Istwa Nou

For the September 1936 number of La Voix des Femmes, Jeanne Perez chose a map for the cover, and the direction it pointed was north. The issue took readers on the trip many Haitians make once: a hundred and twenty miles from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Haitien, the old capital, then several miles south to the village of Milot, then up the Bonnet a l'Eveque, a mountain of three thousand feet, to the fortress called the Citadelle Laferriere. Henry Christophe built it after independence against a French return that never came, and it is among the largest fortresses in the Americas. A feminist monthly was turning itself into a route. The league had been arguing since 1935 that women belonged inside the revolutionary story of the country. Printing a map and walking the readership up to Christophe's walls was a way of saying that the inheritance was theirs to hand out, and that they had decided who was going.

An essay in the New World Almanac named the Citadelle Laferriere an additional wonder of the world. In the September 1936 issue of La Voix des Femmes, Jeanne Perez and Madeleine Sylvain both wrote about the fortress, which Henry Christophe built in the mountains behind Cap-Haitien while he ruled the north of Haiti, first as president and then as king. The foreign recognition was the occasion rather than the subject. Haiti in the 1930s was used to being described from outside, and the recent descriptions had come from American officials who had run the country for nineteen years and from American writers selling Vodou to readers as horror. An almanac entry that set a Haitian building beside the pyramids gave the league something else to work with. Perez and Sylvain took the compliment and used it, treating the fortress as national property and as a standing argument about what Black builders had been capable of a century earlier.

Madeleine Sylvain wrote that the Citadelle now stood in the company of the pyramids at Giza and the Great Wall of China, and that the listing showed plainly what Black people were capable of building. Then she moved to maintenance. Haitian presidents had promised attention to the monument before and had not delivered it, and Sylvain named Stenio Vincent and asked him to keep his word. Her proposals were specific. Lay an asphalt road from Cap-Haitien to Milot so that visitors can reach the mountain. Take the money those visitors spend and put it into restoring rooms inside the fortress. Use the restored rooms for a museum of King Henry Christophe. This is a feminist newspaper writing infrastructure policy in 1936, and the reasoning is exact: a monument nobody can reach earns nothing, and a monument that earns nothing does not get repaired. Sylvain wanted the revolutionary past to pay for its own upkeep.