Between Intersectionality and Coloniality: Rereading the Figure of the Poto-Mitan Woman in Haiti
This text mobilizes the theoretical frameworks of intersectionality and coloniality to analyze the figure of the Haitian poto-mitan woman—she who acts as a “central pillar”—a figure that was constructed during the history of colonialism. Colonial and postslavery relations initiated a process of coformation and coproduction and determined power relations that still traverse Haiti. They connect individual, national, and global dynamics that intertwine, frequently characterizing the poto-mitan women’s workforce as deviant. This article historicizes the poto-mitan woman and unveils how common conceptualizations appropriate the body and time of women assigned the duties of support and protection.
Introduction
Theses on the anglophone and francophone Caribbean mobilize the concepts of matrifocality (Gracchus 1980, Smith 1956,), incomplete families (Clarke 1999), focal incest (André 1987), and deviant families to address the familial realities of women in the domestic space. These families are often portrayed as being led by all-powerful women who dismiss the importance of men. These facts implicitly refer to the nuclear family model that is elevated to the rank of universal model. Thus, families with single mothers are considered dysfunctional and disorganized: a disservice in light of the realities of single-parent families. In Haiti, the term used to describe these women-led families is poto-mitan, referring often to mothers who work outside their homes to assume the social and affective needs of their families with or without men in the roles of husbands/fathers. This figure deserves to be known, both at the theoretical and epistemological levels.
My text will take a genealogical approach, showing, much like Hortense Spillers (1987) in her foundational essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” that the poto-mitan family model is part of an [End Page 136] obliterated and subjugated “grammar” that belongs to the long history of slavery and postslavery in the Caribbean region. This history deserves to be unearthed to better capture the specificities of the power relations at work in these families. Additionally, the European, colonial preoccupation with epistemological order used a local term related to the practices of Haitians, one that structures the cognitive universe of this society. This word—poto-mitan—deserves to be tracked beyond a simple observation, unveiling how it contributes to shaping the world and its relations with the internal and external history of this society. Employing theories of intersectionality and coloniality, I intend to break with the Eurocentric explanatory schemas that are usually proposed to read the realities of women-led families in postslave societies of the Caribbean.
Due to the entanglement of power relations stemming from colonization and slavery, women of Caribbean societies occupy a special position in the gender relations mediated by the place their country occupies on a global scale.1 If, with slight variations, the poto-mitan translates these realities, women in Haiti must also compensate for the failure of a state that discharges itself of the collective under the impetus of external agencies. In this context, the poto-mitan and the feminization of poverty can be considered as two sides of the same reality. The poto-mitan, as a “figure of intersectionality” (Ezékiel 2005), is traversed by the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural logics of coloniality.
To support this proposition, I propose that the poto-mitan reinforces a gender hierarchy constructed in the eighteenth century in Saint Domingue, driven by status, class, and race to construct particular power relations that were resignified in Haiti after independence. Thus, the phenomenon of the poto-mitan responds both to a process of intersectionality and to the logic of coloniality. I also examine the condition of poto-mitan women as a human mode of doing resulting from the order of the possible.
My argument mobilizes three sources of information: life stories gathered from interviews conducted in France with Haitian migrant women; research establishing the sociogenesis of the phenomenon, from colonial Saint-Domingue to present-day Haiti; and personal observations of women in Haiti and France. Concepts of intersectionality and coloniality will be used to challenge notions of women-led Haitian households as deviant; I then demonstrate how the poto-mitan figure is shaped by a complex logic, informed by both local and international power relations.
1. Intersectionality and Coloniality
The concept of intersectionality derives from ideas developed in the nineteenth century by U.S. Black American intellectuals, including Anna J. Cooper, who in A Voice from the South ([1892]1998) [End Page 137] shows the need to think through the imbrications of the relations of gender and race (Harper 2012). Reclaimed by Combahee River Collective feminists ([1977]2008),2 these ideas resurfaced at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s with Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) and Patricia Hill Collins (1991) in their investigations of how gender, race, and class intertwine in their political and representational dimensions to form a structural matrix of domination. Sirma Bilge (2015) defines intersectionality as an analytic of power that relies on a set of interactive and co-constituting vectors of power that give shape to interlocking domains of power. Intersectionality, thus, facilitates the analysis not only of the historically contingent relations of interdependence between vectors of power (race, gender, and class) but also of several domains and their correlations: notably, the structural, the representational, the disciplinary, the interpersonal, and the embodied psychic.
