Istwa Nou

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.

The climb to the Citadelle was supposed to end in enlightenment, and Perez was particular about what kind. Haitians had a settled way of handling 1804: the fortress, the founders, the one successful revolt of enslaved people in the hemisphere, recited for comfort. Perez wanted the past used as a measure instead. She asked her niece to arrive at an ancestral reckoning, a plain question put to every generation since independence. What have we done since. She wanted the revolutionary ideas applied more widely than they had been. The front cover of that September issue of La Voix des Femmes carried the words Plus de Lumiere, more light, and the light was to fall on the present. A country that treats its revolution as a monument gets to feel proud of itself. A country that treats it as a standard has to account for the distance between what was won in 1804 and what its women were living under in 1936.

Perez asked her niece to inhabit the Citadelle as Black history. She named Henry Christophe, the bronze king who built it, and placed herself, her niece Marie-Madeleine and the country's future in his line of descent. The inheritance she listed ran wide: Black thinking and Black dreaming, Black triumph and Black torment, Black sorrow and Black royalty, Black love and Black care. This mattered because of the argument Haiti was having with itself in 1936. The families who held the presidency and the ministries had spent a century treating Blackness as the condition of the peasant majority and their own standing as something apart from it. Perez wrote from the professional class that produced the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale and claimed the whole inheritance anyway. She granted that the years since independence had weathered the revolutionary vision and left the country scarred. She still told her niece to climb into the grief, the weeping and the victories, because they arrive together.

Jeanne Perez wrote and produced her first play in 1940, when the niece she had been sending revolutionary letters to was eight years old. The subject was Sanite Belair, born Suzanne Belair, who fought under Toussaint Louverture alongside her husband Charles Belair. Sanite's ability as a soldier and the circumstances of her capture were already legend. So was her death. Facing a French colonial firing squad she refused the blindfold so that she could look the men in the eye, and she died shouting Viv libete, anba esklavaj. Haitian children had been told that story for generations. Perez took it off the oral circuit and put it in front of an audience with a script, actors and a set. This is the point at which a woman who organised for women's rights becomes a woman who makes art about them, and the choice of subject is itself the argument. The revolution had women in it, carrying guns, and one of them died better than the men who shot her.