Istwa Nou

Comhaire-Sylvain called for a study of Haitian society that drew on several disciplines at once. She was candid that such an approach would not be easy to use, and that it would be no use at all to someone without long experience in the country, because the sources were scattered, uncoordinated and full of holes. She wanted it anyway, on the evidence: her figures showed plainly that stratification in urban Haiti was far more complicated than earlier writers had described. Her criticism was aimed at the thick descriptions produced by visiting ethnographers, work that set out to see everything and, in trying, saw less than it could have. She did not name Herskovits, Hurston, Metraux or Mintz. She did not have to. The people who had made careers describing Haiti to foreign readers were being told by a Haitian woman with two decades of local fieldwork that their instruments were too coarse to pick up the country they thought they had explained.

Comhaire-Sylvain's quarrel with other researchers was less about who they were than about what they had failed to do, which was to see, count or locate Haitian women at all. She objected in particular to the labels then in use. Writers reached for caste to describe Haitian social divisions, and for sub-proletariat to describe the people at the bottom of them. She refused both and used impersonal markers, letters and numbers, for the classes she mapped. Sub-proletariat was the worst offender because of the judgment folded into it. The masses, she wrote, hold to standards the upper classes reject, and that is not a mark of inferiority. Caste implies a divinely fixed order and sub means less. Choosing neutral nomenclature was itself a political act: it refused to let the vocabulary of class quietly reproduce the hierarchy the vocabulary was supposed to be describing. She was writing in the year Duvalier consolidated a regime built on exactly that vocabulary.