Istwa Nou

Haitian law and Haitian social practice in the 1940s left women a narrow road: disposable, confined, contained, with citizenship on paper and very little of it in effect. The women of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale cut paths off that road. Jeanne Sylvain's letters show what the cutting looked like from inside. Physical health, mental health and the kin a woman could call on entered the political thinking directly, and shaped how these women read the moment they were living through. A woman down with fever, a woman unmarried, a woman running a household nobody counted, a woman who declined to continue: each of those was a political position as much as a circumstance. The league was steering toward sovereignty, personal and collective, and it understood where sovereignty is exercised. It is exercised by a particular body, in a particular street, on a particular morning, by someone who has had enough sleep or has not.

The Axis powers had cut American access to rubber coming out of the Philippines, and in 1941 Elie Lescot agreed to make Haiti the answer. The instrument was the Societe Haitiano-Americaine de Developpement Agricole, known as SHADA, a joint agricultural programme with the United States. Hevea rubber trees were to be brought from the Philippines and grown in Haiti. Alongside them the scheme planted cryptostegia vines, a second source of rubber, and took lumber out of the southeast of the country. All of that required land and it required labour. Both came from the Haitian peasantry, who held the ground the trees were to occupy and who would do the clearing and the planting. The structure should be recognisable. American capital directing Haitian land and Haitian work toward an American requirement is exactly the arrangement of the occupation that had ended six years earlier. The difference in 1941 was that the instructions came through a Haitian president rather than a Marine general.

Jeanne Sylvain took her degree in social work at the University of Chicago in 1942 and came back to Haiti to work before returning to her studies. She belonged to a family that supplied the Haitian feminist movement with several of its organisers, and she had trained in the discipline American universities were then exporting across the hemisphere. She arrived in the middle of Élie Lescot's wartime programme, which aimed to build the Haitian economy on American demand and to bind the country into Pan-American networks of trade and diplomacy. That programme is what put her into a salaried job within a year. The forces she had studied in Chicago, foreign capital reorganising a rural economy for a distant market, were at that moment reorganising the country she had come home to. She spent the next two years working inside them and finding out what her training was worth against them.

SHADA was the Societe Haitiano-Americaine de Developpement Agricole, a wartime venture backed by the United States to raise rubber in Haiti after the Japanese conquest of Southeast Asia cut the world off from its usual supply. In mid 1943 Jeanne Sylvain went to work at the company's newspaper, A Propos de SHADA. Her brothers and sisters were abroad through the decade and she was the one at home, which made her letters the family's running account of conditions in the country. At the beginning of January 1944 she told her sisters three things: food prices were moving constantly, work was becoming less secure, and Haitians were being pushed off their land. She had the last item from her own employer, whose planting programme was clearing peasant holdings for rubber vine. Her desk gave her the company's version of itself in the morning and the view from the road on the way home. She wrote both down.