In conversation | Marlene Daut finds her place in Haitian history correcting faulty narratives  

BROOKLYN — Historian Marlene Daut’s latest tome, “The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe,” took her 15 years to research, write and release. The King appears to have been worth the wait, coming at a time when Haitians face distorted narratives and vilification. Doing, in many ways, what Daut’s previous books, articles and appearances tend to do for Haitians worldwide: marvel at the breadth of our home country’s achievements and inject even more pride in our heritage.

A professor of French and African Diaspora studies at Yale, Daut’s brand of engaging scholarship carries academia’s rigorous inquiry and extensive research, plus a deep-seated motivation to set the record straight about Haiti. She stands firm in dispelling fictions with facts, as her IG handle – @fictionsofhaiti – attests, often connecting them to today’s political and socio-cultural wars. That talent is perhaps why she is the ultimate source about Haiti’s transformative role in the Americas and beyond. For many English-speaking dyaspora, Daut’s works fill a gaping hole of knowledge among Haitian Americans of all generations, inspiring writers, podcasters and content creators.

Popular accounts about Haiti’s road to Flag Day or Independence Day often focus on the physical triumphs, the might and charisma of iconic heroes and the religious inspiration. As a literary historian who emphasizes Haiti’s intellectual foundations, Daut dives into the thinking and strategizing that went into the glorious victories. She highlights how Haitians had developed their own ideas of freedom and liberation, citing the many ways “Haitianists” created records.

The Haitian Times met with Daut in February in Brooklyn and again in April, amid a wave of aggressive immigration actions by the Trump administration, including deportations without due process, revoked visas for scholars, and threats to university funding. Her points about colonial-era racism and attempts to codify inferiority through law and institute caste-based social norms were particularly poignant. They also reinforce the need to own and preserve historical narratives to counter misinformation and erasure – two patterns echoing across America today. 

The interviews below are condensed and edited for length and clarity. 

From California livin’ to angering a whole country 

The Haitian Times / Macollvie J. Neel: Dr. Daut, thank you so much for taking time to sit down with The Haitian Times. I’m very curious to know about you and your family, your roots in Haiti. They must have been embedded pretty deep to dedicate your entire career to unearthing Haitian history.

Marlene Daut: Thank you for having me. It’s such a delight. 

So I was born in California, grew up there, with two brothers and a sister. My mother was born in Port-au-Prince, and came here as she was turning 13. My dad is white American of distant German and Irish descent. 

I just grew up listening to Haitian music, eating Haitian food, and I was just always fascinated with Haitian history and culture. My great aunt, who was my grandmother’s sister, has seven children. So I just thought California was overrun with Haitians because there were so many of us.

Recently, I was doing some genealogical digging and I found my grandmother’s birth certificate in the Haitian National Archives through the Association de Généalogie, a digitization project out of Montreal, and it said that she was born in Jeremie. So now I have this newfound desire to learn all these things, meet people from there and visit one day, hopefully, when we can go back to Haiti.

THT: How did your mom and grandmother end up in California from Haiti? 

Daut: In doing my genealogy, I got my grandmother’s immigration and naturalization papers. She did go to Miami at first. She worked as a nanny, she worked as a house cleaner for two different families.  I actually found the three families who I signed a form saying ‘Yes, she worked for me.’ Then the next trace I have of her is living in California. 

THT: I’m fascinated by this genealogy project. Is that your next book you’re working on?

Daut: I think so. I’m calling it “In Search of Grandmothers Lost.”

THT: Tell me a little bit more about your mom and dad’s history. How did they meet?

Daut: My parents met when they were teenagers. They tell this wild story that my dad was driving in a car and he sees my mom, who was like a star volleyball player, on the school bus. He follows the school bus to her volleyball game and watches the game. Eventually, they get married, basically as teenagers out of high school. 

