Istwa Nou

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain spent the 1930s doing fieldwork on marriage in the Haitian countryside. She found that the majority of rural unions had no standing in law. Couples lived in plasaj, a common law arrangement with rules of its own, or in open relationships carrying no formal tie at all. What decided the shape of a union was land. Access to a plot, whether through family inheritance or through a partner, let a woman raise produce and sell it, and selling produce meant income and the right to travel with it. Market prices and the chance of movement therefore ran through every question of who lived with whom and on what terms. This is the practical base under a great deal of Haitian women's independence. The state had a marriage law and the countryside had a system older and more widely used, in which a woman's standing was measured by what she could plant and carry to market rather than by a certificate held at a registry.

Marriage in Haiti could widen a woman's freedom or narrow it, depending which kind she entered. A legal marriage placed her earnings and property under her husband's economic authority. A common law union, or a long standing plasaj contract, let her reach a partner's land while keeping her own income under her own control. Every arrangement carried compromises, including the loosest ones. The economist Mireille Neptune-Anglade described rural unions involving several partners as social contracts that tended to lock families out of class mobility. The feminist Myriam Merlet warned against romanticising the economic freedom of peasant women, given how much labour was demanded of them. That warning was aimed at outsiders who saw independence where the women themselves counted hours. A woman who could farm from dawn until dark, carry her produce to market and keep the proceeds had something the married bourgeois woman lacked. She also had a working day that would have broken most of the people admiring it.

Most Haitian women who sold food made enough to cover a family's needs from one week to the next. Very few of them were madan sara. That name belongs to the women who specialise in commerce, moving goods between the countryside and the towns, brokering supply and price and holding the connections to national and international buyers. They are the visible figures in any account of the Haitian economy, and they were always a minority of the women working in it. When world prices moved, the madan sara carried loans owed to larger traders and factories along with inflated costs, and she passed both down to the peasant women buying goods from her. Each step in that chain absorbed less risk than the one below it. At the bottom stood the woman with a garden plot who had nobody to pass anything to. A system that looks from a distance like women's commercial independence is also a ladder, and its rungs are not the same width.

Plasaj is the Haitian conjugal arrangement that stands outside church and civil marriage, and it is often described as a form that left women room to move. The Haitian feminist Sabine Lamour argues for a harder reading. She traces it to the colonial period, when Africans held in captivity formed unions with no institutional standing, and she puts the weight on what the arrangement produced. Several women's labour went onto a single garden plot, and that labour is what allowed a man to hold his land against wealthy proprietors who wanted it. The habit outlived the colony by a century and a half. Plasaj normalised a work ethic in which a woman becomes valuable by sacrificing herself, and the weight of that model fell hardest and longest on Black women who were poor and working class. Lamour's reading turns the romance of the arrangement inside out. What looks like a woman's autonomous choice began as a method for turning her labour into a man's title.