Istwa Nou

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain divided Port-au-Prince into class zones for her research. Close to twenty thousand women lived at the seams between them. They were domestic workers, and their day was set by somebody else's breakfast. Coffee had to be on the table at seven, so they set out at five, and they came home after dark. Both ends of the journey happened when nobody was watching. Many of them had given up schooling for jobs paid at the legal minimum, and that trade runs one way only. The capital ran on these women. The households that employed them, the zones Comhaire-Sylvain mapped, and the professional and political life conducted inside them all rested on twenty thousand people walking through the dark twice a day. The map of the city did not show them. The census counted them in somebody else's house. The hours they spent in transit belonged to no one's accounts at all.

Some domestic workers in Port-au-Prince had no journey across the city. They lived in the house and went from downstairs to upstairs. That trip took a minute, appears in no record of anything, and left them available at any hour to whoever in the household wanted something. In the data these women were folded into the employer's household, counted as part of a family they may have felt nothing at all for. The consequence outlives them. A woman entered the record as a member of the household she served, while the household she actually belonged to left no trace, particularly where her own family fell outside what the Catholic parish registers would recognise: the wrong beliefs at home, a birth outside marriage, a partner the priest would not bless. So the archive reproduces the arrangement of the house. The people upstairs are documented as a family with dependants. The women downstairs are documented as one of the dependants. Their own kin are documented nowhere.

The Foyer was the house the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale kept for women in Port-au-Prince, and it worked as a fixed point for those who spent their days walking between the city's class zones. Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain called them the femmes du peuple. One of them was Amise, who nursed Comhaire-Sylvain back to health through an illness and afterwards took her into zones four and three, the poorest districts in her own scheme. What Comhaire-Sylvain learned there, by her account, was how to celebrate death. The direction of instruction is worth pausing on, because for the period it runs backwards. A university-trained ethnographer from the elite was taken in hand by a working woman and shown parts of her own city she had no way into otherwise. The women who walked between the zones held together a city whose map showed those zones as separate. Their feet were the connection. The Foyer was where they could sit down.

Marguerite was the Sylvain family's young cook. She survives in the record because of half a sentence in a letter reporting that the whole house had caught the flu in 1943. She and the Sylvain sisters would have met for the first time in the foyer of that house, the entryway, which is the same word the League chose for the centre it built for women like her. She most likely cooked for the leadership meetings of the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale at the family home on Rue Christophe. Her origins go unrecorded; nearby Poste Marchand or Bolosse are likely, or Bel Air or La Saline further north. The women of the League debated the condition of Haiti's working women over meals a working woman had prepared, and she entered the archive only because a virus drew no distinction between the women who owned the house and the woman who fed them.