Istwa Nou

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.

In February 1938 Jeanne Perez stepped down from the editorship of La Voix des Femmes, a year and a half after the paper had carried her open letter to the child Marie-Madeleine. She stayed inside the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale and gave it her house. The building in Petionville became one of the league's schools, where girls brought up from the centre of Port-au-Prince were taught to read and write. She also had more time for the journal of poetry and creative writing she had started in 1937 and called La Semeuse, the woman who sows. The name matches the shape of the work. Perez was putting things in the ground in whatever medium came to hand, in a newspaper, in the theatre, in a poetry review and in the front rooms of her own house, with no assurance that any of it would come up.

The Haitian arts movement of the 1940s ran alongside negritude, the wider current that took the study of African cultures across the world as its subject. Haiti drew people in. Katherine Dunham, Zora Neale Hurston, Suzanne Cesaire, Langston Hughes and Lavinia Williams all studied, taught or made work in the country, overlapping there with Haitian artists including Jeanne Perez and de Pradines. The traffic ran the other way as well. Lina Mathion Blanchet, de Pradines and Perez left to perform in the United States. What made the country attractive to a Black American writer or a Martinican theorist was that the argument they were having elsewhere had been settled here in 1804 and had a hundred and forty years of practice behind it. Haitian dance, Haitian music and Haitian religion were available to be studied as a living culture. For the Haitian artists, the visitors were an audience that already agreed with them, which is a rare thing to have.

In 1941 the Haitian government put its backing behind Jean Price-Mars and Jacques Roumain, who founded the Institut d'Ethnologie in Port-au-Prince that year. Price-Mars had spent two decades making the indigeniste case, that Haitian culture rests on African foundations and that an elite taking its bearings from Paris was describing a country it did not live in. Roumain was a writer of the younger generation. The institute turned that argument into an institution with premises, a budget and a claim on the state. Once the study of African traditions inside Haitian practice was official work, the Haitian arts movement had somewhere to stand, and it could reach across the differences of class and culture that had kept the capital and the countryside in separate conversations. The timing is the striking part. The same government was breaking up Vodou ceremonies in the countryside while paying for the scholars who studied them. The contradiction was productive for a few years and it was never resolved.

Jeanne Perez travelled to New York in 1947, and an account of the trip records that she formed a great liking for Harlem, a place she had heard a great deal about. Harlem in 1947 held the largest concentration of black political and artistic life in the United States, with its own newspapers, theatres, churches and organisations. Perez had spent years teaching Haitian girls, her niece among them, that their country's revolution and its monuments belonged to them, and she had written the girl a tour of the fortress Henry Christophe built in the northern mountains. The Harlem visit extended that education outward. What she wanted to leave behind was a habit of recognition, so that a Haitian girl reading about black life in another country would take it as connected to her own and not as foreign business. The geography of the lesson grew from the mountains above Cap-Haitien to the avenues north of Central Park.