This is Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. In this episode, host Kate Carpenter is joined by historian Dr. Marlene Daut. Marlene is a professor at Yale University and is the author of four books, as well as an editor of several more. The most recent two of those books are Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution, which was a winner of the 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe. She is also the author of many articles and essays in places like The New Yorker, Harper’s, Essence, The Nation, and more. Our conversation covers some burning questions about Marlene’s work, including how she works on more than one book at a time, why you might find her typing into her phone at the grocery store, and she is inspired by the work of investigative journalists. Enjoy Kate’s conversation with Dr. Marlene Daut.
Mentioned in this episode
- The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe
- Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution
- Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2015)
- Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017)
- Julia Gaffield
- Grégory Pierrot
- Laurent Dubois
- Kaiama Glover
- Arial Sabar, Veritas: A Harvard Professor, A Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife
- Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
- Elena Ferrante
- Toni Morrison
- James Baldwin
- Sudhir Azareesing, The Black Spartacus
- CLR James, The Black Jacobins
- George Lamming
- Aimé Césaire
- Plutarch’s Lives
Transcript
Kate Carpenter 0:00
Hello. This is Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm host Kate Carpenter, and I am joined today by historian Dr. Marlene Daut.
Marlene Daut 0:09
Thank you so much for having me.
Kate Carpenter 0:11
Marlene is a professor at Yale and is the author of four books, as well as an editor of several more. The most recent two of those books are Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of the Haitian Revolution, which was a winner of the 2024 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and the First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe. She is also the author of many articles and essays in places like The New Yorker, Harper's, Essence, The Nation, and more. Our conversation covers some of my burning questions about Marlene's work, like how she works on more than one book at a time, why you might find her typing into her phone at the grocery store, and how she is inspired by the work of investigative journalists. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Marlene Daut.
Marlene Daut 0:55
You know, I wanted to write novels when I was a child, and I actually wrote, used to write short stories all the time. And it was funny, because over winter break, I was home in California, and I was talking to my mom about something I had written, and I said, Oh, I wrote my first short story at 11. And she said, No, no, it was far before that. It was like in first grade, like, oh, okay, so my mother had a different memory of what she would consider a short story, but I majored in creative writing as an undergraduate at Loyola Marymount University, and I wrote a lot of creative nonfiction. That was what I was really kind of drawn to. And so when I went to graduate school after that at the University of Notre Dame, I was constantly kind of wrestling with the kind of more formal academic style of writing and what I wanted to do. And I remember some of my professors saying, you're telling a story, you need to argue things. I was thinking, okay, so I learned how to do that, and I did that in several books, and I think it was fruitful, just in terms of, you know, I also used those skills to learn how to write op eds afterwards, or long form, kind of argumentative essays about current events in places like the New Yorker. So I think those are really valuable skills, but I'm very excited now to have been able to kind of return to my storytelling roots with my latest book, The First and Last King of Haiti, because I wanted to tell the life story of someone. And it's not that there was no argument, but it's not the same at all as a typical academic book.
Kate Carpenter 2:24
Fantastic. Well, I have many questions for you, but first I'm going to start with my very practical question. So when and where do you like to do your writing?
Marlene Daut 2:32
I like to write at home. So of course, at every university I've been at, I've had either a little space in the library when I was a graduate student or an actual formal office at the various universities where I've been employed, but I really like to write at home. And, you know, I remember sometimes faculty would say, I don't see you in your office, and because I'm writing, and I go to my office to meet with people and to be social. But for me, writing is really a solitary activity, and I write upstairs in my house, in my office with bright colors. I describe my office colors as coastal grandmother, so there's like turquoise and light pinks and things like that in here.
Kate Carpenter 3:14
Do you have a routine then, for your writing?
Marlene Daut 3:16
I do not have a routine, per se. I know some people say, Oh, I'm doing, I'm writing for 30 minutes. I am just, I write. I write almost every single day. I write when I have time to write. My children and my husband laugh because I'll be in the grocery store looking at my phone furiously typing. They're like, what are you doing? I have the Word app on my phone and I can edit something. I cannot write in that Word app on my tiny phone, but I am known to edit essays, chapters standing in the line of the grocery store. So I definitely don't have a routine. And when my students ask me, oh, how many words should I aim for a day? I say, as many as you can muster. Because to me, that's what writing is. It's just I don't think you should wait for inspiration. I think you have to treat it as a job and an activity and a vocation. But at the same time, I would never give myself a prescription, because if I'm stuck, I just stop and go for a walk or listen to music.
