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

C. L. R. James published the first edition of The Black Jacobins in 1938, writing in London for the Trotskyist press and organising for African independence. The book takes the revolt that began in Saint-Domingue in 1791 and treats it as a revolution of the first rank, with Toussaint Louverture as a political thinker and the enslaved of the northern plain as the people who decided the outcome. Before it, the standard European account handled Haiti as a colonial disaster with a body count attached. After it, the years from 1791 to 1804 could be set beside 1789 and 1917 and discussed in the same terms. The timing was deliberate. James was writing for readers who would soon be demanding an end to empire in Africa and the Caribbean, and he handed them a case in which enslaved people had beaten France, Spain and Britain in turn and founded a state. The argument outlived its first edition by decades.

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain divided Port-au-Prince into class zones for her research. Close to twenty thousand women lived at the seams between them. They were domestic workers, and their day was set by somebody else's breakfast. Coffee had to be on the table at seven, so they set out at five, and they came home after dark. Both ends of the journey happened when nobody was watching. Many of them had given up schooling for jobs paid at the legal minimum, and that trade runs one way only. The capital ran on these women. The households that employed them, the zones Comhaire-Sylvain mapped, and the professional and political life conducted inside them all rested on twenty thousand people walking through the dark twice a day. The map of the city did not show them. The census counted them in somebody else's house. The hours they spent in transit belonged to no one's accounts at all.

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.

In February 1938 Jeanne Perez stepped down from the editorship of La Voix des Femmes, a year and a half after the paper had carried her open letter to the child Marie-Madeleine. She stayed inside the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale and gave it her house. The building in Petionville became one of the league's schools, where girls brought up from the centre of Port-au-Prince were taught to read and write. She also had more time for the journal of poetry and creative writing she had started in 1937 and called La Semeuse, the woman who sows. The name matches the shape of the work. Perez was putting things in the ground in whatever medium came to hand, in a newspaper, in the theatre, in a poetry review and in the front rooms of her own house, with no assurance that any of it would come up.