Istwa Nou

President Élie Lescot justified changes to Haiti's marriage law by saying he meant to combat polygamy. The practice he had in mind was plasaj, the common law union of the Haitian countryside, which sometimes involved more than one partner and often did not. In his account it was no honourable union at all. The fieldwork showed a system with rules. In the 1930s and 1940s a plasaj required an extended negotiation between two families, a contract, an exchange of gifts, and a courtship that usually passed through recognised stages, rinmin for dating and fiyansé for engagement, before any household was formed. Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain concluded that peasant society treated plasaj as a form of marriage and that from a sociological standpoint it was as respectable as a civil ceremony. A head of state described as disorder an arrangement his own country's ethnographers had documented as law. It had been working before the Haitian state existed, and it outlasted his presidency.

In 1937 Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain interviewed a woman and her husband who had lost seven children to miscarriage and infant death. They had brought a second wife into their plasaj union so that there would be children. Infant mortality in rural Haiti was barely documented at the time, and this is what the absence of records looks like from inside one household. Her fieldwork showed that decisions about partnering ran on grief and on care as much as on money or desire, and that plasaj households were often held together by women supporting one another. The count matters too. In Kenscoff in 1938 multiple partnering occurred in about nine of every hundred plasaj unions. Lescot and the reformers who wanted the state to stamp out rural polygamy were legislating against a practice that nine households in a hundred used, generally to survive a loss the state had done nothing to prevent.

Lescot explained the marriage law further by saying he had decided to fight what he called polygamy among the peasants, which he named as the source of the astonishing growth of the population. Rural Haitian households often involved a man with more than one union, and the president treated this as the engine of overcrowding in the cities. The arithmetic does not hold. Sanitation and health care in the countryside were poor enough that infant mortality among the poor cancelled most of any advantage in births, so poor families were raising roughly as many surviving children as the middle-class and elite families of the urban centres. Births outside marriage could not by themselves have filled Port-au-Prince. What Lescot had done was locate a national problem in the bodies of rural women, which cost the treasury nothing, while the conditions that actually drove people off the land went unnamed in his message to the country.

Lescot's explanation of urban crowding rested on peasant fertility. Holding it required leaving out the movement of people that had been under way since the United States occupation, when Haitians began leaving the countryside for Port-au-Prince in steadily larger numbers. That migration had causes the government could name. One of them was SHADA, the agricultural venture his administration had backed, which took land out of peasant hands and cleared it for wartime crops, stripping the households that worked it of the ground they lived from. People walked to the capital because the districts they came from had been made unlivable, in part by decisions he had signed. Placing the cause in the reproductive habits of rural women moved the ledger away from the palace. The man who authorised the clearing described the crowds in the city as a matter of appetite among the people the clearing had displaced.