The Political Project of Marie Sainte Dédée Bazile (Défilée): Reappropriating This Heritage to Build the Present

Abstract

On January 31, 2020, a gathering was held to remember the massacre that had occurred in La Saline, the second-largest slum in Port-au-Prince, on November 13 and 14, 2018.1 Attended by family members of the victims as well as Haitian civil society representatives, feminists, and activists from human rights organizations including Solidarite Fanm Ayisyèn (SOFA) and the National Human Rights Defense Network (RNDDH), the event was titled Ann Refè Jès Défilée a! (Let us repeat Défilée’s gesture!).2 According to a report published by RNDDH (2018), several state dignitaries had participated in plotting and carrying out the carnage in La Saline. This service functioned as a symbolic gesture that enabled the living to mourn and provided an appropriate burial for the dead—similar to the duty that Défilée had fulfilled in 1806 when she gathered the remains of Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines and gave him an honorable burial after his assassination on October 17, 1806. Défilée prevented the body of Dessalines, the founder of the Haitian nation, from being left on the street and eaten by animals. Haitian historiography has erased the political dimension of Défilée’s civilizing act and humanizing intervention. This historiography seems to disregard the accomplishments of women; their narratives do not hold historical value, nor do they provide meanings to Haiti’s collective dynamics in the same way as men who are, in contrast, revered as the fathers of the nation. Studies that mention women’s actions and recount their lives3 as part of Haiti’s national epic are almost nonexistent. Instead, scholars of Haitian history devote their attention to the biographies and