Istwa Nou

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale was founded in Port-au-Prince in 1935 and was the first organised women's movement in Haiti. The legal historian Mirlande Manigat gives the standard later judgement on it. More radical women's movements came afterward, and they left the pioneer organisation somewhere between reverence and dismissal, honoured for opening the road and faulted for refusing to walk it to the end. Grace Sanders Johnson found the same doubleness in her interviews, most of them taken shortly before and shortly after the earthquake of January 2010. The earthquake ended the argument for many of the people conducting it, since leaders of the Haitian women's movement died in the collapse. Gina Athena Ulysse then called for new stories about Haiti on the ground that the old ones had stopped working, having reduced a country to resilience, poverty, pity and the supernatural. Haitian women organising in the twenty-first century face what the founders of 1935 faced: a wealth gap, a state that barely registers them, foreign intervention, predatory markets, sexual violence, and schools and clinics they cannot reach.

In 1944 the Martinican poet Aime Cesaire and his wife Suzanne Cesaire came to Haiti for a month of lectures organised by the Congres de la Connaissance. Cesaire later said Haiti was where negritude first stood up, a debt he traced to the Haitian writers Antenor Firmin and Jean Price-Mars and to the revolution that ended in 1804. Before he arrived, Jeanne Sylvain, coeditor of La Voix des Femmes and a member of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, wrote to her siblings that a Martinican poet, or possibly a Guadeloupean, was expected in September. By October she had been to the lectures and told them he spoke about literature marvellously and that she had learned there were more Haitian philosophers than she had known about. Sanders Johnson keeps that flicker of uncertainty in the record on purpose. The Sylvain sisters had worked closely with Price-Mars, so this was not ignorance. It is what a political idea looks like before it hardens into a name. The lectures fed the surrealist current in Port-au-Prince and the awakening that produced 1946.