Istwa Nou

Jeanne Perez published a letter to her niece in the September 1936 issue of La Voix des Femmes, the paper of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale. The letter is built around a climb to the Citadelle, the fortress Henry Christophe raised on a mountain in the north, and it dwells on the weight of the stone and on what the walk costs a body. The exhaustion was the argument. A young woman who has hauled herself up to that wall has some idea what the founding generation spent, and she will be slower to let the country coast on their account. Then Perez widened the invitation. The niece was to bring her sons along. Boys and men were to be humbled by the same dream and made to climb the same road. Care, memory and belonging were the political work Perez was describing, and she refused to let that work be filed as women's business alone.

What Jeanne Perez did in the September 1936 issue of La Voix des Femmes was put a private form of instruction into public type. An aunt teaching a niece how to read her own country's past, and telling her which parts of it to carry, is ordinary domestic work. Perez set it in a national monthly and mailed it to subscribers, which turned it into a method. Grace Sanders Johnson reaches for the poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs to name what that method is. The practice is older than feminism and older than the category woman, because people of different ages have been investing in each other's survival for as long as there have been people. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale is usually measured by what it won in law, the wage and the vote. Its more durable contribution was a way of moving knowledge across a generation, which outlives any charter and any committee.

Perez told her niece to be baptised again and again in the heat of the revolutionary promise. The creature she chose to carry that image repays attention. A writer reaching for an animal drawn to flame would ordinarily take the papillon de nuit, the moth. Perez wrote papillon, the butterfly, which flies in daylight. That leaves a very narrow opening, and Grace Sanders Johnson thinks Perez knew how narrow it was. One small family of butterflies, the Hedylidae, carries dark brown and black wings through Caribbean nights toward light. Perez was born in Haiti and had travelled the country for her work in law, education, literature and theatre, so its animals were within her reach. The distinction decides what happens at the flame. A moth is destroyed by the light it goes to. The lovers of light Perez described came away from the fire charged.

Grace Sanders Johnson calls what Jeanne Perez was doing othermothering, and keeps it separate from the celebration of motherhood as biology or as national duty, which the league picked up and put down at different points in its history. Othermothering in this sense is care that tends the past and the present in a single motion. The published letter worked as an archive, holding Perez's day at the Citadelle and the revolutionary history that had produced the feeling. It also worked as a summons. A veve is the ground drawing traced in flour or ash at a Vodou ceremony to call a spirit down into the room, and Sanders Johnson compares the letter to one. It was not only writing. It was an inscription meant to bring an ancestral impulse into the present and fasten it onto people, including people not yet born, which is a large claim to make for a column in a monthly newspaper.