Blog

By Marlene L. Daut

In 1948, when he was just 19-years old, the St. Lucian poet and playwright Derek Walcott wrote his first play, Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes. The play went on to be published in Bridgetown, Barbados in 1950, and thereafter it was played on the radio and staged in London in 1952. That performance was directed by Errol Hill, who later taught as a distinguished scholar of theatre at my current place of employment, Yale University. Hill also played Christophe's...

By Marlene L. Daut

This week marked the anniversary of the historic Battle of Vertières (November 18, 1803), considered to have been the formal end of the Haitian Revolution, as it led directly to French general Rochambeau’s surrender on November 19, 1803 and to formal Haitian independence several weeks later on New Year's Day 1804.

Yet one little known fact is that only ten days after Rochambeau's capitulation, on November 29, 1803, Haitian generals Augustin Clervaux, Jean-Jacques Dessalines,...

By Marlene L. Daut

The month of October was a very busy one for me. First, my colleague Pierre Saint-Amand and I hosted a conference to analyze, discuss, and deliberate the implications of the bicentennial of the 1825 indemnity “agreement” with France that impoverished Haiti. Participants included Julia Gaffield, Daniel Desormeaux, Jean Casimir, Chelsea Stieber, Grégory Pierrot, Jean-Marie Théodat, Kaiama L. Glover, Yanick Lahens, Malick Ghachem, and Lewis Clorméus.

The conversations were...

By Marlene L. Daut

On this date we remember Haiti’s founder Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who was killed by members of his own army less than three years after becoming the first world leader in the Americas to permanently abolish slavery.

Below, I introduce you to two Haitian poets who, many decades following the assassination of Dessalines, and each in their own particular way, commemorated the death of Haiti’s first emperor.

In “The Red Bridge,” Coriolan Ardouin (December 11, 1812-July 12, 1835),...

By Marlene L. Daut

Did you know that at the age of only twelve-years-old Henry Christophe, Haiti's first and only king, found himself participating in the American Revolutionary War? Christophe fought at the Battle of Savannah, which took place on October 9, 1779, under the command of the famous French general known as the Comte d’Estaing.

Christophe was not the only Black soldier from the Caribbean to fight for U.S. freedom. Joining him was Louverture’s storied rival André Rigaud and fellow...

By the end of the second decade of the 19th century, it had become commonplace to describe Haiti as a country split in two, one part ruled by Henry Christophe in the north and the other by Alexandre Pétion in the south. In reality, the political divisions were far more complicated and would have everything to do with King Henry's eventual downfall.

On the northern half of Haiti’s southwestern peninsula lies a mountainous region called Grand’Anse. Until February 1820, when Pétion’s successor...

By Marlene L. Daut

For a long time, historians disagreed about the origins of Haiti’s first and only king, Henry Christophe. Yet in my recently published biography, The First and Last King of Haiti, I tried to close the case by first pointing out that in the six different versions of the Almanach royal d’Hayti, published out of the royal press of Haiti from 1814 to 1820—and hailed by bibliographer Ralph T. Esterquest as the “Burke’s peerage for Christophe’s grandiose kingdom”—the king’s date...

This past Wednesday (Oct. 1, 2025), I had the very special opportunity to moderate a discussion at Yale's Whitney Humanities Center with the renowned Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck, following a screening of his latest film, Orwell: 2+2=5. The film journeys into the life and mind of the famous British author George Orwell (real name, Eric Arthur Blair). One of the things we discussed in the Q&A is how Orwell is often referenced or evoked as a dystopian writer and an anti-fascist, for giving...

By Marlene L. Daut

This past weekend (Sept. 26-27, 2025), I had the delightful opportunity to participate in one of the best book fairs I have ever attended: the Delaware History Book Festival. Only 17 writers get the honor to join the conversation each year, so it was especially meaningful that the committee selected The First and Last King of Haiti. In this moment when the enemies of humanity, and seemingly all that is good in the world, seek to distort, reshape, and suffocate history and...

By Marlene L. Daut

On September 20, 1758, Dessalines is thought to have been born to an enslaved mother in Grande-Rivière-du-Nord in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (today Haiti).