Kate Carpenter 4:13
What kinds of tools do you like to use to organize yourself?
Marlene Daut 4:15
You know, I don't use any of those really cool things that people use. I have tried many of these programs. I can't even think of their names, because that's how long ago I've tried to use them. I am very old school. I use Word documents. I keep notes. I have a folder, and it'll say notes on this, and then it'll be organized by heading, folded and all my notes, page numbers, etc. I did, for The First and Last King of Haiti, use timeline software and genealogy, family tree software, because I was trying to keep track kind of immense amounts of people, and I just, you know, didn't want to get them confused. And I was also trying to keep track of very momentous events in world history and Christophe fit into them. So I did avail myself of some better technology as I wrote, but none of the really interesting things that I've seen people doing with the organizational software, library software.
Kate Carpenter 5:11
Where in your research process do you like to start writing?
Marlene Daut 5:13
Let's see. I'm trying to think where I usually start, in the middle. I think the first book that I started with chapter one was The First and Last King of Haiti. I've not written any of my other books that way, but I always write the introduction last and the prologue, if there is one, very, very last, I think, with my previous book, Awakening the Ashes, I wrote the epilogue afterward. And because I remember saying to friends, I don't have a conclusion, I just kind of end because I don't, I don't know if there needs to be a conclusion. I feel like, in the ninth chapter, the book has nine chapters, I conclude it. And, you know, they sort of accepted that. And, you know, the readers, because it was an academic press, the peer reviewers, nobody said you need to have a conclusion. But then, as I was, you know, sort of turning in the very final version after peer review, the revised version, it came to me what the epilogue was going to be. So in that sense, it's the only one where everything, sort of the epilogue came at the very end. But most of my books, I'm kind of jumping in, I sometimes say, at the easiest chapter for me to write, because I have, just as probably many writers do, a fear of the blank page. I hate blank pages. I love revising. I'm on cloud nine once I have a whole book drafted, even if it is the worst prose, it's got "see footnote" here and there's no footnote, you know, but once I have that, I'm good to go. I'm feeling it.
Kate Carpenter 6:39
Then what does revising look like for you. How do you tackle it?
Marlene Daut 6:42
If you could see the folders where I keep my drafts, I probably have more than 1000 drafts. I will save probably five or six drafts on the same day. I have the date, and then I have little stars. So you know, it's been a heavy revising day when I've got like seven stars, if there's two I was, maybe didn't have enough time, or things were looking, starting to look pretty good that day. And then as I get towards the end, sometimes I'll just have one version for that day, but I'm really revising every single day, and I keep folders for each chapter that say, stuff cut from chapter five, because sometimes, after letting it sit for a while, you know, if you've written a chapter six months before, because I usually my books have taken a long time to write. It might not seem like it, but they've taken a lot of time to write, because I'm usually working on more than one thing simultaneously, and I'll realize, oh, no, I need that information. I cut out. And so I try never to go back to things I cut but every once in a while, I realize, Oh, my headspace must not have realized what it would feel like to the reader to be missing that information, and I'll put it back in.
Kate Carpenter 7:46
Well, you have just led to my next question, which is a burning question, I imagine, for anyone following you these days, which is that we're focusing today on your new book, The First and Last King of Haiti, but you also wrote a remarkable book called Awakening the Ashes that came out just about a year and a half ago, I want to say, and it I mean, I want to for listeners who don't know, but you're not just talking about books that you slept together like these are both remarkable books. Awakening the Ashes has won multiple huge awards. So congratulations on that. How did that happen? And how did you do that?
