist on that logic.

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1935 to the 2010s · Haitianspan

The first women's league was embalmed and praised and set aside

Mirlande Manigat's verdict on the pioneers, and the earthquake that took the generation after them.

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1935 to the 2010s · Diasporaspan

Haitian women kept their record in dress seams and under beds

Who is permitted to archive a moment turns out to be a question about citizenship.

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October 1935 to 1937 · Haitianspan

Haiti's first women's newspaper answers a critic who called equality a chimera

Founded in October 1935 to prove that feminism was not a European import.

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1935 to 1947 · Haitianspan

Bryn Mawr subscribed to La Voix des Femmes before Sylvain arrived

The editors called it a microphone for the oppressed and it carried a long way.

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1935 to 1936 · Haitianspan

Jeanne Perez ties antifeminism to being against the revolution

Her recruiting essay for the old capital ends with a cheer for the city of the great king.

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1935 to 1936 · Haitianspan

A feminist paper and the noiriste Griots quote the same Turkish leader

Ataturk's line about a divided people ran above every issue of La Voix des Femmes.

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1935 to 1936 · Haitianspan

The emperor's daughter puts on a nurse's cap and Haiti takes the lesson

The paper made nursing a form of soldiering and then worried about what it had said.

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1935 · Haitianyear only

Two jailed American suffragists arrive to push a treaty on women's nationality

The Inter-American Commission of Women sent them to get the Montevideo text ratified.

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1935 to 1943 · Haitianspan

The league argues that learning to see beauty changes how people live

Taste treated as a faculty of judgement rather than as decoration or a class marker.

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1935 to 1943 · Haitianspan

Two libraries, night classes in four towns, fifty students to a room

The core of the curriculum turned out to be childcare and household management.

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1935 to 1945 · Haitianspan

The league concedes that the work will outlast everyone doing it

Perez kept publishing so that a girl asked whether she was free could answer that she was.

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1935 · Haitianyear only

Two presidents sign a treaty meant to end sixty years of border argument

The line on the map was agreed and the movement of people across it was not.

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1935 · Haitianyear only

A first Haitian report describes children working in other houses

Elie Louis Vernet published La domesticite chez nous while the practice was still called bearable.

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1935 · Haitianyear only

A law reserves certain retail trade for Haitians by birth

German and Syrian merchants had held much of that trade, and their share fell.

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from 1935 · Diasporaspan

American oil companies open the Arabian fields

New fields, new refineries and pipelines to the Mediterranean rearranged who had money.

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1935 · Haitianyear only

A New Orleans firm gets every banana in Haiti, and loses them in eleven years

Concessions handed out to small operators wrecked the reputation of Haitian fruit in two years.

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the 1930s · Haitiandecade

Haiti declares all Jews to be of African descent

The constitution allowed land only to people of African ancestry, so the legislature widened the category.

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February 1935 to 15 May 1936 · Haitianspan

A plebiscite of 454,357 to 1,172 hands Vincent the whole state

He bought the Banque, removed eleven senators and voted himself a second term by single article.

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4 March 1935 · Haitian

Carl Brouard calls the marines' departure a victory for the black race

L'Assaut printed his tribute seven months after the last American troops shipped out.

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1935 · Haitianyear only

Ricardo Widmaier opens Haiti's first commercial radio station

HH3W begins a change that will let politicians address a largely illiterate electorate directly.

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1935 · Haitianyear only

Ethiopia gives the noiristes their first international cause

The Italian invasion pulls a domestic argument about authenticity onto a world stage.

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1935 · Diasporayear only

Fifty thousand Haitians counted in the Dominican Republic

The real number was higher, and the cane cutters became the target of Dominican nationalism.

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1935 · Haitianyear only

A gingerbread mansion becomes the most famous hotel in Haiti

Graham Greene turned the Oloffson into the Hotel Trianon and the Duvaliers into world news.

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1935 · Haitianyear only

The League starts a newspaper and a member says keep your gloves on

La Voix des Femmes appeared twice a month, and cross-class solidarity was called incendiary in print.

