Istwa Nou

Mimi Sheller defines citizenship as a bundle of practices: who may occupy public space, who may speak in public, who may carry a weapon, who may vote. Grace Sanders Johnson adds one more, which is who is permitted to keep the record. Black women's archives rarely sat in state repositories. They were sewn into the inside seam of a dress, tucked between the pages of a valued book, marked with a knotted cord, braided into hair, stitched into a family quilt. Haitian women worked the same way across borders. Copies of La Voix des Femmes went by post to subscribers in the United States, in France and in the Belgian Congo. Self-published feminist essays sat in dented filing cabinets and in libraries kept under beds. Memories were parked in community centres wherever Haitians had settled. Women photographed each other, wrote each other down and held the evidence for a generation that had not yet asked for directions. Tina Campt calls this grammar the future real conditional, an attachment to what ought to be true.