But, by an irresistible logic, the more we forced ourselves to believe that we were "coloured" Frenchmen, the more we simply forgot to be Haitian [...]. As this process occurred, the word "negro", formerly a generic term, acquired a pejorative meaning. As for that of "African", it always has been and is the most humiliating term by which a Haitian can be addressed [...]. Ah! I know what repugnance I will encounter in daring to speak to you of Africa and African matters! The subject seems inelegant and completely devoid of interest to you, doesn't it? [...] For heaven's sake, my friends, do not scorn our ancestral patrimony. Love it, consider it as an intangible whole (Price-Mars, 1995, pp. 146, 147, 151).  
The cultural embrace of Africa was a raison d'être for Haiti's intellectuals, who joined Price-Mars in the Indigenist movement of the late years of the United States occupation of Haiti. In Sales Nègres (Filthy Negroes), Jacques Roumain, the brilliant Marxist poet and novelist, presented the racism and oppression of black people as a universal condition that bound Africa with the Americas together as the 'wretched of the earth':  
Well it's like this:
We others
Negroes
Filthy negroes
We won't take anymore
That's right
We're through being in Africa
In America
Your negroes
Your niggers
Your filthy negroes. (Roumain, 1945, p. 33).
The respected poet Léon Laleau, offered a view of Africa at the centre of the Haitian body that was typical of his peers in his 1931 poem Trabison (Betrayal):  
This obsessive heart which does not relate
To my language and my customs,
And on which bites like a spike
Borrowed sentiments and European customs
Do you feel this suffering
And this unequalled despair
In taming, with words from France
This heart which has come to me from Senegal? (Laleau, 1981, p. 110).