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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...

I initially wrote this article following the July 7, 2021 assassination of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse after one Haitian official requested that the U.N. and U.S. send troops to help stabilize the nation. As can be imagined, many Haitian activists and artists recoiled at the prospect of yet another outside intervention.

The Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat is one artist who has repeatedly railed against past U.S. occupations of Haiti. In her foreword to Jan J. Dominique’s “...

The process of selecting a book cover can be quite stressful. Authors usually have some idea of what they want or don't want, but much of the process relies on instinct, intuition, and commonsense. Yet there is also the much thornier question of love.

Every author I have ever talked to wants to absolutely and unequivocally LOVE the cover of their book. For many reasons, though, sometimes you just don't love the cover that the editorial and/or marketing team finds to be amazing.

As the author...

April 7 will perhaps forever remain a dubious day in Haitian history. On that day in 1803, Toussaint Louverture was found dead by his French jailers at the Fort de Joux prison in the Jura mountains of France. I wrote at length about how the French caused his death in an article for History Today magazine called "The Wrongful Death of Toussaint Louverture." The article is available without a paywall by clicking on the hyperlink above.

But while the date of Toussaint Louverture's death is fairly...

How a utopian vision of Black freedom and self-government was undone in a world still in thrall to slavery and racism

After declaring independence from France on January 1, 1804, Haiti became the first state anywhere to permanently outlaw slavery and ban imperial rule. By establishing a land of freedom in a world of slavery, Haiti’s founders – the generals Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henry Christophe and Alexandre Pétion – challenged the contradictions of the western European Enlightenment, whose...

The work of preparing the renamed capital city, Cap-Henry, for President Christophe to become King Henry happened within the astonishing space of just two months. On March 26, 1811, Christophe issued a proclamation announcing that his council of state had just promoted him from the position of president of the State of Haiti to king of the Kingdom of Haiti. Just one week later, another edict announced the creation of the nobility, with Christophe’s most cherished friends and administrators...

Resistance and Fugitivity on the Island of Saint-Domingue

On December 1, 1773, a 22-year-old enslaved man, about five-feet tall and originally from South Africa, was captured by French authorities in Petit-Goâve, on the island of Saint-Domingue, a French colony at the time. The captive had run away from the man who had enslaved him to become a maroon, or a fugitive from slavery. Upon his capture, when the jailer asked for his name, the man, who spoke no French, said likely the only word he...

Welcome to my blog! I am trying to be really intentional about where I spend my time these days: more time with family, reading, and creating ideas, and working on writing projects, and less time on social media/scrolling the internet. This blog is a part of that effort. Some of what I'll be writing here is stuff that didn't make it into my books, and some of what will be here might end up just as new thoughts I'm working out. Other times, I might talk about some of the aspects of my books...