According to Ochy Curiel (2007) the concept of coloniality was first proposed by the group Modernity/Coloniality3 to establish a schema to understand relations of domination in the contemporary world. Anibal Quijano (1992) sees in this concept a way to learn about colonial consequences and legacies and to grasp contemporary social, political, economic, and cultural dynamics. Hence, a matrix of historical power exists, on a planetary scale, based on the alleged inferiority of certain groups and categories in order to reproduce social discrimination and stigmatizations in time and space. Coloniality, then, derives from the construction of an extensive schema of domination operating on an ethnic and racialized classification of the world population (Curiel [2007]). After the so-called period of decolonization, colonialism continues to organize material and discursive relations in formerly colonized societies. Indeed, the exploitation of the labor force, systemic oppression of particular races, and gender relations coincide with the control of the subjectivities of individuals (Quijano 2007).
In light of the two concepts described, I argue that the poto-mitan is an intersectional figure that exists in a continuum of power, including dynamics based on gender, race, economic class, and social status, that has taken shape, in intersecting forms, since colonial times. Intersectionality and coloniality make it possible to mobilize history to grasp both the impact of colonial decisions in the formation of the phenomenon and the emergence of new actors in Haiti: for instance, U.S. imperialism is an example of external domination that adds to internal relations of power. It follows that the poto-mitan is a historically constructed figure of subalternization instead of being a space of power favoring the omnipotence of women, as some authors working on the centrality of women in families in Caribbean societies tend to present it.4 [End Page 138]
2. A Brief Signification of Poto-Mitan in Haiti
Derived from Haitian Kreyòl, the term poto-mitan is a compound of poto and mitan, meaning “pillar” and “center,” respectively. Literally, the word designates a central pillar of support in architecture and generates a range of figurative, spiritual, material, and political meanings. At the symbolic level, the poto-mitan is the pillar supporting the frame of the temples of Haitian Vodou (Maximilien 1945). It enables the meeting of two worlds: material/spiritual and the visible/invisible (Deren [1953]2004). It is the point of articulation of the life of the temple (Métraux 1958). On a secular level, the concept is mostly associated with women. Thus, the Haitian proverb Fanm se poto-mitan lavi5 reflects the idea that women are indispensable to the maintenance of life in society. They are the beams around which family life is articulated and, by extrapolation, the life of the entire community and all human societies. Thus, in everyday language, a poto-mitan woman is, above all, a figure of indefatigable strength in adversity, self-denial, intuition, empathy, generosity, tenacity, courage, resourcefulness, and dedication. She never fails to sacrifice herself for her loved ones.6
The poto-mitan is a rewarding role; this figure protects and cares for others through the mobilization of her own resources—traits supposedly intrinsic to women. Thus, the concrete manifestations of the poto-mitan figure perpetuate certain normative gender roles—for example, women as self-sacrificing and empathetic—while they call into question others, notably those celebrated in Western countries where the father is perceived as the rightful central figure of the family.
The phenomenon also unveils significant details about colorist social relations in Haiti.7 According to interviews with my interlocutors, complexion plays an extremely important role in the distribution of responsibilities in the family and at the social level. The most arduous and underrewarded tasks are often bestowed on darker-skinned women. These observations are corroborated by Dominique Rogers (2003), who notes that, historically in Haiti, the color of individuals is considered a criterion of unavoidable political, economic, and social differentiation.
Moreover, the further one moves from those who are financially and socially well-off in Haitian society, the more the poto-mitan figure is accepted as a norm. Thus, any sister, aunt, grandmother, niece, or cousin can perform this role permanently or sporadically in the absence, “abdication,”8 or death of biological mothers (Lahens 1997–98).
In these ways, one can detect a consensus around the ideal and material significations of the poto-mitan in Haitian culture. Capitalizing on these [End Page 139] various meanings, I advance that the poto-mitan is the ordering point of a world: taking clear shape is a matrix of socialization specific to women—and dark-complexioned, working-class women, in particular—compelling them to worry about the well-being of others to the detriment of their own. In this context, the racial and gendered social division of labor, deployed to ensure the social balance, becomes a legacy shared between Haiti and other societies shaped by colonization.