So my mom was, at first, like a school nurse. She later became a radiology tech. My dad was a marital family counselor. We lived in Inglewood, Los Angeles, and I just thought everybody had one white parent, one black parent — it was common. Then later, we moved to Orange County. We were the only Black kids, and some of the things that people would say, I just had never heard. So in my child’s mind, I was like, ‘Where did we go? What is happening?’

THT: So when did you start thinking, ‘Oh, man, there’s more to Haiti than the music and all these people in my family?’ When did it start taking on a career, scholarly interest?

Daut: You know what? It was actually reading an Edwidge Danticat magazine article. I believe it was Seventeen magazine. Nobody had ever given me a book by a Haitian author. 

THT: Wow, look at that.

THT: What path had you been on to study in grad school?

Daut: Initially, I wanted to study Francophone writers from French Louisiana because I was always very interested in the 19th century. Through that, I came across a voluminous amount of Haitian writers from the 19th century. And there was this whole other world that other people told me, ‘You’re gonna have a hard time getting a job because nobody’s gonna know what you’re talking about.’ I just decided I had to do what I wanted to do anyway. I tell all my graduate students that. If you stop and change because of the market, then you end up with something that you aren’t passionate about.

THT: How did your family respond to your interest in Haitian history, Haitian literature? 

Marlene Daut : My mother’s reaction was interesting. When I would write short pieces for popular audiences, like in Essence, and send them to her, she would say, ‘I grew up in Haiti and I don’t know any of this.’ She learned about the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint, knew Christophe was a king, etcetera. But the real nitty gritty of her education [at] a Catholic school was French history and novels in French. Now, every time new books come out from all the wonderful Haitian authors writing in English, she’s reading them alongside me. 

My father loves to read history. What drove me to write “The First and Last King” as a narrative history was to write something my dad would want to read. I would send him my pieces too, like the New York Times one – “Napoleon isn’t a hero to celebrate.” He and my father-in-law still joke with me that I angered a whole country of people with that piece. 

THT: Yeah, well, they did worse to us.

Unearthing facts, and countering fictions 

THT: So now, let’s talk about your work. “Awakening the Ashes,” which is exactly that – unearthing these stories – and your latest, the Henry Christophe narrative. You’ve done amazing research that centers Haitians, to show people these receipts.  

Daut: I always teach Michel-Wolf Trouillot’s “Silencing the Past.” I read it so many times, and every time I read it, something new jumps out at me. But there’s this passage that has always just sat with me, where he talks about how actions, the actions of the revolutionaries, preceded the documents we turn to constantly, which is Toussaint Louverture’s Declaration in 1793 or the 1801 Constitution. What I wanted to also think about in “Awakening the Ashes” was what you said earlier about thought: Before we act, we think. 

But, the Haitian Revolution has often been portrayed by foreigners as a moment when enslaved Black people just decided to set everything on fire. And it’s like ‘No. They organized it.’ So that’s what I trace in the book, is their organization. There had been organized rebellion for three centuries really. I go back to the era of Anakawona and Kawonabo, and I really wanted to think about how the Haitian revolutionaries and 19th century intellectuals wrote and thought about them. And, they were the ones who brought forth the story of Anakawona and talked about how it inspired them. 

THT: I’m curious about what that process was like, when you say every single day. How do academics actually work?

Daut: Yeah, I mean, you’re just keeping multiple files in your computer, trying to be super organized. It could be whole days locked in the world of writing, and like, ‘Oh, wow. It’s 3 p.m. and I forgot to eat lunch.’ ‘My kids are coming home from school.’

THT: So reading Awakening, I feel like this shows the receipts for our statements around claiming Haiti as the original Black Lives Matter movement. When we say Haiti inspired freedom all over the world, we often focus on physical liberation. But all of these thinkers that you bring in shows the necessity of having education throughout the centuries, of having thought to help sustain the physical action. 

Daut: On some of my other books and writings, some editors would tell me, ‘Oh, you can’t really use the term white supremacy because that concept didn’t exist in the era,’ or ‘Bell coined the term in 1814.’ But white supremacy can exist without the coinage. Also, in 1807, Juste Chanlatte, who worked under Henry Christophe, called slavery and the slave trade “a crime against humanity.” But watching how at the Nuremberg Trials, the International Criminal Court of Justice pat themselves on the back, saying they were the ones to call slavery and the slave trade a crime against humanity.