Marlene Daut 8:20
You know, it was a very interesting process to research two books simultaneously, but I had experience with it before, because when I wrote my first book, Tropics of Haiti, you know, there was a temptation to, and that book is long, throw everything in there, everything and the kitchen sink, as they say, right? And there were things that I realized, there were stories I realized I wanted to tell that I could tell in a different format. So my second book is actually called Baron de Vastey and The Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism. But Baron de Vastey is in Tropics of Haiti, as well. Has one chapter in Tropics of Haiti, and that was kind of similar to what happened with Awakening the Ashes and the biography of The First and Last King of Haiti, in that I was actually working on the biography first, technically, well, it depends on how you think about it, because for my dissertation, I wanted to write an intellectual history of Haiti. But at the time the early 2000s you know, my advisors really cautioned me against that, because if you read Awakening the Ashes, it's really sinking into the story of a Haitian Revolution from a Haitian perspective, Haitian intellectuals, Haitian writers, they really, this is their moment to shine. And when I was in grad school, my advisors, and I think smartly, said, you know, people don't know these names yet, and you can help them to know their names by putting them in conversation with people they do know. And so that's what I did with Tropics of Haiti, and to a large extent, with the Baron de Vastey book. So when I came back to Awakening the Ashes, it was in part to take up that project once more, but I was also already kind of working on the Christophe biography. And so I realized, oh, I can do so much more with talking about Kingdom of Haiti in Awakening the Ashes If I don't have to set up this entire apparatus of the biography of the king, which is just this enormous project, and that also freed me up in the biography to really sink into the story without saying, oh, there's this larger tradition and an intellectual tradition that they're all a part of, that we could really just focus on seeing events across a wide swath of history, but really through one person's eyes, so to speak.
Kate Carpenter 10:27
That's so interesting. So in some ways, they're almost companion books that kind of function together. What was it like then, I mean, to simultaneously sort of be working on this intellectual history where there are all these figures that you are dealing with, and then on, on the other hand, be working on this draft of a project where it's just one person and you have that singular focus. Was it hard to switch between those?
Marlene Daut 10:47
I would say that the hardest switch was, you know, so sort of when I would had drafted Awakening the Ashes completely but the Christophe book was only half done, and so I had the voice of Awakening the Ashes, kind of in my head. But then, you know, one of my colleagues said, and I was glad that she noticed this, that, Oh, you found another register in The First and Last King of Haiti. It's a different voice. And so I had to remind myself that, and a lot of what I cut out is or sort of the relics of this. But I had to remind myself that, oh no, I'm telling this story, and I've adopted this method of of kind of investigation to tell this story, whereas in Awakening the Ashes, there's a huge kind of narrative component. And so you would think it would be the opposite, that Awakening the Ashes would read more like the investigation and the biography more like the narration, and they're both narrative histories, but the tone of Awakening the Ashes is we are going to see things through a host of characters' eyes, and the story is going to be different from the way it's usually told, because we're seeing it through the people who participated. We're seeing it through their eyes, whereas the Christophe story, there are multiple perspectives in there as well, but it's also is this perspective the one that we need? Is this perspective biased, which all perspectives are? But how have those biases affected how we understand Christophe's life, for example, when he tells a story about his life versus one of his enemies or even one of his allies, and it's different. What do we do with that information? Because there's a way in which I could just say Christophe's story is the most important one, because in Awakening the Ashes, I'm saying the Haitian perspective is the one we're following. But in Christophe's case, we're seeing the world as he experienced it, but remembering that, yes, his memories of what happened. But the people around him had their own memories, and they had things they wanted people to believe about him, some flattering and some not so flattering.
Kate Carpenter 12:48
You mentioned earlier that, in many ways, really, with both of these books, but especially with The First and Last King of Haiti, you're returning to, sort of your storytelling impulses a little bit. Were there things you had to unlearn or maybe relearn in order to do that?
Marlene Daut 13:01
Yeah, I have actually said that before. I think, Well, I think the one important thing to point out is I was trained as a literary critic technically, but I never really wrote literary criticism. And I think that literary criticism is extremely hard to write things that are new, oftentimes about books like Shakespeare or, you know, plays, or things that people have really combed over, and they've analyzed a lot, and they found a lot of historical material about. And so I was always kind of doing literary history because of that. And in literary history, there's a fair amount of it that is actually storytelling. It's just usually you're telling the story of what happened in a book or what happened to create the circumstances for a book to come into being. So I would say that I I didn't have to sort of unlearn a kind of high theoretical register which a lot of literary critics have, because they're talking about incredibly complex ideas, a lot of which go completely over my head, like phenomenology and epistemology and get all these things. So I didn't, I didn't have the temptation to sort of sink into any of those registers, mostly because I I had to do it when I was in grad school for certain classes. But in my published work, I really hadn't gone down that path, but I would say what I unlearned were long sentences. That's I would say that the long sentences with multiple clauses is something that I really wanted to make sure that if there are long sentences, because they need to be long.
