Istwa Nou

Comhaire-Sylvain's second piece for La Voix des Femmes was a short story built out of fieldwork, and it carried a woman's name, Adelsia. It ran in a standing section of the paper called Notre Paysanne, our peasant woman. The possessive contains the entire difficulty. The paper was made in Port-au-Prince and Petionville by women who had been schooled in French, and the woman in the column carried produce down a mountain on her head. Claiming her as ours could mean kinship and it could mean property, and the section title never settled which. What the essay opened up was narrow and real. A reader in the capital came away with the name, the trade, the household and the losses of one particular woman in Kenscoff, printed in the same pages that carried the arguments for giving Haitian women the vote.

In 1928 Jean Price-Mars published Ainsi parla l'Oncle and told the educated class of Haiti to stop despising the culture of the peasantry and to bring popular Haitian thought inside the discipline of ethnography. The book set the terms for a generation. Comhaire-Sylvain took the instruction and turned it. Her submission to La Voix des Femmes recorded what women thought and how they said it, and it laid out the method she would work by for the next thirty years. The uncle of Price-Mars's title is a figure of authority, the elder whose speech a nation was told to respect. Comhaire-Sylvain went after the aunt, the grandmother and the woman selling artichokes in the market, on the ground that they held the same thing he had sent his readers to look for. The programme had been announced as a national one. She made it a programme about women.

The essay tells the story of a young woman called Adelsia who took Comhaire-Sylvain through Kenscoff, showing her the paths and telling her who lived where and on what terms. Partway through the telling the author reveals that the two of them had met long before. As a girl Adelsia came down the mountain with her grandmother to sell peaches and artichokes in Port-au-Prince, and the two were more than a decade apart in age, and each remembered the other. The detail carries the argument. The market route from Kenscoff to the capital had put these two women in the same street years before any anthropologist arrived with a notebook. The connection across class that the feminist league kept announcing it wanted to build had been running twice a week on a mountain road the whole time, carried on the heads of women bringing fruit to town.

By the time the two met again as adults, Adelsia ran a business, had children, and was known in the district as a dancer. She walked Comhaire-Sylvain through her days and eventually took her to the cemeteries of Kenscoff. The research notebooks show what happened there. They hold hand drawn maps, sketches of individual tombs, measurements written out, names, and notes matching plots to families in the village. Work of that kind cannot be done in an afternoon. It means standing in a graveyard beside somebody who knows which grave belongs to whom, asking, waiting, writing, and asking again. The pages are the evidence of hours spent in one another's company. That is the method. A visitor who arrives with a list of questions and leaves the same day gets answers. Time spent gets a village.

The notebooks do not say what hour anything happened. The published essay fills part of that gap, because Comhaire-Sylvain reproduced pieces of what the two women said while they walked, about money, about marriage, about children and about the dead. Out of the talk about money came the line she is remembered for. Adelsia had never been to school, and her mental calculations were remarkable. Women trading between Kenscoff and the capital held prices, quantities, credit and the cost of the journey in their heads and settled accounts without writing anything down. A university trained linguist put it in print that a woman with no schooling could reckon faster than she could. The remark ran in a paper read by women who employed such women in their kitchens, and it was aimed at them.