Istwa Nou

Nobody can reconstruct what Haitian women and their families felt in the first weeks of the invasion, though fear, confusion and anger were certainly part of it. The most revealing accounts of daily change come from people who were children in 1915, of the age of Eleanor Charles or of Alice Garoute's older grandchildren. They folded the occupation into everything else about growing up, treating it as one more thing that required caution and rewarded careful curiosity. The literary scholar Nadève Ménard reads the novels written in Haiti during those years for what they show about the mind of a person raised under foreign rule. Oral histories, novels and archival records agree that young Haitians absorbed the occupation into ordinary life, by conscription, by necessity or by self preservation. Some remembered a before and an after. Ghislaine Charlier, born in 1918, had never known another Haiti, and described the Marines as deeply familiar and vividly out of place at once.

In Marie Vieux-Chauvet's novel, Claire mentions the American occupation in passing while describing her father's death, her attachments and the weather. Ghislaine Charlier gave the occupiers the same unceremonious place in her memory of early childhood. She was a girl among girls, shadowing the women of her family. For some women that detachment was a privilege of money and class. For others it was a daily refusal to grant a military government any standing. Women were changed by the occupation and they changed it. Women of different classes were drawn toward one another and stood in for one another in actions against anti Black violence and against the foreign presence. As they worked out their right to move through streets and institutions the Americans were rebuilding, physical mobility and political movement met at the point where a girl became an adult. The occupation was a condition rather than an event, and it outlasted the troops in the families and alliances it made.