After being tortured by his enslavers for thirty-three years, Dessalines participated in the Revolution (1791-1803) that brought slavery in the colony to a standstill. Eventually joining the famous revolutionary and formerly enslaved Toussaint Louverture, together, they and the other revolutionaries, forced...

By Marlene L. Daut

This week marked a historic day of teaching for me. Along with my colleague Professor Kaiama Glover, we launched a two-semester course, "Haiti Writes I" and "Haiti Writes II." After a search through institutional course records at Yale, Kaiama confirmed that our class is the first at the university to be devoted solely and entirely to Haitian literature. For me, this is both a moment to be celebrated and one to be pondered.

Putting aside for now the deep historical,...

By Marlene L. Daut

In 1998, an international organization, whose mission is to promote peace and security across the world, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), named August 23rd as the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition. This date was chosen to honor the Haitian Revolution, which started on the night passing from August 22nd to August 23rd in 1791.

UNESCO’s official statement honors Haiti for changing the world’s...

By Marlene L. Daut

Back in 2021, I wrote an article called “Why did Bridgerton erase Haiti?”. In the article I asked a deceptively simple question:

“If people want to see Black aristocracy on screen, then why not just put them in nineteenth-century Haiti where they really lived?”

Simon Sebag Montefiore, who reviewed my book, The First and Last King of Haiti, for The Times of London evidently wondered the same thing when he wrote:

“I don’t know if the makers of Bridgerton, Netflix’s glossy late...

July 17, 2025 marks the ten-year anniversary of the publication of my very first book, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865, published with Liverpool University Press on July 17, 2015. I can hardly believe it, especially since I was told by an editor at another press, who issued a blanket desk rejection, literally, five minutes after receiving an emailed proposal, that there was “no market for this.” The journey to publish...

July 11, 1825 was a tragic day for Haiti: It was on this day that Haiti’s president Jean-Pierre Boyer "agreed" to pay an indemnity to France’s Charles X, amounting to 150 million francs, as the price of France's recognition of Haitian independence and to compensate the former French colonists for the loss of their “property.”

Ange René Armand, Baron de Mackau, the diplomat whom Louis XVIII’s brother and successor King Charles X sent to deliver the ultimatum (in the form of an ordinance dated...

By Marlene L. Daut

What a great read! I'm talking about Julia Gaffield’s new book recently published with Yale University Press, I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom. I found it incredibly absorbing, and I learned so much that I even endorsed it. Here is my blurb, which appears on the back cover of the book:

“A distinguished scholar known for her precise archival research, Julia Gaffield has succeeded in the vital mission of writing a faithful account of...

What writing about Haiti’s first, last, and only king taught me about archives, ethics, and unreliable narrators.

By Marlene L. Daut

As a literary and intellectual historian, I have spent a large part of my career focusing on how literary fictions (poetry, drama, novels, and short stories) affected the way that people living in the 18th and 19th centuries understood the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804). My newest book, a biography called The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of...

Remembrance as a Radical Act

By Marlene L. Daut

AMASA DELANO: “But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright son has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.”

BENITO CERENO: “Because they have no memory . . . because they are not human.”

--Herman Melville, Benito Cereno

In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic 1961 short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” the character George attempts to console his wife Hazel—for what, he is not sure—by...

Way back in 2019, phew!, what a different, but also similar world it was then. We were pre-pandemic, but prime Trump, and I am now at Yale, not the University of Virginia, but universities and academia are still under attack, and even more so..... Sigh....

Well, today, because it is still Haitian Heritage Month, and I want to keep the hope alive, I am resurrecting one of my first forays into public-facing scholarship. In April 2019, I partnered with WAMU/NPR's show "The Academic Minute" to...

Although my recently published book The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe (Knopf, 2025) naturally focuses on the king himself, his wife Queen Marie-Louise is a central force throughout, and her own biography reveals complex layers to the story of the Haitian Revolution, Haitian independence, and the rise of the Kingdom of Haiti.

I wrote about Queen Marie-Louise's journey after her husband's tragic death in this excerpt adapted from my book (originally...