Istwa Nou

The incidents happened in the open, on the street. They were written down inside the miscellaneous notes attached to reports on construction work called necessary. The Caribbean scholar Donette Francis describes postcolonial Caribbean space as capable of working as a clandestine site, a place hidden in plain view where a woman who tells what was done to her meets disbelief because nothing can be verified. Haitian women under the occupation were accounted for and erased in one motion. Their injuries were set down in enough detail to be treated medically and processed legally, then filed under headings that emptied the detail of meaning: careless women, disobedient women, drunk women, girls recorded as women and women recorded as girls. The street was public and the file was private. Everyone saw the violence and none of it could be admitted. Grace Sanders Johnson treats this as harm aimed at the archive itself, so that the record of what happened became the means of losing it.

Having accepted three thousand Haitian dead as unavoidable, Admiral Knapp was asked about women and children and said no. He allowed that a woman might have been shot during an action while in the company of a band, and called such cases accidents of the campaign, without intent behind them. He had heard of no case at all in which a child was killed. The records his own service produced say otherwise. Marines treated women close to the cacos as an equal threat and beat and killed them deliberately, and distance from the fighting protected nobody, since women were attacked on the roads, in the markets and inside their own houses whatever their politics. Estrea Jean Gilles, Eleanor Charles and Adirenng Senatus were injured and killed by American troops, and under Knapp's account of the occupation their deaths were inevitable and impossible at the same time. Officers wrote down the wounds. The same officers declined to answer for them in public. A file recording an injury and a testimony denying it are two halves of one policy.