1935 to 1936 · Haitianspan
A feminist paper and the noiriste Griots quote the same Turkish leader
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Every number of La Voix des Femmes opened with the same epigraph, from Kemal Ataturk: a people split into two categories, men on one side and women on the other, will always be weak. The Griots, the ethnological circle around Francois Duvalier and Lorimer Denis, admired Ataturk too. In the mid 1930s the league, the Griots and the socialists agreed on more than that. All three backed anticolonial movements abroad and all three distrusted the transitional government of Stenio Vincent. In its issue of August 1936 the newspaper praised an essay by Duvalier and Denis attacking Haitian deference to French thought, which asked why Black students should be taught Clovis and Joan of Arc when they had Louverture, Dessalines and Henry Christophe. Madeleine Sylvain had made the same argument months earlier, blaming a national sense of inferiority on the country's fixation with France and asking what people could claim a better past. By the 1940s the two readings of Ataturk had separated, the Griots folding him into noiriste politics while the league stayed clear of party alignment.
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