Istwa Nou

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain kept printed and hand drawn maps of Haiti and used them as instruments. One was the 1947 Republique d'Haiti carte-guide et plan de Port-au-Prince, an ordinary street guide, which she used to chart how class, colour and political power were laid out across the capital in the 1940s. The classification she worked with put close to ten percent of the population in Class I. Only six percent of the population were the wealthy, educated, high earning households the category was meant to describe. The remaining 3.7 percent were servants and other members of Class IV living outside their own crowded wards, which meant inside the houses of the families they worked for. The map of the rich districts therefore contained the poor as residents. The city refused to sort itself into zones meeting at their edges. The classes overlapped inside the same buildings, and a street plan can be made to show that once somebody thinks to ask it the question.