Istwa Nou

In Haiti the death space covers more than the passage from this world to the next, which is to say to Ginen. It takes in the procession, the possessions, the wake, the placing of bodies in the cemetery and the long practice of mourning. Under military occupation those observances gained new weight, because the authority that should have counted the dead was foreign and counted selectively. Suzanne Sylvain built a scholarly life on that ground and her sister Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau built a political one. Women's organising in the years after the marines left drew on both. It was shaped by exclusion from the Haitian state, since women could neither vote nor hold office, and it was driven by shared loss and by mourning work Haitians already knew how to do together. The Sylvain sisters carried their parents' politics and their grief into the same effort. When the movement began after 1934, its method was to study women's lives across class, beginning with the women who had knelt in the market.

During the years of her grand deuil, Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain published four pieces in a row in La Voix des Femmes, the journal of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale. The first was about running into a young woman from Kenscoff she had known as a child, who used to sell food near her house. The second traced continuities between Kreyol and African languages, the subject her father had spent his life on. The third was a list of jokes about women and their families. The fourth retold a folktale about mothers and daughters and what women want from one another and do not get. Read in sequence they amount to a wake conducted in print, a libera for her father, her mother and her elder brother. The Sylvain sisters lost their parents as the American occupation was ending, and they carried the grief into the same journals where they were building a women's movement. The scholarship was the mourning.