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

Jeanne Perez wrote a public letter to her niece in 1936. In 1942 she wrote Sanite Belair with a goddaughter. Belair was an officer in the revolutionary army whom the French executed in 1802, and Perez gave her a child to instruct. Across those six years Perez assembled a record with a single argument running through it. The duty to care for women, which she treated as both sacred and political, is the test of whether Haitian citizenship means anything. She choreographed how women were to stand toward one another. She wrote women and girls into the national script as makers of the future rather than spectators of the past, and she did it for people who had been told the race was already under way without them. Belair's cry of long live liberty, down with slavery, came out of the 1942 script raised an octave. The change of pitch widened what freedom could be asked to cover.

Nation and nationalism sit awkwardly on postwar Africa. Territories had to turn themselves into nation-states out of administrative units in a very short time, and in some cases the work is still unfinished. Movements that called themselves nationalist were frequently defending a region or a group, as concerned with who would hold the territory after the Europeans left as with getting them out. Searching for a shared consciousness inside colonial boundaries usually misleads, because those boundaries were drawn for European convenience and carried no ethnic, linguistic or historical logic. In practice nationalism in Africa often meant sharper competition between ethnic, religious, regional and economic groups, some of those rivalries manufactured by colonial rule and some far older. Polities that had been dominant in the nineteenth century pursued their own aims inside the anti-colonial struggle and sometimes sought to leave it. The task facing postwar leaders was to gather political associations, trade unions, militant Christianity and Islam, negritude and pan-Africanism into something that could force a departure and then govern.

Comhaire-Sylvain published while her fieldwork was still running. The first piece to appear, Vocabulaire des croyances paysannes, listed the words rural Haitians used for the things they believed in. She laid it out in columns like a dictionary, setting each Haitian Kreyol term beside a word from Dahomey with a similar sound and a similar sense. Dahomey, in what is now Benin, was one of the coasts that supplied Saint-Domingue with captives through the eighteenth century, and the vocabulary had crossed with the people. Printing the comparison in parallel columns made the claim difficult to argue with, since a reader could run a finger down the page and see the correspondence for herself. The venue mattered as much as the method. This did not appear in a learned journal. It appeared in a feminist newspaper, in front of the women of the capital, at a moment when the capital was still being taught that its Kreyol was a corruption of French.

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain spent February and March 1938 writing up Kenscoff, the village in the mountains above Port-au-Prince, for the paper La Voix des Femmes. Four articles came out of it. They covered how people there worked the land, what stories and beliefs they held, and how they buried and remembered their dead. The paper belonged to the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, the women's league founded in 1934 to press for civil and political rights, and its readers were largely schooled women of the capital. What Comhaire-Sylvain handed them was fieldwork. She had trained as a linguist, and she reported what she had watched and heard: the hours women worked, the words they used, the graves they kept. Haitian feminist writing had until then argued mostly from principle. These four pieces set a different pattern, which was to start from the lives of women who would never read the article.