Istwa Nou

The women of the League travelled the country and wrote down what they saw. Those accounts, printed as journey reports in La Voix des Femmes, worked twice over. They are personal records, and they are evidence of how far the organisation reached beyond Port-au-Prince, into towns and rural districts that Haitian politics normally treated as scenery. The roads they used had been laid by the United States occupation, which built them to move troops and to see into places it could not otherwise reach. The marines left in 1934. The roads stayed. The daughters of the generation that had organised against the occupation rode along them to hold meetings, open schools and record what women in the countryside actually needed. A geography built for surveillance became a geography of organising without a single stone being moved. Infrastructure keeps whatever purpose the people using it assign to it, and for four years the League assigned it a new one.

When Cleante Valcin wrote up the September 1935 drive to Saint-Marc for La Voix des Femmes, she wrote it as an epic. The road was brown and full of stones. The two cars were steel beasts, sweating and snorting and refusing to be turned back, pelted along the way by some invisible spirit amusing itself at their expense. Two young men friendly to the league, recorded only as Sylvain and Moise, did the driving with what she called skilful hands. The party reached Arcahaie quickly, parked there for a few minutes and pushed on north. The sea played hide and seek with them, disappearing and returning for five minutes, ten, fifteen, along the same stretch of road. Valcin loved that sea and said so. What she had actually done was travel one day up the coast to a meeting in a provincial town, and what she filed was a report with beasts in it, an unseen tormentor, and water with a will of its own.

Stones came up off the road against the cars and the sea kept pace with them going north. For Cleante Valcin the trip was worth as much as the arrival. What she saw and heard, and where the party stopped, placed the league's members on a route of their own choosing, through a country they were learning to look at as organisers rather than as residents of the capital. By writing the drive as an encounter with beasts, with gods and with a sea that behaved like a person, she gave the ordinary labour of building chapters in the 1930s the shape of a voyage. Valcin was the first Haitian woman to publish a novel, and across her fiction she was trying to get the whole country onto the page. In La Voix des Femmes she and the other members did something narrower and stranger. They wrote down their changing relations with one another and the ideas they were forming together, issue by issue, so that the movement kept its own account of itself.

At the league's annual conference on 7 June 1936 Madeleine Sylvain gave a speech she called Notre Conception du Feminisme. She began by thanking the members who had come in from the branch chapters, women who had left their houses and their jobs and paid for the journey to show that the idea they shared was worth something to them. Then she used those women as her evidence. Could anyone still say that the Haitian woman was satisfied with her situation and had no wish to change it, when delegates from several cities of the republic were willing to face a long and punishing trip for no purpose beyond standing beside other women? Roads in Haiti in 1936 were bad and travel took days. The argument required no statistic and Sylvain offered none. The women were in the room, and what it had cost to get them there was the answer to her question.