Istwa Nou

The Second World War was good business for a narrow layer of Haiti. Factory owners and the big import and export houses had guaranteed buyers in the United States, fixed contracts and rising prices. Very little of that money moved downward. The local markets went on extracting labour from a working class that was growing as people came off the land, and from the peasant majority that still fed the country. Haitian women carried the heaviest part of the arrangement. They walked the produce to market, they did the domestic work in other people's houses, they took the factory shifts, and they kept households running on whatever was left over. Sanders Johnson uses one word for what this did to them, which is depleted. It is the right word. A person can be impoverished and still recover. Depletion means the stock is drawn down faster than it is replaced, and nobody in the arrangement intended to replace it.

The influenza that closed out 1943 did what outbreaks do. It produced rumour, fear, hints of national and international blame, shut businesses and schools, and wore out the people doing the nursing. The Sylvain sisters wrote to each other about the older members of their community, who were the ones at risk. Then the virus went through their own house. In the confusion and lethargy that followed, Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau could not remember whether she had told her sister Suzanne, who was away doing research in the Belgian Congo, that the grandmother of Madeleine's husband Max Bouchereau had died during the epidemic. That lapse is the most exact record of the household's condition anybody left behind. A family of formidable letter writers who held themselves together by post lost track of a death, because every one of them was too ill to write it down.

When Jeanne Sylvain listed the symptoms of the 1943 influenza she included the mental one, the heavy depression that came with the disease. The newspapers and the doctors gave that symptom very little attention, since a fever can be measured and a mood cannot. Her letters put it next to the other thing she was recording that season in Port-au-Prince, which was women killing themselves and women killing their newborn children. She built no theory out of the two facts. She wrote them down together, in the same correspondence, across the same months. That is enough to open a question the medical authorities of the time were neither equipped nor inclined to ask. An epidemic is not experienced the same way by everybody in one house. The person who nurses the sick, feeds them and has no wage of her own is carrying a different illness from the one the doctors were describing.

In January 1944 a reporter for Le Nouvelliste, one of the daily papers of Port-au-Prince, framed the infanticide cases then in the news as a question with two possible answers. Was it misery that provoked these crimes, or a twisted mentality in these women? Sanders Johnson takes the sentence apart. Offered a choice, a reader who takes the second answer finishes the inquiry inside the mother's skull. A reader who takes the first has to keep going, out into the price of imported oil and soap, the minimum wage frozen at a gourde and a half, the peasant plots cleared for the rubber scheme, and the administration presiding over all of it. Haitian women and children were dying, and the public discussion of their deaths was conducted as a diagnosis of the female mind. That is what makes the sentence worth preserving. It cost a newspaper nothing to print and it moved the whole argument indoors, away from anything a government could be asked to fix.

A newborn girl was found near the shore at Cite-Vincent in Port-au-Prince at the start of 1944. Jeanne Sylvain never claimed to know what had happened in that case or in the others being reported. She wrote to her sisters with a structural account instead. President Elie Lescot had brought down the prices of food staples. At the same time the taxes charged on goods imported from the United States, among them oil, soap and paper, had gone up. The minimum wage stayed where it was, at a gourde and a half. A household buying imported necessities out of that wage could not cover them, and the sums did not come out for the women running such households. She concluded that the basic needs of Haitian women were going unmet. The newspapers had asked whether Haitian mothers were mad or desperate. Sylvain added up the wages, the taxes and the prices, and produced a figure. The disagreement was about method before it was about conclusions.

On 6 January 1944 Jeanne Sylvain wrote to her family about what the Port-au-Prince papers were carrying. Deaths from physiological misery and undernourishment appeared as a matter of course. So did reports of women giving birth in the street. Over the previous few months a further item had joined them, and she noted it: cases of infanticide. Sanders Johnson is interested in how the reporting sounded. Deaths from an epidemic disease were written up as a crisis demanding action. These deaths went into the ordinary weekly cycle alongside shipping notices and court lists, with the quiet suggestion that whatever was killing Haitian infants originated in their mothers. A woman who could not feed a child was presented as the danger. The alternative reading, that she was the clearest available evidence of one, would have led straight to wages, prices and the government that set them. Sylvain, who was reading the same papers every week, drew that second conclusion in her letters home.