It makes sense that Haitians would find words to describe what they had just been through, because they created their own press so that they could do that. It makes sense that they would try to think about and try to help the world to understand the grave tragedies and travesties that they had been through. It makes sense that they would find terminology that didn’t exist, because the things that they were talking about, no one had ever been able to respond to in that way before.

THT: Yes, they were living it and seeing it, these atrocities, day to day. So some of these, what I consider groundbreaking terms in here are “Haitianist,” for example, used the way people refer to “Marxist.” I’m like, yeah, if all these Haitian people did all this work, all this thinking, we should recognize them. 

Daut: I’m so glad you pointed that out because as scholars, we’ve been trying to refine the language used. Say, ‘enslaved’ person instead of ‘slave’ or things like that. It has also led to some types of tensions where, you know, people have said, it’s human trafficking, not the slave trade. I quote a passage from the Haitian newspaper, under only Christophe, La Gazette Royal D’Haiti, where they call it the slave trade. They call it that odious traffic in human flesh. They just knew exactly how to describe things as they were, and that was the language they used. It is absolutely human trafficking that Europeans legalized.

THT: The more I read, the more I got the sense of history repeating itself in this moment.

For example, the way colonists had the maréchaussée hunt down people sounds a lot like immigration enforcement right now, with people having to show their papers. There are so many parallels. 

Daut: Yes, I mean, it’s, it’s actually amazing to think about. The favorite tool of white supremacists is the law. It’s not the baton, it’s not the gun. The favorite tool is the law. When you have the law on your side, because you’ve created it to be on your side, you can do almost anything. You can jail dissidents. You can demand people’s papers so that you can deport them. You can tell this person, ‘You’re allowed to execute that person.’

THT: What would you say to the doubters and people who don’t really buy it? People who wonder how these thoughts were actually recorded, especially since there was no widespread education system?

Daut: The proof is in the pudding. I explain all the ways, the how and why The Haitian Revolution was of monumental world historical significance. For example, the laws Haitians created didn’t resort to euphemisms, like the French laws. The French referred to laws in place during the Ancien Régime. The United States Constitution didn’t say ‘slavery is going to continue.’ It said ‘all other persons will be counted as three fifths of a person for the purposes of representation.’ Haitian lawmakers who came on the scene were specific. They said: ‘Slavery is forever abolished.’ ‘Servitude cannot exist in this land.’ ‘No distinctions of color can be recognized by the law.‘ ‘All Haitians are Black.’

Sometimes, people misunderstand what Dessalines meant by that part. It was an ingenious way to try to strike at the heart of the racist colorist system that the French colonists had put into place. In French, the word nègre is a synonym for slave and mulâtre became a synonym for free. The Haitian laws are saying, ‘No, none of this.’

As far as the education system, Christophe created one. He recruited school teachers to come and teach from abroad, to train Haitian teachers so that Haitians could teach themselves once they got up to speed in the pedagogy. He created a college of anatomy, a college of medicine, mathematics, and a painting academy. He wasn’t afraid to bring in European doctors to teach Haitian doctors.  

Finding a king, and giving him his due

THT: Let’s talk more about Henry Christophe building up the North of Haiti with many world marvels — literally, there’s a UNESCO World Heritage site. That took a certain level of sophistication and intellect, and obsession too, to really bring together. Today, despite Haiti’s demise, we still talk about The Palace of Sans Souci. So tell us about the king who built it all.

Daut: I’m embarrassed to say it took 15 years – ten years researching and five years writing every single day. I realized along the way that there were so many fantastical tales about Christophe — as a tyrant, the despot of the north — I realized he had a lot more influence and importance to the Haitian Revolution than is ordinarily recognized. Christophe is the guy who burned down Cap Français, but he was doing so much more than that.