Kate Carpenter 14:35
To see some of those sentences in action, I asked Marlene to read an excerpt of her new book. Here's Dr. Marlene Daut reading from chapter three of The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe.
Marlene Daut 14:47
If, as our eyewitnesses have it, Christophe still lived on Rue Espanol and worked at the Cap Haitian Hotel the year before the Haitian Revolution began in 1791, he might have, on the afternoon of July 11, 1790, witnessed something to rival Saint-Domingue's many works of theater. A few weeks prior Hibert, a long standing resident and saddle and carriage maker, announced his plan to hold a lottery at the hotel for a superb car in the form of a stagecoach mounted on two wheels and four springs, very soft and light. The bottom of the carriage was cherry colored. The train was painted green with harnesses for five horses, enriched with a quantity of ornaments as well as buckles and bits of the bridles and boots for the coachman, all fur gilded. At Hibert's residence, located in the Courant Hotel, those seeking to acquire the elaborate carriage could purchase one of 90 lottery tickets for one Portuguese a piece. Hibert estimated the worth of the carriage at approximately 6000 colonial livre. The public would be notified of the winner in about 15 days, once the lottery was complete. Years later as king, Christophe deeply admired the kind of luxurious carriage that he might have first witnessed being offered to the lucky winner of Hibert's lottery. In July 1815 the American press reported that the king of Haiti had a state carriage made in London, the likes of which had never been seen, having been constructed specifically for use in Haiti. The shape being entirely novel, with the front projecting outward for the purpose of shade, which is exceedingly pleasing to the eye. The lining was of the richest velvet, embroidered with the Star of the Order of St Henry, while the draperies fringed with gold of immense richness, the seat and fore part resembling the lion's standard are solidly gilt, the description continued. The braces and every ornament correspond with equal grandeur. All told, Christophe had 22 other such elaborate carriages made for the royal family and other members of his nobility. Carriages and lavish dinners dangled before his eyes, but just out of reach, must have nourished some ambition in Christophe's adolescent soul at the hotel. Christophe would have been surrounded by opportunities and fineries which he and the colony's enslaved population could only dream. By 1790, Rue Espanol remained Cap's busiest and most expensive avenue. Previously home to a nunnery and dentists and goldsmiths, there was by then a dye factory and a veterinary school, as well as several boarding schools, including ones specifically for girls. Yet these schools were for little white children, not girls of color born into free black families like Christophe's future wife, Marie Louise.
Kate Carpenter 17:47
Talk to me about what went into writing this passage.
Marlene Daut 17:49
Yeah, you know Saint-Domingue's most prominent newspaper in the 18th century during the French colonial period, was called the Affiche Americain, and these papers have been digitized. They're available pretty much in almost complete print runs. And I was looking for Christophe, mentions of him, given his trajectory as someone who fought in the Battle of Savannah or participated there, who worked at this very prominent hotel. I'm thinking maybe, on the off chance there could be a mention of him, I'm going to go through, comb through, every issue. And when I did, the world that came to life for me was a world that I hadn't thought much about. To me, Saint-Domingue is a slave colony. It's the cruelest slave colony in the Atlantic world, and the papers bear that out. There are multiple fugitive slave notices in every single issue. There are, you know, horrors described being committed upon people who are returned to slavery, the branding. And alongside that is this other world of opulence and wealth and leisure for the enslavers, for planters, for visitors. And so someone who would be working at this hotel, which I found so many descriptions of, would see all of that. But if they're enslaved, or they're they don't have free status at that moment. What is their life like in relationship to this opulence of wealth, which is quite different to be in capital, say, which is basically the capital, the wealth, capital of the colony and of the Caribbean, in many ways, to witness all of this. And I say, does it create yearnings? Do you think I want that? Are you disgusted by all the wealth? What goes through a person's mind? So I tried to imagine, from Christophe's trajectory later, it seems that he was in awe of this world, and he admired it.
