“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.