3. A Sociogenesis of the Poto-Mitan
To fully understand the poto-mitan in Haiti requires a consideration of the positions of enslaved women in Saint Domingue. As work units with an accessory reproductive capacity, they met the massive labor needs of the colony (Neptune-Anglade 1986). Until 1743, only the slave trade ensured the renewal of this labor force (Behanzin, 2003; Neptune-Anglade 1986). However, from 1743 to 1763, several international and local events changed the situation for these women. Indeed, the Austrian Succession Wars (1743–48) and the Seven-Year War (1756–63) (Neptune-Anglade 1986) provoked naval blockades and contributed to exacerbate the problem of hunger in the colony.9 The boats could not supply the colony with food or servile labor. This state of affairs provoked a rise in marronage and the death by starvation of captives and “little”/poor whites. In fact, while individuals reduced to slavery were by far the most affected by nutritional deficiencies, whites were not spared (Bourdier 2011). This situation fueled, among other things, conflicts between “big”/rich and “little”/poor white people (Frostin 1975). These tensions focused on the contradictions between work perceived to be related to servile conditions and the possession of wealth intrinsically associated with the whiteness of the skin. Thus, as poor as they could be, the “little” whites could not work without mortgaging “the only wealth” they had in the colonial hierarchy: their “whiteness” (Cervulle 2013). To get out of this impasse, the colonial society created a social category that, while still fixed at the margins of society, could occupy space in a different way than other marginalized peoples: white women, mulatto women, mulatto men, “little” whites, and free Black men rose in status above the enslaved.
Additionally, “Negro-gardens”10 were built to combat hunger caused by limited imports. These gardens consisted of small specific parcels of land conceded to the captives, so that the latter could cultivate food supplies themselves (sweet potatoes, cassava, yams) for their subsistence. With this solution, the colonists agreed to the principle ordered by the metropolis: the [End Page 140] reservation of a part of the land of the colony for crop cultivation (Saint-Louis 1999). This decision complicated constructions of race and the gendered division of labor in the enslaved population. Indeed, Negro-gardens introduced a novel arrangement of the positionalities of the different social categories in the colony, especially those of captive women. Settler colonists withdrew from the management of hunger, a central element in the maintenance of reproduction and the development of cohabitation within any social group. They allotted “the collective responsibility” (Rabatel and Koren 2008) of the colony—or the way a group assumes the problems of a community that aspires to make a society—to the enslaved population. In this way, Negro-gardens reshaped the process of land and food distribution and the organization of space and assigned a central role in the government of that space to women of African descent.
In conjunction with this novelty, policies were put in place to encourage the pregnancy of Black women (Behanzin 2003; Gautier [1985]2010). This resulted in a process that motivated the (heterosexual) coupling of captives around Negro-gardens. Captive women could be exempted from field work after birthing four children and become free after six live children (if two of the children replaced their mother in the fields). Men had access to these rights if their companions were dead and their children were very young (Gautier [1985]2010). In other words, the gender of the caregiver did not matter in the policy as written.
Together, these policies facilitated the emergence of two new phenomena: the genesis of fragmented cultural practices and the trade of surplus food (mobile trading practices) (Neptune-Anglade 1986). Enslaved women performed the tasks of the reproduction of labor, the reproduction/cultivation of food, and the trade of surplus crops, leading, in turn, to the communalization of these women’s workforce, less confinement to the private sphere, and a neutralization of the captives’ paternal power. The sociogenesis of women’s “controlled autonomy” was thus initiated in connection with their “restrictive mobility” as merchants, food traders, and captives; at the same time, captive men were ejected from “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 2014).
