Istwa Nou

Kenscoff sits fifteen miles above Port-au-Prince among pine and eucalyptus, and in 1937 it held about 7,500 people and roughly a hundred gravestones at the entrance to the town. Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, who had left Haiti to study in Europe after her parents died, came home and went up there to work. She knelt on the ground, put her hands on earth and stone, and drew the graves of women. What she recorded was a system in two parts. Petit deuil starts on the day of the funeral and runs six months for the immediate family. Ten years after a parent dies the children open grand deuil, which runs a further two years for a mother and eighteen months for a father. At its close the family holds a mass and sings a libera over the tomb, a song of release. Comhaire-Sylvain reached Kenscoff twelve years after her own parents were buried. Ten years and two. She arrived inside her own grand deuil.

During the years of her grand deuil, Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain published four pieces in a row in La Voix des Femmes, the journal of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale. The first was about running into a young woman from Kenscoff she had known as a child, who used to sell food near her house. The second traced continuities between Kreyol and African languages, the subject her father had spent his life on. The third was a list of jokes about women and their families. The fourth retold a folktale about mothers and daughters and what women want from one another and do not get. Read in sequence they amount to a wake conducted in print, a libera for her father, her mother and her elder brother. The Sylvain sisters lost their parents as the American occupation was ending, and they carried the grief into the same journals where they were building a women's movement. The scholarship was the mourning.