My body is a piece of land

Women who quit domestic service in Haitian towns were routinely accused of theft on their way out. Guilt and innocence in these cases were seldom established either way. What the women were doing was leaving, and leaving without notice was the only shape the departure could take. Carolle Charles records the terms in which poor, working-class and peasant women described the thing they were guarding. Kom se kawo tem: my body is a piece of land. Se lajam'm: it is money. Read that literally and it rearranges the sociology. A migrant with no property who sells her labour in a town belongs, by the standard categories, to the urban proletariat. A woman who holds a plot and works it decides for herself how hard to work it and how much of the yield to keep. These women were placing themselves in the second category. The body was the holding. Walking out of the house was how she set the rate.

On 30 December 1935 Le Nouvelliste, the country's main daily, began running a series of articles setting out the racial and biological theories of the Griots. The Griots were young intellectuals who had taken the cultural nationalism of Jean Price-Mars, which asked Haitians to recognise the African content of their own culture, and pushed it into biology. In their hands African descent stopped being a heritage to be studied and became a set of inherited traits determining temperament, aptitude and the proper distribution of political power. Printing the argument in Le Nouvelliste moved it out of small literary reviews and into the reading of every educated household in Port-au-Prince. This was the intellectual equipment of noirisme, the doctrine that the Black majority had a right to the state and that the mulatto elite had held it by fraud since 1804. François Duvalier was one of the Griots. Twenty-two years later he was president.

On 11 September 1936 Lorimer Denis and Francois Duvalier published an essay on what they called the Haitian ethnie in Le Nouvelliste, the country's main daily paper. Their claim was that biology determined the psychological and social behaviour of the different colour groups in Haiti. The country had been divided since independence between a largely light skinned elite and a Black majority, and that quarrel had always been fought in the language of politics, property and class. Denis and Duvalier moved it onto race as a physical fact, borrowing the vocabulary of European racial science and turning it against the elite that had used the same vocabulary to justify its own standing. The essay is the founding document of noirisme. It supplied the reasoning Duvalier used as president after 1957 to argue that power in Haiti belonged to Black Haitians by nature, and that opposition to him was opposition to the majority itself.

Haitian newspapers told readers almost nothing about President Stenio Vincent's difficulties. The country had been under a state of siege since not long after the American marines withdrew in 1934, and the controlled press printed praise. Vincent's programme was a move from representative government to personal rule, carried out behind the proper legal forms. The elections of September 1936, the first general elections since the occupation ended, offered voters one government candidate for every seat in the Chamber of Deputies, on printed slates they were forbidden to change. Vincent later gave Colonel Calixte of the Garde the theory behind it: the government makes the constitution, the laws, the regulations and the agreements, and cannot let any of them get in its way when it decides a measure is needed to keep itself in place. By the end of 1936 the state was Vincent. The mass of Haitians had no vote worth casting, class, region and colour were sorting the country again, and the Garde itself was reported to be coming apart.