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25 August 1935 · Diaspora

Trafalgar Square hears that Ethiopia's cause belongs to all

James chairs the friends of Abyssinia and links Adwa to Toussaint's mountain warfare.

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15 September 1935 · Haitian

The League opens a branch at Saint-Marc and a newspaper in the capital

Valcin reported the Saint-Marc inaugural; La Voix des Femmes had begun weeks earlier.

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15 September 1935 · Haitian

The league takes the occupation's roads out to the provinces

Chapters at Port-de-Paix and Saint-Marc within months of founding, and a clinic at La Saline.

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September 1935 · Haitianmonth known

Two steel beasts sweat up the stony road to Saint-Marc

Valcin filed a chapter meeting as an epic, complete with a sea that hid and reappeared.

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September 1935 · Haitianmonth known

Valcin says the road mattered as much as the meeting at its end

The first Haitian woman novelist used the league's paper to write its members into a story.

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September 1935 · Haitianmonth known

Eight women from the capital drive north to open a chapter

The delegation to Saint-Marc carried most of the league's founding layer in two cars.

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September 1935 · Haitianmonth known

A Saint-Marc committee with officers and a treasury takes the league inland

Nine named women ran the branch, which made the expansion structural.

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September 1935 · Haitianmonth known

About a hundred people hear Madeleine Sylvain and change their minds

Valcin wrote that she had won a lot of hearts before she left the room.

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September 1935 · Haitianmonth known

A banquet menu names each dish for a suffragist or a revolutionary queen

Mary Winsor cucumber, Claire Heureuse fish, Marie-Jeanne coffee.

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September 1935 · Haitianmonth known

The night ends with the national anthem sung without anyone calling for it

The league had spent the day placing itself in a line that ran through queens and warriors.

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30 October 1935 · Haitian

A Port-au-Prince journal warns about the rhetoric crossing the border

L'Assaut told its readers that Dominican anti-Haitian talk carried a danger nobody was answering.

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November 1935 · Haitianmonth known

The second issue lines up Haitian women with Ethiopia against Italy

Italy invaded in the month the paper first appeared, and the paper took a side.

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30 December 1935 · Haitian

Le Nouvelliste begins serialising the racial theories of the Griots

The articles supplied the intellectual scaffolding that Duvalier's regime would later stand on.

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1936 to 1937 · Haitianspan

One candidate a seat, and ballots the voters may not alter

The first elections after the marines left handed the government back to itself.

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1936 to 1942 · Haitianspan

Six years of print make care for women a test of citizenship

Between a letter in 1936 and a script about Sanite Belair in 1942, Perez built a record.

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1936 to 1944 · Haitianspan

A senator's petition becomes the law that frees a wife's wages

Married Haitian women were legal minors who owed their earnings to their husbands.

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1936 to 1944 · Haitianspan

The League builds a justice committee around one wage bill

Institutional shape followed a single campaign in the movement's first years.

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1936 · Haitianyear only

Suzanne Sylvain traces Haitian grammar to a West African language

The first serious study of Creole came from a Haitian and put the structure on the African side.

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1936 · Caribbeanyear only

Santo Domingo becomes Ciudad Trujillo and the border becomes a project

Peasants along the frontier were given land and paperwork to make them Dominican.

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15 to 16 March 1936 · Diasporaspan

Black professionals reach the London stage in a black writer's play

Two performances at the Westminster Theatre, with James himself filling in for a missing actor.

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19 April 1936 · Diaspora

Palestine rises and a royal commission proposes partition

Jewish immigration tripled between 1933 and 1936 and the country was in revolt for three years.

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May 1936 · Haitianmonth known

Duvalier publishes on whether the Haitian mind is African or Latin

He put the country's psychology in Africa and built a career on the answer.

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7 June 1936 · Haitian

Sylvain asks whether a woman who travels this far is content

Her conference address turned the members' travel costs into the whole argument.

