Istwa Nou

The women of the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale, an organisation founded by educated women in Port au Prince, worked on Haitian peasant, poor and working class women as researchers. They gathered data, published findings, and set the terms on which those lives entered the record, which placed them on the observing side of a study of their own countrywomen. Grace Sanders Johnson notes what the surviving papers look like as a result. The material on poor and rural women runs to many pages. The material on the elite and middle class women who did the collecting is scattered and thin, because they were never subjected to the curiosity and surveillance they directed at others, and because poorer women often refused to cooperate with it. Silences in the archives of Black women are usually the work of colonisers, foreigners or men. These particular silences were made by women about women. Sanders Johnson follows Marisa Fuentes in insisting that a historian work against that grain, and treats the act of archiving as a claim to citizenship.