Through this process, enslaved women were constructed as strong women who did not need, in contrast to white women, the protection or economic support of a man. Such a scenario blurred the frames of private and public spaces and definitions of gender. Indeed, captives were conceived of neither as women nor as mothers who nurtured their children. They were workers, with a reproductive capacity, responsible for the physical care of offspring: the basic needs of the colony, without the subsequent sociopolitical [End Page 141] recognition. They were wet nurses. As food producers and surplus food merchants, they also met the needs of the colony but were eventually able to position themselves as key suppliers of the food markets of the colony. All these roles, induced by slavery, reworked the dominant logic regarding the valid and valued norms for [white] women in the same spatiotemporal frame. Black women’s participation in society thus came to be perceived as mutant, deviant.
4. What Gender Does to Race and Status, and Vice Versa
A legal framework was mobilized to make coherent the mutation of normative frameworks governing gender relations for the captives, notably the Black Code of 1685, which recalled the rule of Partus sequitur ventrem: the child follows the condition of the mother.11 As a result, the link between captive women and their children became the only link of recognition in Saint Domingue. This law legitimized the sexist principle that declared female individuals better suited to take care of children, physical products of their bodies. This bond, which is neither matrilineal nor matriarchal, aimed at an essentialization of captive women as instruments of reproduction, whose bodily products belonged to their masters. By this principle, children born in a servile condition followed the condition of their mothers, regardless of the social position of their fathers and/or progenitors in the colonial hierarchy. As a result, no nonwhite child could be recognized as a legitimate child of a white man in the colony (James 2008), and no captive Black man could be the father of a child. Thus, regardless of the angle of consideration adopted for the captive group, the woman/mother-and-child couple were the only legitimate configuration for people of African descent in the colony.
In this context, the meeting of the Black Code, a metropolitan legal instrument, and the colonists’ decision to allow Negro-gardens announced disjunctures between the metropolis and the colony when it came to the definition of parentage: heteronormative constructions of households run by a recognized father and mother contrasted households centered around the mother. And by stipulating that “the child follows the condition of the mother,” the Black Code hindered the constitution of a nuclear family framework, sanctioned by the State and the Church, even while deliberately exposing women to the moral “risks of pregnancy” (Tabet 1998, 93).12 In other words, Black women were encouraged to have children out of wedlock as arms on the plantation, while a nuclear family model was maintained for non-Black women. [End Page 142]
Thus, the tangibility of pregnancy as a biological process served as a link between the woman and her child, as well as between the colonist and his property. The challenge was to keep these women in the status of workers capable of carrying children without being considered wives or coupled parents. Plasaj emerged as a noninstitutional mode of union for the captive group. In Haiti, plasaj is a customary consensual union, in which men contribute the land and women their labor force to constitute a family unit. After independence, plasaj became systematized with the need for men to place several women on scattered plots to guard against spoliation. However, Serge-Henri Vieux (1989) argues that the origin of this type of union can be traced to the establishing of garden plots, well before the country’s independence in 1804.
In the long run, this schema built a dynamic in which women’s primary responsibility lay in relation to their offspring, without the presence of a man or any political or institutional framework. Alongside the colonial placement of women in a developing food-market economy, distinct from the commodity economy (Saint-Louis 1999; Trouillot 1995), captive women were rendered the central element in the access to fundamental and primary needs for their loved ones and their community.
I argue that, for women, the formation of a labor-intensive work ethic (Robertson 2003), leading to the ability to find resources for her loved ones and her community, and notions of self as integrally tied to a caretaking role for others supports the idea that a woman must “sacrifice herself” in order to be valuable. Thus, the emergence of a new subject: Black women as poto-mitan, or pillars of society. A figure of the margins, the poto-mitan is constructed in the interstices of hegemonic norms of gender and race, class/status, and sexuality. Captive women had the distinction of being categorized as those whose bodies could become part of the public good, functioning for the well-being of all. What happened, then, in the passage from Saint Domingue to Haiti?
