Istwa Nou

The women knocked on doors and stopped people in the street. The first day brought in one hundred American dollars. Between October 1920 and February 1921 Haitian women financed the Union Patriotique's delegation to the United States, and the campaign reached all sixty-one committees the organisation had in the country, with women serving as the main fundraisers and the administrators in each of them. They were instructed to give two or three days a week to soliciting from families in their own neighbourhoods, and they spent weeks inside other people's houses. That is where the second thing happened. Sitting in those rooms, the collectors heard what the occupation had done to the women who lived in them, wrote it down, and carried the accounts back to the membership and outward across the region. The material became the centre of the delegation's report in 1921, reached American newspapers, and was printed years later in the book Occupied Haiti. A fundraising round had produced the first archive of the occupation's violence against women.

American surveillance reports on the November collection in Port-au-Prince said that most of the marchers were children, and used the observation to write the day off. Some officers went further and called the children a device of the Union Patriotique for gathering sympathy. The occupation's intelligence service could not hold the idea that a child living under a foreign army might have reasons of its own. Certainly some children came out for the noise and the crowd. They were also living the occupation. Children in Haiti in 1920 had watched marines kick severed heads along the road and had seen their mothers run down by military vehicles. Political understanding in that country did not wait for a minimum age. Madeleine and Jeanne Sylvain were somewhere in the crowd holding their mother's bucket, or at home that evening hearing what the day had brought in. What the reports actually recorded was the limit of what the occupier could imagine about the people it was governing.