Burial Rights: Death, Family, and Feminist Revival in Haiti, 1925–38

This article uses Haitian anthropologist Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvains’s grief and record of study in rural Kenscoff to historically imagine the gendered implications of quotidian death and women’s rights activism in the inner-war period and aftermath of the U.S. occupation. Using Comhaire-Sylvain’s intimate loss and mourning as a narrative frame, I pare her 1937-1938 field notes and unpublished writings, with the women’s rights organization La Ligue Feminine d’Action Sociale—LFAS’s use of her published work in popular discourse. Similar to the productive power of remembering, remaking, and reorganizing the past and present that folklore stories and family tales told at the wakes that Comhaire-Sylvain frequented conveyed, I submit that Comhaire-Sylvain produced and LFAS similarly used her research to situation themselves in the nation’s politics recasting this time as a period of collective mourning and reconstitution. Refashioning the bifurcation between occupation and post-occupation, I submit that in the wake of the U.S. occupation—both referring to the period of time before it’s “death” and in the several years after 1934—women’s rights activism can be understood as a practice of public mourning and witnessing, in which early Haitian feminists shared narratives of origins, crafted a collective past, and rewrote their history in order to move forward with their vision of feminism and a sovereign nation.