5. The Poto-Mitan: From Saint-Domingue to Haiti
As mentioned previously, in the contemporary era, certain “women’s” tasks—once considered important and profitable but now devalued and unavoidable—have been left to weakened segments of the society. To grasp the path of the poto-mitan’s trajectory, I highlight the way in which postcolonial aggressions, racism, and sexism in Haiti overlapped from 1804 to 1915. Between 1791 and 1804, periods of war for liberation, the military division of labor [End Page 143] confined women to the role of food producers, supporting the war effort (1791–1804) (Neptune-Anglade 1986). With independence, struggles around this mode of production and the distribution of wealth among newly freed people and those who had achieved liberation in the years before caused many conflicts and divisions that needed to be mediated. During this period, class struggles were instrumentalized around the question of “color as an ideological weapon” to gain power (Labelle 1976). Numerous divisions were erected, such as mulatto/black, Kreyòl/French, urban/rural, Vodou/Catholic, proprietors/nonproprietors. These divisions and conflicts fueled Haitian civil wars in the nineteenth century and early-twentieth century (Hector 2006). Since men were enlisted in armed conflict, women were mobilized, including new peasant women, from fields to markets, taking the places of men in many cases (Neptune-Anglade 1986).
In this period, plasaj constituted the primary mode of union of the peasant class: a political minority, although the majority in terms of numbers. Women in this group retained their previous position as referents in the filiation and care of their offspring. While marriage, the nuclear-family model, and role of housewife became the norm for proprietors and a merchant class, single, hard-working and mobile/trading women were otherized. Other forms of hegemonies and subalternities between men, women, and spaces emerged, following the lines of gender, race, class, and sexuality, without eroding the figure of the poto-mitan. Moreover, in a context where latent conflicts hindered the construction of collective spaces, there was an overdevelopment of domestic spaces led by the poto-mitan, reinforcing and resignifying the phenomenon based on specific contexts.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the living conditions of the Haitian peasantry began to decline. Later, the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915–34) led to the dispossession of peasants from their land (Lucien 2013) and caused the emigration of large numbers of men to Cuba and the Dominican Republic for cane cutting (Castor 1988). The result was another reconfiguration of the poto-mitan phenomenon, since, in addition to the burden of single-mothering, peasant women who remained in Haiti were obliged to perform work traditionally reserved for men, especially working the land. In addition, women of urban working classes, often cooks and servants, were drawn into a movement of international migration (Lucien 2013). Suzy Castor (1988) highlights the fact that many women who engaged in these migratory dynamics ended up earning a living through prostitution: a clear link to the devaluing of the poto-mitan figure in the contemporary moment.13 [End Page 144]
Gender relations also changed for women of the urban petite and haute bourgeoisies during the U.S. occupation. In the aftermath of 1915, bourgeois and middle-class urban women were forced to invest in the wage labor market to compensate for the economic failings of men in these sectors (Bouchereau 1957). Due to the demanding economic crisis of the occupation, these women had to join the workforce to support their households. In this sense, the period of the occupation constitutes a key moment in the consolidation of the phenomenon of women as pillars of families in Haiti.
The entry of women from the well-to-do classes into the Haitian labor market and the international migrations of women from the lower classes signifies a misleading form of transcendence of the internal cleavages of race and class. For if, because of external pressures, the frameworks of access to the labor force of women from the wealthy and poor classes reconfigured themselves, internal divisions evoking gender, class, and race were reinforced. The racist logic of the occupier, the U.S. Marines, deeply embedded in the retrograde racial practices of the old U.S. South (Lucien 2013), found purchase in Haiti, already plagued by colorism. Regardless, established, wealthy women and poto-mitan suffered many of the same effects when the logic of coloniality and its contradictions unfolded internally during this period in history.
6. Intersectionality and Coloniality in the Production of the Poto-Mitan
By referring to intersectionality and coloniality in the analysis of the poto-mitan, I emphasize the transversal, contradictory, and paradoxical junction points that evolve at the confluence of multiple systems of domination. The articulation of the two levels of reality makes it possible to point out forms of complex hierarchy among women themselves, according to the color of their skin, their nationalities, and their class status and positionalities. That said, the poto-mitan, constructed for the needs of the slave system and translated as a racialized device to organize the female labor force, and then restructured and resignified after independence, reveals much about the intersectionality of power relations and the underlying logic of coloniality.
