Istwa Nou

Days after the assembly, the members of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale published a pamphlet. Its title reads La femme haitienne repond aux attaques formulees contre elle a l'Assemblee Constituante, which says plainly enough what the thing is: the Haitian woman answers the attacks made against her at the constitutional assembly. It carried essays by the president Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau, the vice president Alice Garoute, the novelist Cleante Desgraves Valcin, the journalist Yvonne Hakim Rimpel and the teacher Marie-Therese Poitevien. The last essay ran as a chronicle, a running transcript of the debate. Near the end the writers break that transcript with a parenthesis: a woman of the people wants to enter the gallery reserved for women, the gendarme prevents her, the members of the Ligue protest and are supported by the crowd, the speaker wants to distort the incident. Those lines are the only surviving trace of her. Writing them in also exposed the writers' own position, because it is there that a reader learns they were sitting behind a partition. The pamphlet stops at that point, with no conclusion, because they had walked out.