Kate Carpenter 19:44
As you've sort of mentioned here. And as we can see a little bit in this text, one of the biggest challenges in this book, is just how hard it is to parse out some of these details. There are limited sources, there are conflicting sources, as you mentioned earlier. They are all written or spoken with lots of goals in mind, and I love that in this book, instead of sort of hiding that uncertainty or just burying it in the footnotes, you really make it central to the text. You kind of walk readers through how you look at this evidence and how you analyze it. Why did you choose that approach? And was that challenging? It seems challenging.
Marlene Daut 20:20
It was definitely a challenge. And the reason I chose that approach was when you're dealing with somebody whose life has been caricatured, demonized, romanticized, right, made larger than life, or discounted, written off as a tyrant, a despot. I talk about in the book, there was an article from the 20th century that called Christophe black Hitler. So I felt that I could not just take all the conflicting accounts and decide which one was the correct one, and that even when I had an abundance of evidence showing this or that scenario to be more likely or even to be the true scenario, as far as truths go, I should say I felt that I needed to tell the reader that there were those conflicting accounts, because otherwise that would leave the door open for someone who encounters a different story, the dominant story of his life, to say, No, you're wrong. There's another story. So in telling the reader why this story is maybe not necessarily the most judicious or the one that we should rely on. What I was able to do was, I hope, convince the reader to come along with me and to trust that I didn't have the kinds of ideological sort of goals as many of the people who've written about him in the past, which is not to say, don't have a subjectivity or a point of view, but in approaching it as an investigation, I obviously have preconceived notions, but I'm willing to change I'm willing to change the verdict. I'm really willing to change the conclusion based on what I find. And I'm also willing to admit when I haven't gotten it right in the past and when others haven't gotten it right in the past. And so that was really what informed it. I was I was really highly influenced by investigative journalism, by the questioning. I love the way that investigative journalists pull their readers along, even when they already know the outcome at the beginning, but they set it up for you so that you can accept the outcome. And I think this is especially true when there's a foregone conclusion with people think they know all about someone, and this is the case with Christophe, a lot of people think they know exactly who this person was. And so I wanted to start out in the beginning and say, but what if we don't know this person? What if we don't know this person? Because there's been so much writing, which is actually the opposite problem that I think a lot of people have when writing the history of enslaved person. They don't have a lot of sources. I had time periods in which there were less sources, but I actually had voluminous writings to consult for his life in the post independence period leading into the modern.
Kate Carpenter 22:53
I was curious as I was reading, it seems almost like you're having to communicate in two registers. One is to readers who maybe don't really know anything about Christophe and and are new to this story. But another is to people who either already know quite a lot, or perhaps consider themselves experts. Have already written. And you're sort of saying like this is why my interpretation is, I believe it to be as close to true as I can figure. Was it hard to balance those parts of your argument?
Marlene Daut 23:21
I'm glad you noticed that, because I think that's really true. Is that on the one hand I'm talking to people who might not be able to pick out Haiti on a map, they've never heard of this history, and so I have to invite them in to not just the story by giving them enough background and context, but why they would want to learn this history, why they want to learn about this life, why they want to go on this long journey. I say I have to convince them to come on this long journey, because it's not a short book. But at the same time, I have experts who, again, also might think they really know the story. They may have written about the Haitian Revolution. And so I felt that in talking about it as we're following the life of Christophe through that. This could help even those who feel like they know the story already to say, but do you know the story as it involves Christophe? Because a lot of the sort of new reveals involved what he was specifically doing at various moments during this momentous kind of world changing revolution, and it's been great to see experts say, you know, I, I, you know, I didn't know this because I was not following his story. They're either following the vast movement of the revolution or a figure like Toussaint Louverture, who is widely written about. And I always say, I would never say, we don't need more Toussaint biographies. That we don't need more writing about Toussaint Louverture. We need more writing about all of the people who experienced the revolution, including women like Christophe's wife Marie Louise, but also those women who were not attached to or whose stories and names we don't know because they weren't married to someone who became famous and became a world leader, that we just need more of it all. And so that's also what I wanted to demonstrate here. It's not about less of that and more of this. It's about telling the more capacious story. And that might start by following various lives. If we've talked a lot about the revolution as a story and a phenomenon in recent years, let us start to follow the lives of the various people who were part of it.
