Haiti and Black Transnationalism: Remapping the Migrant Geography of Home to Harlem - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2000 by John Lowney

The outstanding contribution of West Indians to American Negro life is the insistent assertion of their manhood in an environment that demands too much servility and unprotesting acquiescence from men of African blood. This unwillingness to conform and be standardized, to accept tamely an inferior status and abdicate their humanity, finds an open expression in the activities of the foreign-born Negro in America.

This "spirit," he concludes, is "eloquently expressed in the defiant lines of the Jamaican poet, Claude McKay: 'Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back'" (349).

The irony of identifying McKay as "the Jamaican poet" has not been lost on Domingo's readers, especially given the article's expressed purpose of bridging cultural differences. Winston James, for example, emphasizes in his prologue to Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America that "it is inappropriate that Domingo should have cited McKay as he did, since one of the most powerful motifs in McKay's work is the supersession of petty and negative divisions between people of African descent--including those between African Caribbeans and African Americans" (5). [12] These divisions were especially pronounced during the early 1920s debates about immigration restriction, which coincided with the campaign against Marcus Garvey. As the heated exchange between Domingo and the African American socialist Chandler Owen in The Messenger exemplified, the boundaries between anti-Garvey and anti-West Indian antagonism were not always clear, even though the degree of mistrus t--and misunderstanding--between Caribbean and African American intellectuals became all too clear. [13]

During the Garvey controversy, disagreements between Caribbean and African American intellectuals about radical politics within the United States superceded common interests in opposing United States imperial incursions in the Caribbean. Nonetheless, the cause of Haitian self-determination remained a source of agreement for blacks worldwide, as United States control of the Haitian economy and political system became more firmly entrenched under the administration of its client President, Louis Borno. Opposition to the American military occupation of Haiti within the United States was strongest during the election year of 1920, following the military response to the massive uprising against the Occupation that took place in 1919. By 1919, United States policy makers had drastically revised the Haitian Constitution. The new Constitution blatantly served American economic and military interests as it denied democratic rights to Haitians. Most notably, it legalized alien land ownership, suspended the elected Hai tian legislature, and legalized all acts of the military occupation. In addition to the introduction of such anti-democratic policies, the United States also implemented plantation agriculture that was financed by private American investments, which destroyed the existing land-tenure system of peasant freeholders. While there had been popular resistance to United States economic and military policy since the Occupation, the most intense guerilla warfare took place during the uprising of 1919. The Marines responded with their superior weaponry, killing over 3,000 Haitians. Criticism of the Occupation intensified in the United States when military documents about "the indiscriminate killing of natives" were publicized. [14]