Istwa Nou

Comhaire-Sylvain divided Port-au-Prince into quadrants using four measures: how densely people lived, which parish they belonged to, what their houses were made of, and how they stood in relation to paid work. Out of that she drew four class zones covering the whole city. The numbers and letters she attached to them were meant to widen the description rather than compress it, holding several kinds of information in one label without passing sentence on the people inside it. What she was after was relation, not accumulation of evidence. She had watched class labels do damage in Haiti: they hurt people, they held people in place, they inflated people, and they left people both unaccounted for and unaccountable to one another. Her method carried an ethic inside it. If the available way of naming people injured them, then the researcher's first task was to build a new way of naming. That is a harder standard than most social science sets itself, then or now.

Zone IV held the largest share of the city, 49 percent, about 91,000 people. It ran across the northern part of the old town near the business district, taking in the hill of Bel-Air, the cathedral, and LaSaline, a stretch of alluvial ground recently taken from the sea. Inside that crescent Comhaire-Sylvain counted eighty seven ounfo, the temples where Vodou is served, seven Protestant churches and ten night clubs, and recorded a strong African presence in the celebrations and in the exclusive use of Kreyol. In LaSaline she collected 2,721 questionnaires. Most of the respondents described themselves with pride. They could not read, they owned the houses they lived in, and they had built those houses themselves. They preferred plasaj, the recognised union outside church marriage. Most worked for themselves, and three quarters of the women gave their profession as trading. The women of LaSaline were not waiting for a league of educated ladies to define them. They had already named their work and chosen their households.