Istwa Nou

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain had spent years doing fieldwork among Haitian girls, and the girls had handled her. They declined the assumptions she brought about their lives, and they declined her right of access. They walked around her intentions, gave nothing to her questions, and in doing so taught her something about their own power and their own view of things. The same schooling went on at the Foyer Ouvrier. Women of the League arrived with university training and a plan for what working-class girls needed, and the girls corrected them by ordinary means: by choosing what to answer, by choosing what to attend, by declining to be material. Research of this kind assumes the knowledge runs in one direction. Here the subjects were running the seminar, and the credentialed women in the room were the ones under examination.

In the first months of the Foyer Ouvrier the League made rest and play central to the plan. Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau observed that the idea of entertainment seemed very distant to the women coming in, and she bought games, cards and dominoes to remedy that. The women worked eighty to ninety hours a week and spent at least ten hours more walking to and from their jobs. They arrived at the Foyer and chose to study. Sylvain-Bouchereau and her sister watched this happen and adjusted the programme. Leisure turned out to be a matter of choice, and what these women chose with their free hours was skills and language training, because those things fed their curiosity and opened routes out of where they were. The correction is the part that counts. Two university trained women had decided what tired workers wanted, the tired workers told them otherwise, and they were listened to.