Istwa Nou

Jeanne Perez wrote a public letter to her niece in 1936. In 1942 she wrote Sanite Belair with a goddaughter. Belair was an officer in the revolutionary army whom the French executed in 1802, and Perez gave her a child to instruct. Across those six years Perez assembled a record with a single argument running through it. The duty to care for women, which she treated as both sacred and political, is the test of whether Haitian citizenship means anything. She choreographed how women were to stand toward one another. She wrote women and girls into the national script as makers of the future rather than spectators of the past, and she did it for people who had been told the race was already under way without them. Belair's cry of long live liberty, down with slavery, came out of the 1942 script raised an octave. The change of pitch widened what freedom could be asked to cover.

Between her sixth and tenth birthdays, Marie-Madeleine Price-Mars watched her godmother write a play and her father take a senate seat for the second time. The two things belong together. Jean Price-Mars had stood for the presidency against Stenio Vincent in 1930, lost, and then led the opposition to him in the senate. When Elie Lescot was elected in May 1941, Price-Mars returned to the chamber that same year. The household the child grew up in ran on both kinds of work. On one side a woman was writing for the stage and for a feminist newspaper, making the case for Haitian women in public. On the other side stood the man who had told the country in 1928 to take its African inheritance seriously, and who was now doing it as a legislator. Neither career made sense without the other, and the girl between them inherited both.

Six years before the premiere, Perez had written to her niece Marie-Madeleine about the Citadelle and about the revolutionary woman she meant to summon. In 1942 she summoned her in a theatre. Read against that letter, the drama about Sanité Bélair reads as feminist argument, and the praise it drew for artistry and novelty accounts for only half of what it was doing. Perez had to hold several truths on the same stage at once: the historical record of the revolution, the sacred material of Vodou handled without desecrating it, and the case that Haitian women had made the country and could remake it. She kept all three standing for three acts. The reviewers noticed the craft. The niece it was addressed to would have caught the rest, and so would every young woman of the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale watching it from the seats.

Marie, the goddaughter in Perez's play, has no clear existence in the historical record. Perez most likely invented her. Between the songs, the dances and the fast talk about troop movements, the filleule keeps reminding the hall of a fact the military histories leave out, which is that the woman giving battle orders was somebody's marraine, her godmother, answerable for a child's upbringing and soul. Sanité Bélair was shot by the French in October 1802. The play cannot change that and does not try. What it does is put the word marraine in a child's mouth in every act, so the death keeps being interrupted by the voice of the person who came after. Their fates were tied together by the writing. A godmother is a claim on the future, and the future in this play will not stop calling her name, which is one way of saying the past cannot be executed while somebody is left to answer for it.