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7 June 1936 · Haitian

Market women walk further every day than the delegates drove

Sylvain answered the doubters by pointing at how far women would move to reach each other.

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1936 · Diasporayear only

Robeson plays Toussaint in London with C. L. R. James as Dessalines

The play at the Westminster Theatre came two years before James published The Black Jacobins.

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11 September 1936 · Haitian

Denis and Duvalier print a claim that biology sets social behaviour

Le Nouvelliste carried the essay that gave noirisme its scientific costume.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

Perez tells her niece to bring the boys up the mountain

A public letter about the climb to the Citadelle assigns Haitian sons a place in women's politics.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

The League's method was care handed down a generation

Alexis Pauline Gumbs has a phrase for what Perez printed: older than the category woman.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

Perez picks the butterfly over the moth and means it

The insect that flies at night toward light is a rare Caribbean family, and she chose it on purpose.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

What have we done since is the question put to the next generation

The September cover demanded more light, and the demand was pointed inward at Haiti.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

Perez claims the Citadelle as Black inheritance, scars and all

Heirs of the bronze king take the grief along with the royalty.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

One gourde buys the Citadelle and a demand for more light

Volume one, number twelve of La Voix des Femmes put a fortress under a masthead.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

A newspaper cover prints a map and sends its readers up a mountain

Perez took subscribers a hundred and twenty miles north and then up three thousand feet.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

An almanac calls the Citadelle a wonder of the world and Haiti answers

Perez and Sylvain both wrote about Christophe's fortress in the same issue.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

Sylvain asks Vincent to pave the road and build a Christophe museum

She wanted the money visitors spent put into restoring rooms inside the fortress.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

Perez stands at the foot of a hundred and thirty foot wall and writes to a child

The feeling had nowhere to go in the present, so she addressed it to the future.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

A letter tells a four year old to climb the mountain and raise her head

Perez wrote to Marie-Madeleine Price-Mars about wounds and about magnificence.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

Do giants beget dwarves, Perez asks a four year old

She told her niece to come back to the fortress the way a butterfly returns to a flame.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

Perez sends the sons up the stairs that carried Christophe's body down

In her account the weeping queen walks ahead of the princes and the counts.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

Perez was in love with a child and with a country and printed both

Putting the letter on the front pages made a private feeling into the paper's position.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

Perez was raised by women and organised the next generation the same way

In Haiti the auntie and the godmother are working offices, and she held both.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

A godparent bond that Haitians called more binding than blood

Theodora Holly wrote that sponsorship turned two friends into co-parents.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

Perez shared her niece with Rosa Clara Perez and Jean Price-Mars

Then she signed the entire readership up as co-parents, in print.

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September 1936 · Haitianmonth known

The letter works like a veve, calling something down onto the page

Othermothering here means tending the past and the present in one motion.

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Late 1930s to early 1940s · Africanspan

Plantation schemes undercut the chiefs that empire installed

Colonial agriculture went American, and the indirect rule chiefs became surplus to the state that made them.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

A folklorist counts a hundred graves at the entrance to Kenscoff

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain went up the mountain to study the rites twelve years after burying her parents.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Four essays in a feminist monthly serve as a funeral song

Comhaire-Sylvain published a reunion, a language argument, a set of jokes and a folktale.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Haitian women have no rights, the editor tells a Montreal paper

On a vacation from Bryn Mawr, Madeleine Sylvain described the civil code to Canadian reporters.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

A president who jails critics reads a headline from Montreal

In Haiti Women Have No Rights ran while Vincent was answering for the border massacre.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Moral misery hurts as much as hunger, Alice Garoute tells senators

The 1937 appeal asked men to raise women to the rank of free citizens.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Dispossession outruns moral misery and the League knows it

Perez told women to look straight ahead and only glance back for comfort.

