Istwa Nou

Price-Mars at the League's podium did two things at once. His presence showed the leaders were willing to have class, colour and cultural privilege attacked in their own hall. His argument gave them something else. In his account, rural women embodied a cultural authenticity that educated women had to respect and take in, which turned peasant women's bodies and customs into the ticket by which elite women entered the land of origins. Trouillot, Matthew Smith, Ramsey and others have shown how easily the celebration of African ancestry sat beside contempt for the people who practised it daily. Here the harm ran from women to women. Price-Mars also did the useful work of treating Haitian women as Black women inside a patriarchal order, with common ground across class, and he named schooling as the way out of domestic mistreatment and a shrunken civic life. He asked far less of men. He explained multiple partnerships as an inherited African trait and said nothing about the marriage contract that left a wife subject to her husband. That silence pushed the League toward family law.