Istwa Nou

Jeanne Sylvain worked against the story she was paid to tell, in the only ways open to a translator. She refused to circulate the SHADA newspaper to her brothers and sisters, the people whose judgement she rated highest, on the ground that the paper could not be relied on. She kept trying to slip her own humour into the copy. Neither act stopped a bulldozer. Both are records of a woman who knew what she was inside of. SHADA was one of several ventures in the 1940s where Haitian hopes for Pan-American cooperation were spoiled by how the partners actually behaved on the ground. Chantalle Verna's point stands alongside that: Haitians used the machinery of Pan-Americanism steadily for purposes of their own. Withholding the paper from the Sylvain household was a small piece of archival sabotage. She was deciding what her family would have to read about SHADA afterward, and she chose nothing.

The young Haitian women who reached the towns after being displaced from the countryside went into other people's houses to work. What they found there was low pay, long days, and no boundary between the job and the employer's household, which in practice meant sexual violence from employers with no recourse available to the worker. The volume of coerced and forced movement in these years was never counted and its effects ran well past the households involved. The Haitian psychologists Guerda Nicolas and Casta Guillaume have argued that tearing women away from land and from home space may have done physical and psychological damage beyond measuring. SHADA was a commercial venture with a wartime justification and a foreign balance sheet. What it did to the Haitian countryside reads like the record of a natural disaster: the social and environmental fabric of whole districts taken apart, and most of the people carried off in the wreckage were women and girls.

SHADA, the Societe Haitiano-Americaine de Developpement Agricole, was a wartime venture set up to grow rubber and other crops for the United States. It cleared land on a scale Haiti had never seen, felling trees across thousands of hectares. Jeanne Perez had worked for the company, writing the copy that presented the clearing as progress. In 1945, a year after she left that job, she travelled with her sister to the country near the Foret des Pins and wrote that the forest had been painfully exploited by SHADA. The sentence is short and it does two jobs. It records the deforestation as a fact about the land. It also records her own part in it, since the Haitian and American partners had used journalism to keep public objection quiet while the cutting went on. She had helped build the story. She went back and looked at what the story had been covering.