Istwa Nou

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.

Comhaire-Sylvain did not raise Adelsia's arithmetic as a compliment to one woman. She raised it as a question about how women count, in both senses of the phrase. Vendors and market women measured with pots of graded sizes, by the weight of a handful, by touch and by smell, and they did it accurately enough to run a trade on it for a lifetime. That is a system of measurement. It has units, it can be taught to a daughter, and a buyer can check it. It had never been written down because the people who wrote things down did not think of it as knowledge. In La Voix des Femmes she argued that these systems mattered and that the women using them counted as members of the nation. The pot a woman used to measure rice was an instrument, and no laboratory recognising it changed nothing about what it could do.

Comhaire-Sylvain wrote down the friction. Her account of Kenscoff records women examining one another, contradicting one another and putting one another right, and it records the places where the translation broke and a woman could not make her life legible to the other. The clearest break was marriage. The two of them could agree about prices, about children, about work and about the dead. They could not reach a shared account of what a union between a man and a woman was for, or of what a woman gave up by entering one without a ceremony. Leaving that disagreement in a published text was unusual. The convention of the period was to report a village as a coherent thing the visitor had understood. Here a reader gets two women talking past each other on the single subject where their positions in Haitian society made agreement impossible.

Adelsia lived in a plasaj, a union recognised by the people around her and by neither church nor state, which might involve one partner or more than one. It was the ordinary arrangement in rural Haiti and it carried real obligations about land, children and support. Comhaire-Sylvain admired the way Adelsia handled her trade and raised her children, and said so in print. On the union she balked. The essay questions Adelsia's standing as a second wife to her husband, and at that point the register shifts from description to judgement. The same writer had spent four articles insisting that the way a market woman measures rice is a form of knowledge educated Haitians should learn to read. The way that woman organised her household received no such reading. Ethnographic generosity extended as far as work and stopped at the bedroom door.

Comhaire-Sylvain closed with a regret. Adelsia would grow old in Kenscoff and be called Manze Adelsia, then Sor Adelsia, then Grann Adelsia, and she would never be called Madame. The village titles were real and carried standing. Madame was the one the church and the state issued, and it went only to women married in a ceremony. Foreign reporters and ethnographers of the period were fixed on plasaj, which they produced again and again as their proof that Haiti had failed to become modern. Comhaire-Sylvain knew that argument and worked against it for thirty years. Her disappointment here shows how much of it she had taken in anyway. A woman who ran a trade, raised children and was known across a district was still, in the pages of a feminist newspaper, short of something, and what she was short of was a word on an envelope.