1915 to 1934 · Haitianspan
Women's injuries are recorded in the margins of American road reports
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The American occupation built more than 500 miles of road, bridge and railway in Haiti, and its engineers filed routine construction reports as the work went on. Those reports are also the fullest surviving record of what happened to Haitian women in the same years. In side notes and passing description the paperwork registers women's skin raised, punctured, cut open and dismembered by occupation personnel, through malice and through carelessness. Grace Sanders Johnson borrows Marisa Fuentes's term mutilated historicity for the result. Haitian women enter the written record of these nineteen years overwhelmingly as injured bodies, so that a historian who wants their lives has to build them out of wounds. Sanders Johnson reads Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau's statement that the Haitian woman was literally transformed by the occupation as a claim about flesh and material conditions rather than a figure of speech. The Haitian geographer Georges Anglade argued that the occupation cannot be understood without treating the reordering of physical space as a political and historical fact.
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