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1937 to 1938 · Haitianspan

A women's movement bets that ethnography can cross a class line

Peasant life became the League's shared subject with the women it claimed to speak for.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Valcin writes that a country girl's dreams melt like soap

Two years before the League surveyed domestic workers, one of its writers described them.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Vlan, says the essay, and the trained servant walks out

Valcin's complaint is written in the second person, addressed to the woman doing the hiring.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Train the servants and send the rest back to the land

Valcin's remedy sorted working-class women into the fit and the unfit.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

A feminist essay records its own failure on the same page

Aspiration and refusal sit together in Valcin's account of domestic service.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Tired of doing all the work alone is an accounting of unpaid labour

In the cracks of her complaint, Valcin maps how women's work holds up men's power.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Claudia Jones will name it superexploitation within ten years

The League's writers reached the analysis from inside the contradiction it describes.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

The servant who walks out holds a freedom the League cannot grant

A domestic worker's disappearance settles who controls the terms of engagement.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

One word turns a woman leaving a bad job into a bad character

Rogue was the League's description of a domestic worker changing employers.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

The countryside people were being sent back to was emptying out

Haitians were crossing into the Dominican Republic for low wages and the same hope.

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1937 to 1940 · Haitianspan

The women who called a servant rogue later called it slavery

Valcin, Garoute and Sylvain revised themselves in print between 1937 and 1940.

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1937 to 1946 · Haitianspan

Minor, criminal, insane: three legal categories, one citizenship

Sylvain-Bouchereau's phrase described statutes, and she later shortened it to slavery.

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1937 to 1938 · Haitianspan

A couple who lost seven children take a third partner

Comhaire-Sylvain found that plasaj answered infant death, and that multiple unions were rare.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Two years after the border treaty, Haitians are massacred on the Dominican side

The official version blamed marauders, and Price Mars suspected Haitians of colluding in the settlement.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Two hundred priests serve thirty thousand people at Plaisance

A count in one northern commune shows how much of rural Haiti the religion actually held.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Graves above Port-au-Prince name the Africans buried under them

The inscriptions carry a name, the word African, a birth date and a death date.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Two hundred dollars a year for a peasant family in Plaisance

A coffee buyer in the next village along was said to take seven thousand.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Three men in Plaisance and Cap-Haitien give up their stories

A day labourer, a farmer and a cook supply the tales as the evening gatherings end.

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1937 · Caribbeanyear only

The man who massacred Haitians in 1937 later signs to import them

From 1952 the two governments split the wages of the men they sent across the border.

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May 1937 · Caribbeanmonth known

Jose Francisco Pena Gomez is born on the border in the year of El Corte

His parents were killed in the massacre and his opponents spent forty years calling him Haitian.

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Good Friday 1937 · Haitian

Rara comes up from the south and dances through Plaisance on Good Friday

A masked man danced as a bull and several boys danced standing on their heads.

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April 1937 · Haitianmonth known

An advertisement makes one scholar the pivot of Haitian feminism

La Voix des Femmes welcomed Comhaire-Sylvain home from Europe with a public bet.

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The summer of 1937 · Haitianseason

A work party in the north gets one meal and nobody can afford a dance

Twenty cents bought an evening of dancing, and twenty cents was a day's wage.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

The massacre is the first crisis of the postoccupation era

Good Neighbor diplomacy meets the killing of Haitians across the Dominican border.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Trujillo's massacre halts Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic

Thirty thousand killed on the dictator's order, and the flow stopped for more than a decade.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Thirty tailors and ten bakers make up a village middle class

The whole intermediate stratum of a northern Haitian town fits on one page.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

Three men in Plaisance describe what changes shape at night

The households accused of it, never to their faces, were the prosperous ones.

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1937 · Haitianyear only

A colonial slaveholder becomes the spirit who fathers pale children

President Clermeil sold his soul to escape the people he owned and is serving still.

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2 to 5 October 1937 · Haitianspan

Thirty dollars a head, then two cents, for fifteen thousand dead

The Massacre River took its name in 1728 and got the meaning back in October 1937.

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2 to 5 October 1937 · Caribbeanspan

The Parsley Massacre

Fifteen to twenty thousand Haitians killed on the Dominican side of a river already named Massacre.