But he, like all 19th-century Haitians, lived in a world that was determined to see them fail. So they waited for Christophe to be gone before pushing this business with the indemnity [under President Jean-Pierre Boyer]. I wanted to illuminate Christophe’s vision, what he tried to do, his flaws, and the legacy he left behind as more than just the sum total of the mistakes he made as a ruler. This is a person who led a complex life, whose life doesn’t deserve to be caricatured. You don’t see it that way with the Jeffersons and the Washingtons and even Napoleon, who did terrible things and yet get to be heroes.

The other thing is that Christophe was very honest in the fact that he’s a king, by choosing a constitutional monarchy. Whereas Pétion [in the South] has himself reelected president, declares himself president for life, which in a way is masquerading as democracy, as a republic where freedom only exists for an elite few. So if you really want to keep the class order intact, then you don’t want the masses to be educated. You tell them to go into the fields.

THT: That’s insane for Boyer to have eliminated the schooling and sign the debt. And so, we are feeling the effects of all of that today.

Daut: Exactly. That’s to me why the danger is so acute and not hypothetical. History is there to teach us, so we don’t repeat the past. Do we like to hear about rulers who oppressed our own ancestors? Of course not, but we have to tell the truth about it. We need to learn from it.

THT: What comes to mind is the extent to which Haiti’s prosperity has been pilfered. Through outright extortion, the possibilities and potential of Haiti have been siphoned off, because of the link that an economy has to political sovereignty. When you touched on suzerainty – that emphasized the feeling we’ve never really been free.

Daut: Yes, they’re economic chains. I agree. I think Boyer sold Haiti’s sovereignty.

THT: Now, we’re seeing the attacks on education, on universities. So how do we then, as Haitians or Haitian Americans, like trying to ensure that we’re not complicit in whitewashing this period we’re living through?

Daut: When I see these full scale attacks on history and on academics and universities, it affirms my belief we are doing something important. Because if we weren’t, they wouldn’t be trying to shut us down like this. They wouldn’t be scrubbing pages from the Office of the Historian or website of the National Archives. They wouldn’t be changing the documents from the U.S. Library of Congress. If what we were writing didn’t matter, they wouldn’t be scared of it. But they’re so scared of the truth, it would be laughable if it weren’t so scary. So we have to continue to speak out. 

They say we’re indoctrinating the students. But any student who’s taken my class can tell you that I put the documents up. That’s not indoctrination. Those are just facts.

THT: How are you feeling now, having uncovered all of this? What’s the reception been like?

Daut: It’s been heartwarming to see the reception in the Haitian and Haitian American community. It makes me know that I’m doing something worthwhile. I offer things historically that can help to illuminate Haiti as more than just any particular crisis. And so for even people living in Haiti and Haitian Americans here to tell me, “keep going, keep telling our stories,” it is meaningful to me. This is what we need, all of us, to collectively keep doing and make sure that the story is always as full as it can be, and not one node. 

The scholarly community, podcasters, reviewers have come out to support this book and say let’s have this longer, more nuanced conversation about this pivotal figure who is made to seem unimportant. If we forget Christophe today, it’s on us because in his era, he was recognized as the visionary that he was.

THT: I’m super excited that the stories are coming out now because we need these affirmations of who we are. The more we can go back to the lessons in how our ancestors survived and overcame, the more supported we’ll feel in continuing to resist and rebel today.

Daut: Years on, the struggle, the fight, continues. But we’re never going to give up, and we’re never going to stop saying all the things that need to be said. 

I’m worried that most people who only know U.S. history or have spent all their time in the comfort of living in the United States really don’t understand the kind of danger they can be in. They are more interested in their own personal security, their own personal wealth. The entire history that I’m studying shows those things can be extremely fragile, and all it takes is people not standing up for what’s right. 

THT: Well, thank you. Thank you so much.

Daut: Thank you so much for the support. I hope people enjoy “Awakening the Ashes” and “The First and Last King of Haiti.”