Istwa Nou

Sanité Bélair was an officer in the Haitian revolutionary army, executed by the French in 1802 at twenty one. Every Haitian schoolchild knew her name, which is why people doubted that a play about her could hold an audience. The playwright Perez, a member of the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale, opened her drama at the Rex Theatre in Port-au-Prince on 10 August 1942. A reviewer wrote the following day that the piece kept close to the historical record and still escaped the false ideal, the flattering national portrait such subjects usually produce, and that a true ideal came out of it instead. After the first act he called the staging sober, clear and quick, and said the author deserved congratulation. The point of the notice is that familiarity had been beaten. Perez had taken the most rehearsed story in the country and made it move at the pace of something happening now.

By the third and last act of Perez's drama nobody in the Rex Theatre was in suspense about the plot. Sanité Bélair and her husband Charles were captured and shot by the French in 1802, and the whole country had been taught that ending. One reviewer wrote that they all already knew the two were lost, and that even so the intensity of the writing made them care about the outcome, wait, follow, and go breathless toward the thing they knew was coming. That is a strange effect to produce and it tells you what the play was for. A hundred and forty years after the execution the audience was not being informed of anything. It was being made to feel a death again, together, in the present tense, at a fixed hour, in a commercial theatre. Perez kept telling the story because the telling was the point. Grief performed on a schedule stops being memory and becomes practice.

The reviewer's account of the central scene is about sound. Sanité Bélair, full of enthusiasm and hatred of slavery, raises her voice to the soldiers, and the voice carries the accents of victory and freedom. The audience at the Rex Theatre was receiving an instruction delivered in the second person. Perez built the play so that the revolutionary promise sounded newly lit, and she built it out of young women's voices, so the past being summoned was one in which women gave the orders. That past went into the ears of a Port-au-Prince audience in August 1942 at a volume no printed history could reach. Haitian schoolbooks name Sanité Bélair and move on to the generals. On this stage she commanded, and the people hearing her were being asked to answer. Perez called it care for the nation, which is a plain way of describing what she was doing to the room.

The sound the Rex audience heard in August 1942 amounted to more than battle speeches. Perez scripted Haitian Vodou songs and dances into the body of the play. Vodou was the religion of the Haitian majority, and the Church and the state had treated it as an embarrassment to be put down; the anti-superstition campaign had been driving priests through the parishes until a few months before the premiere. Putting that music inside a drama about the founding of the country, on a paying stage in the capital, made a claim about where the revolution had come from. Perez also gave Sanité Bélair a goddaughter named Marie and used the child to carry the spiritual and political inheritance forward inside the story. The device repeated the writer's own arrangement with her niece Marie-Madeleine, to whom she had written six years earlier about summoning a revolutionary woman. The play was that promise kept, with the songs included.