In this context, the poto-mitan interconnects gender, race, class, sexuality, and the status and positionalities of individuals, being the meeting place of several axes and the point where separate systems intersect (Bachetta 2009, 2015; Crenshaw 1991). Indeed, the position of women within the group [End Page 145] is linked to a mode of social management placed under the constraint of coloniality. Here, the contribution of Bachetta allows me to articulate intersectionality and colonialism and also to theorize the poto-mitan apart from dimensions involving several scales of interests that convene: the economic, the institutional, the social, the spatial, the temporal, the emotional, and the cognitive. These dimensions interact constantly and simultaneously. From this perspective, the poto-mitantism of Haitian women inscribes itself in power relations that can both, in their coformations, support, maintain, reinforce, or dissolve the phenomenon. This is evidenced by the translation of the term into “single parenthood” in some Western contexts and the way in which the concept is mobilized to fuel xenophobia under the fallacious pretext that Black immigrant women and single mothers of African descent are “welfare queens” in the United States. Along similar lines, the false argument is often proposed that “Antillean women” are profiteers of social security in France. In the case of Haitian women, they do not emigrate to take advantage of social security programs but instead to “seek life” for themselves or to take charge of their families and offspring. For example, I met Sula in France, a young woman whose family entrusted her with the mission to go abroad to take care of her siblings. These often-undocumented women survive by doing the most unrewarding jobs to pay for the schooling, extracurricular activities, and health care of their loved ones.
That said, poto-mitan is an intense phenomenon, revealing, during each historical period, situated forms of gendered subjectivity, racial privilege and discrimination, class mobility, and oppression. Thus, I argue that poto-mitan has no definite form and meaning through time and space. It is a phenomenon innervated by many power relationships in which the coproductions of many systems, including capitalism, colonialism, and military occupation, are multiple poto-mitan figures: self-selected poto-mitan, maternal poto-mitan, de facto poto-mitan, elected poto-mitan. In this sense, the poto-mitan is a hybrid figure of Black Haitian womanhood, constructed in and out of the domestic space at the crossroads of several “debasement technologies” (Chamayou 2014), all stemming from the colonial process.
Currently, to control the poto-mitan and their work force, dominant forces render these women as unrespectable. Hence, their form of peculiar “controlled autonomy” is not understood in the common discourse. The rapprochement between coloniality and intersectionality makes it possible to avoid the pitfalls of dehistoricization and favors the healthier analysis of the realities of Haitian women within the world system (Wallerstein 2006). By the same token, Haitian women must present themselves as historical [End Page 146] subjects whose realities of oppression are as meaningful as those of white bourgeois “housewives” on which the dominant Western feminist discourse has been constructed. The articulation of these visions gives me the opportunity to reconstitute a reality with its own name and to come out of the reductive frameworks of the Global North, which present the figure of the poto-mitan woman as pathological and deviant. I advance that poto-mitan comes to represent an important new framework of analysis within theories of power relations. This is justified by the fact that the poto-mitan makes it possible to understand that Haitian women are engaged in a logic of collective appropriation of their bodies, their work force, and their reproductive capacity for the production of a communal cohabitation, while also taking part in the process of global migration and accumulation through their movements in search of work and “a better life.” It is precisely this last aspect of the phenomenon that contests the stereotypical poto-mitan as a poor Black woman: an impoverished worker deprived of agency, rights, or resources, whose work ensures the fragile balance of a society that has chosen not to protect all its members.
Conclusion
In this article, I question the first and most common meaning of the term poto-mitan woman—one that gives shape to a false reality that holds such social prominence that it goes unimpeded in Haiti. Following the traces of the phenomenon, from the promulgation of the Black Code in 1685 through the wars between European empires and conflicts between the colony and the metropolis, I considered the colonists’ needs to construct enslaved women as laborers in the same vein as men, the reorganizations of social and gendered divisions of labor within the colony, and the development of Black women as pillars of the family, the community, and society. Reinforced after independence by struggles against a return to the colonial order and struggles for the sharing of wealth, the poto-mitan figure resurfaced again in 1915, during the U.S. occupation and the extranational demands of capitalism.
Between these various coformations and coproductions, the poto-mitan woman exists in a complex reality, rooted in the local and the global, which reveals the logic of dominations associated with different spatiotemporal frames. Further study of this group is warranted, as is more attention to making visible its reality. The poto-mitan cannot be read only in light of social relations of gender, nor simply within a closed national framework. The phenomenon is marked as much by the logic of coloniality as by the [End Page 147] intersectional dynamics of gendered power relations. As such, the poto-mitan is part of a matrix of hierarchies and devaluation historically and institutionally constituted on both macro- and micro-levels. The figure deserves to be considered as integral to the analysis of social relations in Haiti, as well as Haiti’s political and economic relationships with the rest of the world.
