Istwa Nou

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.

Sylvain wrote about repairs. Jeanne Perez wrote about what happened to her at the site. She described the high steps of the Citadelle as a Black heart's heroic dream set down in stone, built to watch for enemies from outside the country and from inside it. Arriving at the foot of the fortress and looking up, she felt something she had no name for. The walls rise a hundred and thirty feet. Perez was humbled, grateful and awed, and had no way to discharge any of it where she stood. So she addressed it forward. She wrote a letter to her four year old niece and printed it in La Voix des Femmes. The emotion was too large for a travel report and too large for the present tense, and the only container she could find was a child who would still be alive when Perez was not, and who might one day climb the same stairs and understand what her aunt had failed to say.

Jeanne Perez addressed her published letter to her niece Marie-Madeleine Price-Mars. One day, she wrote, climb the steep slope of the Bonnet a l'Eveque and speak with the ancestors there, by thinking hard and by wanting it. At the foot of the old dungeon, stop. Lift your head and look at the heroic dream of a Black heart written into those steps, which more than a hundred years have failed to bring down. A feeling you have never had will make you small. Perez then set the fortress and the country side by side. Like the Fatherland, she wrote, the Citadelle is cracked and storm damaged and its injuries show. All of it is magnificent anyway, because it was forged by a Black heroism that time and carrion birds have not managed to finish off. The letter is three things at once: a note of love to a small girl, a set of instructions for keeping revolutionary memory alive, and an argument that a wounded thing can still be the proof.