Black History Month 2024: Madan Sara brings story of Haitian businesswomen to Medgar Evers College

The Madan Sara is a boisterous native Haitian bird that searches for and finds food wherever it goes. It’s also the name lovingly used to refer to the women who serve as the economic bridge between buying produce and goods in rural areas and then bringing them to urban marketplaces to either sell themselves or distribute to other merchants unable to make the trip into the interior themselves.

The Madan Sara are also at the heart of filmmaker Etant Dupain’s documentary of the same name, which will be screening at Medgar Evers College on Monday, February 5, 2024 as part of the school’s Black History schedule of events. 

For Dupain, who cut his teeth as a journalist and filmmaker producing segments for outlets including the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera and Vice, this project was a labor of love. Even more so because his own mother had been a Madan Sara as a means to support his family when Dupain was still a teen. It’s a story he felt needed to be told given the important role these women play in telling the socioeconomic story of Haiti.

“This network in Haiti is super-important for the economy because the Haitian economy is very much informal,” he explained. “If you have an economy where more than 60 percent of it is informal and if you don’t have a big industry that’s really developed—you wind up with an economy that’s run by the Madan Sara.

“The Madan Sara is basically a group of people that keep the country running and the economy going. Also, they are the ones that primarily take care of the family in Haiti.”

Dupain started shooting his debut documentary in 2015 and spent the next four-and-a-half years working on it while juggling his freelance responsibilities. A final online campaign raised the $10,000 needed to complete the film. The end result not only found him putting Madan Saras like Clotide Achille and Monique Mattelus on camera telling their stories, but also showing the hazards they dealt with in trying to be successful entrepreneurs. Hazards and challenges range from trying to acquire low-interest loans and fending off gangs to seeing the markets they work in be burned for insurance money with little or no support from the government.

“We’re not only not investing in [this system], we’re destroying it,” Dupain said. “It was very important for me to show that part of the business because it’s not like it’s a whole rosy picture. It’s a really hard business to be in. They’re not safe—they’re traveling with a lot of cash. They get harassed. It’s a very tricky business to be in as a woman. I hope when people watch the film, they’ll receive the message as a whole. These are not people that are asking for a handout. There is this narrative, when it comes to storytelling and the global self as a whole, there is a lot of focus—I’m just trying to tell a different story, witness Monique and Clotilde and just follow them to tell their stories and see their lives.”

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BLACK HISTORY MONTH AT MEDGAR EVERS COLLEGE

For more information on the Madan Sara event, please click here.

For our full calendar of Black History Month events, please click here.