SABINE LAMOUR is an international sociologist trained in France and Haiti. Currently, she is completing a research project that explores the role of the evangelical in the political context. Since 2005, she has been working with Haitian women’s organizations as a feminist activist and an independent consultant at both urban and rural levels. Since 2017, she has been the national coordinator of Solidarite Fanm Ayisyèn (SOFA)and has taught courses at l’Université d’État d’Haïti (UEH) since 2012. She is interested in topics such as gender, sexualities, slavery, family dynamics in the Caribbean, and Haiti’s political system. In 2018, Lamour copublished Déjouer le Silence: Contre-discours sur les Femmes Haïtiennes and has published articles in Chemins critiques; Women, Gender, and Families of Color; and Revue internationale des études du développement.
Notes
I wish to thank Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper for translating my original single-authored work.
1. According to Romain Cruse (2014), “La Caraïbe renvoie à l’espace—colonisé par les Européens à partir du 15eme siècle. Cette zone était caractérisée par l’établissement des plantations—notamment sucrières—qui nécessitèrent une main-d’œuvre servile pour sa bonne marche économique et son bon fonctionnement économique.”
2. A Black Marxist lesbian association underlined the simultaneity of oppressions despite hierarchies among them. Written in 1977, the Declaration of the Combahee River Collective is one of the fundamental texts of Black feminism. See also Eistenstein (1978). The French translation is published in Black Feminism: Anthologie du féminisme africain-américain, 1975–2000, edited by Elsa Dorlin in 2008 (Paris: L’Harmattan).
3. The most notable figures of this approach are Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, Anibal Quijano, and Maria Lugones.
4. I draw attention to the readings proposed in the French-speaking Caribbean on the positions of women in “Antillean” families. Here, I retain the thesis of Fritz Gracchus (1980) who claims that Black women had enjoyed many benefits during slavery because of their relationships to white male colonists. Thus, after slavery, families were built on the model of a woman/mother, without the presence of men in the role of husbands and fathers. According to this idea, the men in these societies are victims of the omnipotence of women preventing them from playing their role as fathers and husbands, considering that the psychic space facilitating this construction is already occupied by the idealized image of the white man in these roles.
5. Haitian Kreyòl for “Women are the poto-mitan of life.”
6. This fact found in the discourse of my fieldwork interlocutors is also underlined by Claudine Michel (2003) reporting the remarks of Karen McCarthy Brown in her representation of Alourdes, a Haitian manbo woman living in the United States.
7. One of my fieldwork interlocutors shared that the burden of her family fell on her since her childhood: she is not as light-skinned as her older sister, the illegitimate daughter of a mulatto bourgeois. This confession is associated with the image of the two most famous female Vodou spirits: Erzulie Fréda and Erzulie Dantor. The former is described as a loving, casual, and luxuriously dressed (in satin) mulatto woman who eats refined food. The latter is a Black woman carrying a child in her arms. This hard worker eats the least-appreciated dishes in Haiti. These facts are discussed in details in Deïta (1993).
8. In Haïti, parental abdication is not easy for women. There are several proverbs and coercive devices that ostracize women in this situation and lead them to assume the responsibility of their children.
9. To understand the question of hunger in Saint-Domingue, see Bourdier (2011), as well as Saint-Louis (1999).
10. According to Vertus Saint-Louis (1999), Negro-gardens or quarter-gardens emerged at the same time as sugar plantations.
11. “The children who will be born . . . between slaves will be slaves and will belong to the masters of slave women and not to those of their husbands, if the husband and wife have different masters.” See Sala-Molins (2012, 114, l’article 12 du Code Noir).
12. Saint-Louis (1999) states that these gardens were apportioned by household by masters.
13. As stated previously, poto-mitan women, especially those of the working classes, frequently occupy devalued niches of work, such as domestic servitude, petty trading, and prostitution. The poto-mitan is at the heart of the racial and gendered division of labor, intimately linked to the movements and migrations of women in Haiti.
