1925–1929: (Jacques Roumain and the Ligue: The Revue Indigène, the Desecration of Dessalines’s Statue, and the Fuse That Was Lit in 1925): The fuse that was …

1925–1929: (Jacques Roumain and the Ligue: The Revue Indigène, the Desecration of Dessalines’s Statue, and the Fuse That Was Lit in 1925): The fuse that was to detonate the coming explosion the blan had so unwittingly prepared had been lighted in 1925. That year a young scion of the elite who was pursuing engineering at Zurich had delighted the Union Patriotique by a fiery letter asking to be enrolled — this brilliant young mulâtre was a grandson of Tancrède Auguste, and his name was Jacques Roumain. When he returned to Haiti in 1927, he flung himself into the intellectual resistance by launching a literary magazine, Revue Indigène; when this went the way of most literary reviews in 1928, he soon founded a less arcane journal, Le Petit Impartial, calling itself Organ of the Masses and specifically the voice of a student organization, Ligue de la Jeunesse Patriote Haïtienne, brought into being by Roumain. What few Haitians and no Americans then knew was that the Communist Party had recruited Roumain in France. The time was ripe for Roumain, for his ideas, and for those of the volatile elite students he set out to politicize — reporting the mid-1929 desecration of Dessalines’s statue by youths of the Ligue, an officer of the Garde commented that these people, mostly aged up to twenty-one years, were anti everything, even Dessalines, their attitude strictly anti anything that might have caused the present condition of Haitian politics — they were against their parents, the government, the opposition, and the occupation. After fourteen years of occupation this was the disaffected mood of a class whose parental bases of self-respect and pride, identification with French culture, and condescension alike toward American materialism and ignorant noir culture had been so undercut. Roumain’s feelings, voiced in mordant verse, were even bitterer: pour en finir / une / fois / pour / toutes / avec ce monde / de nègres / de niggers / de sales nègres.