Istwa Nou

Haitian speech has a physical component. Meaning rides on the tap of two fingers against the mouth, on a lifted eyebrow, on the way a body is held while a sentence is finished. Grammars written in 1938 recorded none of that, because a language was understood as words on paper with rules for joining them. Comhaire-Sylvain wrote the physical part down. Her notes and articles are the earliest archive of Haitian Kreyol as something performed, assembled at a time when the language itself was still treated in the capital as a defect to be corrected. The women of the feminist league took the point. So did readers well outside that circle. Anthropologists and sociologists began citing a method that had been developed for a column in a women's paper, having recognised in it the material their own disciplines had been walking past for decades.

Several months after her articles ran in La Voix des Femmes, Carter G. Woodson reviewed Comhaire-Sylvain's books in the United States. He took two of them, Le Creole Haitien, Morphologie et Syntaxe of 1936 and both parts of Les Contes Haitiens of 1937, and set them against Life in a Haitian Valley, which Melville Herskovits had brought out in 1937. Woodson doubted the American's evidence. A first excursion to Haiti, he wrote, did not entitle a man to speak like one having authority. Herskovits was the most prominent anthropologist of African survivals in the Americas, and his book was the one American readers would reach for when they wanted Haiti explained. Woodson's objection turned on who had put in the time. The Haitian scholar had grown up inside the language she was analysing and had been collecting in the countryside for years. The visitor had been there once.

Woodson wrote that in the very field Herskovits had chosen to work there had lately appeared Madame Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, and he counted her among the most intellectual people of Haiti. What impressed him was not her conclusions. It was what she had decided to record: how folktales and Kreyol are actually recited by the people who own them, how far a story travels and how widely it is known inside the country, and by what routes it has reached other places. Woodson had founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and had invented Negro History Week, and in Black America he was the man who decided what counted as scholarship. His notice placed a Haitian woman working outside Port-au-Prince in the same line as the historians of the United States, at a moment when almost everything Americans read about Haiti had been written by visitors passing through.

The documentation Woodson singled out was a record of gestures. Two fingers struck against the mouth, an eyebrow raised, a posture taken up in the middle of speaking: Haitians of every station used these, and they carried the same meaning for a market woman in Kenscoff and for a lawyer's wife in Petionville. Those were exactly the meeting points the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale was hunting for, since the league's standing problem was that its members and the women it claimed to speak for shared almost nothing. Comhaire-Sylvain's work later became the ground on which a written standard for Kreyol was built, and the state adopted an official spelling in 1979. In 1938 the ambition was smaller and stranger than that. A dictionary and a grammar were being handed to women of one class so that they could talk to women of another.