Istwa Nou

The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale took Comhaire-Sylvain's example and tied its political practice to her scholarship. Her subject was peasant life and culture: household forms, work, language, and the rites around birth and death. The League proposed to treat that as a field its own members would enter, and the purpose was specific. The organisation was led by educated women in Port-au-Prince and it claimed to speak for women in the countryside and the market, whose lives most of its members knew through servants. Charity could not close that distance and tended to harden it. Serious study of what rural women knew, and of how they ran their households, offered different footing, since a researcher has to sit still and be taught. Whether the League managed it is another question. The decision to try, taken across 1937 and 1938, put ethnography at the centre of a political programme.

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain returned to Haiti in 1937 after studying in Europe, where she had taken a doctorate in letters. In April the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale ran a notice in La Voix des Femmes announcing her arrival. She was their one distinguished doctor of letters, the notice said, and her thesis showed the intellectual capacity of women and men alike. Then the League said what it wanted from her. It hoped Madame Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain would become the pivot point around which Haitian feminism would evolve. That is an unusual thing for a political organisation to print about a single researcher. The League was staking its direction on a method. If Haitian feminism was going to have a centre, that centre would be a scholar working on the language and the daily life of the rural majority, which settled in advance what kind of movement this was going to be.

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain spent February and March 1938 writing up Kenscoff, the village in the mountains above Port-au-Prince, for the paper La Voix des Femmes. Four articles came out of it. They covered how people there worked the land, what stories and beliefs they held, and how they buried and remembered their dead. The paper belonged to the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, the women's league founded in 1934 to press for civil and political rights, and its readers were largely schooled women of the capital. What Comhaire-Sylvain handed them was fieldwork. She had trained as a linguist, and she reported what she had watched and heard: the hours women worked, the words they used, the graves they kept. Haitian feminist writing had until then argued mostly from principle. These four pieces set a different pattern, which was to start from the lives of women who would never read the article.

Comhaire-Sylvain published while her fieldwork was still running. The first piece to appear, Vocabulaire des croyances paysannes, listed the words rural Haitians used for the things they believed in. She laid it out in columns like a dictionary, setting each Haitian Kreyol term beside a word from Dahomey with a similar sound and a similar sense. Dahomey, in what is now Benin, was one of the coasts that supplied Saint-Domingue with captives through the eighteenth century, and the vocabulary had crossed with the people. Printing the comparison in parallel columns made the claim difficult to argue with, since a reader could run a finger down the page and see the correspondence for herself. The venue mattered as much as the method. This did not appear in a learned journal. It appeared in a feminist newspaper, in front of the women of the capital, at a moment when the capital was still being taught that its Kreyol was a corruption of French.

The four page spread opens with a short introduction and then goes straight at a single word. ABOBO is the cry of assent and invocation that runs through Vodou ceremonies and dances, the sound a congregation makes when a thing has been done properly. Comhaire-Sylvain noted that some people, while calling it, beat two fingers against the open mouth. She then set the word beside BOBOBO, a Dahomean term for exactly that noise made by exactly that gesture. The match is more than vocabulary. A word can be carried in the head and taught to a child in a room. A gesture has to be performed in front of somebody to survive, which requires an unbroken chain of people doing it: through the slave ships, through the plantations, through the revolution, through the nineteen years of American occupation that had ended five years before. Readers of a women's newspaper were shown that chain in four pages.