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October 1937 · Haitianmonth known

Trujillo has thousands of Haitians killed on the border

The Parsley Massacre left a permanent wound between two countries on one island.

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October 1937 · Haitianmonth known

Trujillo says the killing was done to protect European culture

The stated aim on the Dominican side was to de-Africanize the frontier.

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October 1937 · Haitianmonth known

The word for parsley decides who lives on the Dominican side

A pronunciation test sorted dark-skinned Dominicans from Black Haitians in October 1937.

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October 1937 · Haitianmonth known

Weeks after the essay, Trujillo empties the border of Haitians

A Dominican financial crisis was settled on the backs of Haitians cutting cane.

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October 1937 · Haitianmonth known

The League's paper is missing for the months of the massacre

Between September 1937 and early 1938 no issues survive in any archive consulted.

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October 1937 · Haitianmonth known

A pronunciation test on the riverbank kills twenty thousand people

Trujillo's soldiers used machetes until their arms tired, then reached for their rifles.

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November 1937 to 9 January 1938 · Haitianspan

Five shots outside the Cafe Rex end Calixte's command

A plot against the president, an ambush on the Petionville road, and a taxi with plate P-3031.

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4 to 14 December 1937 · Haitianspan

A major in the palace basement holds back the bullets

Raids out of Dominican territory exposed who actually controlled the Garde d'Haiti.

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1938 · Indigenousyear only

An anthropologist files the first Caribbean people under Amazonid

Jose Imbelloni traced island ancestry from the Amazon through the Orinoco in 1938.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

Vincent removes the Garde's Black commander

Calixte's dismissal completed the elite's grip on the one institution that mattered.

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1938 · Diasporayear only

C. L. R. James puts the Haitian Revolution at the centre of history

The Black Jacobins appeared in 1938 and armed a generation of anticolonial writers.

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1938 to 1942 · Haitianspan

A godmother writes a play while the father returns to the senate

A child grows up between a feminist stage and the opposition benches of the Haitian senate.

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1938 to 1985 · Datasetspan

Good arable soil falls from 540,000 hectares to 205,000

In the mid 1980s Haiti was losing between six and ten thousand hectares every year.

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February 1938 · Haitianmonth known

A linguist writes up a mountain village for a feminist newspaper

Four articles on farming, belief and burial in Kenscoff set the pattern Haitian feminist work followed.

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February 1938 · Haitianmonth known

Her first publication sets Kreyol words beside words from Dahomey

A glossary of rural belief, printed in two columns so a reader can run a finger down it.

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February 1938 · Haitianmonth known

Two fingers struck on the mouth cross the Atlantic and hold

ABOBO in a Vodou ceremony and BOBOBO in Dahomey name the same noise and the same gesture.

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February 1938 · Haitianmonth known

Jeanne Perez leaves the paper and turns her house into a school

She names her new poetry journal La Semeuse, the woman who sows.

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1938 to 1941 · Haitianspan

Church and state together attack the rural population's defences

Casimir counts systematic religious persecution as an assault on a spiritual resource base.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

Les Griots turns race into biology and Duvalier writes for it

A review of a few hundred copies supplies the theory a president would govern by.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

The anchor of the Santa Maria goes into a case in Port-au-Prince

A national museum opens holding the iron from the wreck that began the whole business.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

Haitian speech carries gestures that no grammar had recorded

Anthropologists and sociologists pick up a method worked out for a newspaper column.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

Woodson reads a Haitian scholar and finds Herskovits thin

One excursion to Haiti, he wrote, does not entitle a man to speak like an authority.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

Woodson puts a Port-au-Prince linguist into the Black scholarly line

What impressed him was her record of how stories are actually recited and how far they travel.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

A list of gestures is offered as a grammar for crossing class

The tap on the mouth reads the same in a Kenscoff market and a Petionville parlour.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

Adelsia appears in a standing column called Our Peasant Woman

The possessive in the section title holds the whole difficulty of the enterprise.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

Price-Mars asked for the uncle and she went to find the aunt

Indigenisme was proposed as a national programme. She made it a programme about women.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

