“Les femmes dans l’ombre”: Gendering the 1946 Revolution in Haitian Literature

Abstract

This article examines revolutionary episodes, particularly the events of January 1946 in Haiti, which stage the exclusion/inclusion of women’s bodies in post-revolutionary politics. These were tensions with which Haiti’s first revolutionary generation had already grappled following national independence in 1804. Here, we will consider how the revolution was gendered, how it was experienced through the female body, and how the women of the revolution were represented in Haiti’s cultural and journalistic sphere of the mid-1940s. We will then examine how revolutionary women and the events of January 1946 have been portrayed in Haitian literature, including the writings of former revolutionaries like Gérald Bloncourt and novels by women such as Marie Vieux Chauvet and Yanick Lahens. Through the tradition of a female revolutionary spirit, its revival in 1946, and its subsequent literary reincarnations, this article examine how Haiti’s revolutionary women have historically played a role in shaping national identity and how fictional landscapes continue to be shaped by the collective memory of previous generations of female revolutionaries. It concludes that taking gendered, embodied, and intergenerational perspectives into account can be a useful way of diversifying our understanding of Haiti’s multiple historic legacies of revolution.

Keywords:

• Gender
• revolution
• Haiti
• generation
• memory
• body

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The photograph can be seen in this online reproduction of the article by Yves Savain (first published 2011): https://gilbertmervilus.medium.com/this-photograph-from-early-1946-is-a-rare-record-of-a-gathering-of-the-intellectual-vanguard-of-21eee0fc7c1d.

2 Octave Petit, “Défilée-la-Folle,” Revue de la Société d’Histoire et de Géographie d’Haïti, 3:8, October 1932: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k57966804/f1.item Petit acknowledged in the opening to his lecture the encouragement of Miss Lily Sansaricq, Vice-President of the exclusive social club le Cercle Excelsior in Jérémie, who invited him to speak. Sansaricq was later murdered by the Duvalierist regime along with her family in the Vêpres de Jérémie of August 1964. On Défilée as a site of memory in Haiti, see Evans Braziel (2005) and Dayan (1995).

3 On the political activities of the Ligue Féminine d’Action Sociale, see Sanders Johnson (2023).

4 See for example Le Joug by Annie Desroy (1934), discussed in Ménard (2013) and Ménard’s translation into English of extracts from Cléante Valcin’s La blanche négresse, also published 1934, in Dubois et al. (2020), pp.239–242.

5 Regnor C. Bernard, “Paroles dans la Tourmente” (1946, 1). See the digital collections of the University of Florida, https://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00007288/00002/pdf/0. [Accessed January 2024].

6 The hidden libertine meaning of the rhyme “Nous n’irons plus au bois” as social commentary on the closing of brothels in the Bois de Boulogne in the eighteenth century is discussed on the Radio France programme “Descendances de la chanson française,” 27 June 2023: https://www.radiofrance.fr/francemusique/podcasts/arabesques/les-chansons-francaises-2-2-5052870.

7 “The overthrow of Elie Lescot in January 1946 was achieved in the name of Surrealist ideals, Marxist politics and the iconoclastic spirit of the times” (Dash 1981, 160). Dash explains how the revolution came to be, and how it was overtaken by the rise of the political Noiriste movement; he also cites Ghislain Gouraige, one of the student revolutionaries at the time: “It was the time of the young. The time of dreams” (cit. 161).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kate Hodgson

Kate Hodgson is currently Lecturer in French at University College Cork in Ireland, where she co-convenes a research cluster in the College of Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures on memory, commemoration and the uses of the past. She is author and co-editor of a recent volume with Routledge, Memory, Mobility & Material Culture (2022). Her research focuses on the Haitian revolution, the abolition of slavery and postcolonial memory.