Istwa Nou

Comhaire-Sylvain set out in 1939 to find what girls in Port-au-Prince did with their free hours. The premise was that unaccounted time was a danger, that a girl whose day could not be reconstructed might be doing something that would cost her a reputation, and that such time therefore needed watching. The survey found something else. A large share of the girls she interviewed were servants in the houses of the well off, and they were working more than ninety eight hours a week. A small number were enrolled as full time pupils. Most were part time, and of those, many missed classes often. There was almost no free time left to investigate. The ninety eight hour week belonged to children who appeared on the rolls as students, and the houses that employed them were the houses of the women who would read the report.

Working girls in Port-au-Prince had a job, some schooling and a share of the housework at home, which left almost nothing over. Comhaire-Sylvain asked what they did with the little that remained. They talked with their friends, they danced and they played games, which is what the daughters of the middle class and the elite did with a far larger allowance of free time. Rich or poor, she wrote, the young girls of Port-au-Prince are highly social. The finding cut against the way the city described itself. Class in Haiti was held to run all the way down, separating income, schooling, language, manners and the shape of a childhood. Put the question narrowly enough and the separation disappears. Given an hour, girls on both sides of it did the same three things, and the difference between them lay entirely in how many such hours they were given.

The lives of Port-au-Prince girls diverged on one point, and that point was schooling. A girl who attended regularly and a girl who lost weeks to work were being handed different futures, and the gap widened every term. Comhaire-Sylvain proposed a remedy within reach of the organisation she was writing for. The Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale should open a library at the weekend, so that a girl who had missed days to a household job could pick up some of the material on the one day she was free. The proposal is modest and it is practical. It leaves untouched the arrangement that put a child in somebody else's kitchen for ninety eight hours a week. It works around that arrangement, treating the lost schooling as a gap to be filled rather than as a consequence with a cause and a beneficiary.

Raising the intellectual and moral level of Haitian women would take more than better schools, Comhaire-Sylvain argued. Children also needed some understanding of art in the hours they were not studying. Then she corrected her own verb. Introduce was the wrong word, she wrote, because art was already present in an embryonic state, in the love of singing, of telling stories and of dancing, all of which she granted were very well developed. The correction is characteristic of her. She kept noticing that the thing she had come to bring was already there. The word she settled on let her hold both positions at once. Haitian children had art, and their art stood at an early stage, and at that stage it could go wrong. Which left the educated woman with a job to do after all, and left the singing and the dancing waiting for her approval.

Comhaire-Sylvain wanted the artistic energy she had found in Haitian girls brought under supervision. Her recommendation was social gatherings arranged and watched by adults, at which young people would be shown plays, art exhibitions and educational films. She then told the members of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale plainly what their part in this was. The women of the nation who had been to school were to teach the class that had not, and to show them what constitutes beauty. That sentence sets the league up as a court of taste. Beauty is treated as a settled question, known to women with a French education and unknown to everyone else, and the transfer runs one way only. A year earlier the same writer had been in Kenscoff arguing that a woman who never saw a classroom held knowledge worth recording. Both arguments ran in the same newspaper.