The girl who carried peaches down to town becomes the guide

Two women who had passed each other on the Kenscoff road for years, and each knew it.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

Pages of tomb measurements show how long the two women sat together

Hand drawn maps of a graveyard are the record of hours nobody wrote down as hours.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

Adelsia never went to school and did the arithmetic in her head

A trained linguist reports in print that an unschooled vendor calculated faster than she could.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

Market women measure by pot, by hand and by smell

It has units, it can be taught and it can be checked, which makes it a system.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

Where the two women stopped understanding each other was marriage

An ethnographer leaves the disagreement in the published text instead of tidying it away.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

Plasaj is where the ethnographer's sympathy runs out

She admires how Adelsia runs a trade and questions how Adelsia runs a household.

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1938 · Haitianyear only

Adelsia will be called Manze, Sor and Grann, and never Madame

Foreign writers used plasaj as proof Haiti was backward, and the regret shows how far that reached.

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October 1938 · Haitianmonth known

Duvalier and Denis found Les Griots to make race a science

A quarterly on the distinctiveness of African peoples grows from a reading group.

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10 November 1938 · Diaspora

Ataturk dies and the generation that made the republic is finished

The men who won the war of liberation had run out of ideas before their leader ran out of life.

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18 December 1938 to 15 May 1941 · Haitianspan

Vincent tells Haitians their minds are too backward for a vote

The Cayes speech abolishes the plebiscite, and Washington decides who follows him.

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January 1939 · Haitianmonth known

Price-Mars asks how one island came to hold two countries

Fifteen months after the border killings, a historian goes back to the treaties.

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1939 to 1945 · Africanspan

Africa is drafted into a European war for the second time

British armour stands around the Cairo ministries in 1942 to watch the men inside them.

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1939 to 1945 · Africanspan

Africans fight in Italy and Burma and watch Europeans fail

More than 370,000 in British uniform, and the men who came home knew the empire could break.

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1939 to the late 1950s · Africanspan

Colonial rule looks permanent in 1939 and is finished in twenty years

Europe leaves Africa in roughly the same span of time it took to seize it.

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1939 to 1941 · Haitianspan

Haiti enters the war and plants rubber for the United States

Two wartime schemes, one for refugees and one for latex, and the economy comes out worse.

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March 1939 · Haitianmonth known

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

Sylvain-Bouchereau asked whether the pioneer of abolition would now stay behind.

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1939 · Haitianyear only

Denis and Duvalier say Haitian politics is settled by biology

Coups, constitutions and civil wars are recast as expressions of inherited racial character.

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1939 · Haitianyear only

Girls working ninety eight hours a week are counted as students

A survey of leisure time finds servants in elite houses who have no leisure to survey.

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1939 · Haitianyear only

Rich or poor, the girls of Port-au-Prince do the same three things

Given an hour, a servant and a lawyer's daughter both talk, dance and play games.

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1939 · Haitianyear only

Her remedy for missed schooling is a library open at the weekend

A modest proposal that works around the arrangement putting children in other people's kitchens.

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1939 · Haitianyear only

She corrects her own verb and calls Haitian art embryonic

Singing, storytelling and dance are already very well developed, and she still finds work to do.

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1939 · Haitianyear only

Educated women appoint themselves the judges of beauty

Plays, exhibitions and educational films, all of it supervised by adults who know what beauty is.

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1939 · Haitianyear only

Cleante Valcin prescribes volleyball, cycling and swimming by the hour

Each sport is matched to a duration and to the ailments it is expected to cure.

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1939 · Haitianyear only

Sport is recommended to improve the beauty and vigour of the race

A girl's body is discussed as public property, its condition standing in for the country's.

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1939 · Haitianyear only

The fitness campaign is about keeping girls off the street

Volleyball answers three elite worries at once: comportment, sex and steady labour.

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October 1939 · Haitianmonth known

Les Griots writes the mulatto elite out of the Haitian nation

A series on historical origins turns a political grievance into an inherited trait.

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