Istwa Nou

The Foyer was the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale's attempt to work on the city directly. Port-au-Prince in the 1940s was crowded, expensive and hard on any woman who arrived alone, and the league's answer took the form of a room. The same people came back to it. A woman's absence would be remarked on. Care was expected there and could be asked for out loud. Recognition, care and accountability, built up slowly by repetition rather than declared. Grace Sanders Johnson describes what the room was for in one sentence. The Foyer was a place where somebody might see another woman looking out toward the sea for too long, and offer her other possibilities. Everything the league argued about wages, marriage, the law and citizenship sits behind that sentence. In front of it is a specific afternoon, a specific woman at a window, and the ordinary act of walking over and starting a conversation.

Three things the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale produced in the 1940s make the same argument. The letters its members wrote each other. Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain's research on Port-au-Prince. The Foyer. All three treat women's social and political position as terrain that can be altered. Comhaire-Sylvain's thinking about space was still developing across the decade, and the research she did alongside the Foyer aimed at making visible the strategies of social struggle nobody had catalogued, the ones women were already using every day. The geographer Katherine McKittrick later reduced the principle to three words: we produce space. The league had been acting on it for forty years by then. Jeanne Sylvain, writing about the country that SHADA had stripped bare for rubber, said she wanted to plant something. She meant it about the ground, and it describes the rest of her work as well. The Foyer is what she planted in the cleared land.

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, Haiti's first women's rights organisation, built its own teaching materials in the 1940s rather than borrow them. Doing so meant paying attention to how women actually moved. Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, an anthropologist, walked the mountains above Kenscoff and worked with the women there to produce a set of handwritten maps showing the rural paths that carry people down into Port-au-Prince. Those were women's routes: market women with produce, girls sent to relatives in town, workers going back and forth each week. In 1945 Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau published a series of beginner reading books built on the same knowledge. The stories follow a girl through an ordinary day in which women cross between countryside and city and break the journey at the foyers kept by aunts. A child learning her letters from these books was also learning the geography of her own life, and being told that the women who travel it are the subject of the lesson.

Twenty years of research let Comhaire-Sylvain watch a part of Port-au-Prince change. She wrote about Zone III, which was made up of the students and the teachers of the Foyer, and she called them the most vigorous of all the social classes in the capital, the one most likely to advance quickly in the years ahead. Their appetite for connections across class lines, she noted, made them sympathetic to the peasantry. What she had been charting for two decades is what others have since called the Black middle class. Then in 1959 she wrote down where its energy had gone: the support of this group had put Francois Duvalier in the presidency. The women the Foyer educated became the constituency that carried him there. A feminist project measured its own success and found that its graduates had helped install the government that would spend the next thirty years closing every association in the country, including theirs.