Reflections on Being Machann ak Machandiz: August 27, 2010

My last conversation with my friend, colleague, and feminist comrade Myriam Merlet was in my kitchen on December 22, 2009 around 1:00 am. Myriam was in transit on her way to Montreal. That trip was particular and very personal. She needed to see her daughter, Anaiz. As usual, Myriam always spent a day or a night with me in order to catch up with the latest news. And in our usual pattern, the conversation had turned to issues of gender and of Haitian women. My daughter Jane was also present, and she began to ask some very pertinent questions about how one becomes a Haitian woman.

I am writing this upon returning from my first post-earthquake visit to Haiti where I visited the site of Myriam’s death, as well as the sites of Magalie Marcellin’s and Anne Marie Coriolan’s deaths. These three exceptional feminist leaders had perished during the quake. Jane’s question kept popping up in my mind. In fact, that trip helped me better understand better Myriam’s comments on December 22.

In her response to Jane, Myriam had stated that Haitian women were both Machan ak Machandiz, meaning we were both commodities and seller/ trader of these commodities. As I have written about elsewhere (Charles 2010), we spent the night deconstructing both commodities and sellers, looking at how color, class, sexuality, and the urban/rural divide shape them. More important, the introduction of these categories of differences was the beginning of a mapping of Haitian women positioning and posturing within Haitian society, and also in the many Haitian diasporic communities, since the bargaining and selling of commodities spans a kind of gendered transnational market. We also understood that the paradox of such a binary could also be expressed in different fields of enactment of existing power relations.

While on that difficult trip to Haiti, Jane and Kika, the daughter of a friend of mine, had a conversation with us [mothers] about a category of girls their age that they define as “dolls” always in search of “suitable partners.” These dolls live through a script as young “uptown ladies” (see Ulysse 2008). That discussion took us back full circle to the December 22 conversation during which Myriam also used the category of doll in our exercise on gender. In that vein, the categories of color/pigmentation and class were more significant in increasing the value of the doll than education and occupation, for example, which did not seem to play an important role. Immigration status, however, may have some impact as a coveted asset.

Indeed, what does it mean to be both machan ak machandiz? This binary, in fact, reflects a paradox, which, I believe, in many ways characterizes gender relations in Haitian society. I have always argued that Haitian women have been in a subordinate position in all fields of gendered, racialized, and classist relations of power within Haitian society, yet at the same time they have been able to act as agents defining and negotiating these same relations of power. The issue was, and still is, to delineate the weight or significance of these two elements of that paradox. Although Myriam and I agreed on these categories, we differed in our thinking about their manifestations and dynamics by virtue of our respective fields and, most likely, because of her practical experience at the Ministry of Women.

Myriam was, for example, fundamentally opposed to micro-credit practices and activities. As an economist, she forcefully argued that micro-finance was always a palliative, but more important, her opposition was grounded in her feminist position that micro-credit not only reproduced stereotypes about what the majority of poor Haitian women should be (ti Machan—small-scale vendor), but also pigeonholed a very differentiated group of people into a very homogeneous category. Haitian women were defined primarily as “ti Machan,” and such categories inform most development projects.

Myriam was also very cautious in assessing the degree of economic independence of Haitian market women as pillars in Haitian family households and in the larger society. In one of...