Kate Carpenter 25:23
How did you think about narrative structure as you were crafting this project?
Marlene Daut 25:27
Yes, so that was another kind of moment where I had to think about, well, do I want to tell the story in a pure chronological fashion, where it's just, it's definitely a cradle to grave biography. But I tell the reader, we have to go forward and backwards in time. And the reason I wanted to do this was I realized that, especially when I had started cutting stuff out again, putting into my stuff, cut folder, that, oh, you know, I need to tell the reader this the first time this person comes up, which their story isn't going to be important later. But there's so many names in the book I need them to remember that this person will be important later. And so this happens a lot early on, when, for example, I'm talking about the king and the queen, their families, and otherwise it's just, I'm giving you the name, and it would have been 100 or 200 pages before, and then now we see that person. And I didn't, I wanted to avoid a notion in which a reader felt that they had to go back, not just because they wanted clarification, but because they wait. Who was that again? And so by telling the reader also throughout, okay, we're going to jump in time, or we're going to go back in time, I felt like again, trying to pull the reader along to say, just like, which is what investigative journalists do. They often kind of give you snapshots and episodes as you go through different people's stories or tales or different moments, and to say, we're going to return to this person later. And so there's a few times I'll break the kind of third wall and say, remember this name? This is a person who's going to be very consequential later, and especially if I don't tell their full story, because the story's long, I wanted to tell the reader, here's a moment you could pay attention to. And I hope it's working, because I think so many of those side stories are really fascinating.
Kate Carpenter 27:16
What do you think the genre of biography offers to historians? I feel like there's sometimes a little maybe snobbishness about biography among academic historians that I think is is unfair, and maybe, maybe I'm being unfair. But what, what do you feel as a writer of history, biography offers you?
Marlene Daut 27:32
That is so interesting that you should say that. Because I think that that's true. I hope I don't know if we have the same we're going to the same angle. So you can tell me, but I do think that sometimes among academic historians, like biography is not serious or rigorous, maybe, and I think sometimes that perspective comes because sometimes in biography, there's a tendency to take a point of view and to follow that. And so sometimes the historians come along. And again, just what I was mentioning, they know that there's this other side to be it Martin Luther King, Jr, Frederick Douglass, or Dorothy Day. And so they'll notice that the biographer has taken a certain path and has gone down and is stay, staying on that path, because a lot of biographers are not producing a work of historiography at the same time. And so that's what I think. The challenge of this book is that I wanted it to do both things. I wanted to tell the story of Christophe's life, but it could also act as a work of historiography, because I didn't think we could tell it in a straightforward way. And I think what what biography offers, though, I don't know. I guess I started reading Plutarch's Lives as one does when one is a new biographer. And you know, in this yes, that famous line in the Marcus Aurelius biography about don't study events, study lives. And I tried to just sink into that. I've spent my career studying events, also lives and events and separately and sometimes together. So it's definitely not in the camp where it's one or the other. It's not a zero sum game, but it changes the story of the Haitian Revolution. And you know, the readers who've reached out to me already have said that following one person's life, it really does. It changes your conception of what happened, even as we recognize that it's not necessarily the truth with a capital T their experiences, but that and their how they shaped that history, as well the immense influence that Christophe had on the revolution in the independence period and then, of course, as king, but also the immense influence his death had in opening the door for the disastrous indemnity that Haiti had to pay France is the price of freedom.
You've also written quite a lot and quite beautifully for popular media outlets. How does that differ from your book writing process?
You know, it's interesting. I revise those a lot as well, a lot. I have the same kind of folder version, you know, this date little stars for those same things. That are on the same date. I'm a reviser. I am dreaming of those words. I'm in the shower thinking, of course, I have to hop out, run to the computer, write a note down. I've got sticky notes everywhere. I'm a runner, and I'm having epiphanies while I'll run, coming in, and nobody talk to me while I write this down. And that happens especially, it might even happen more so when I'm writing a short form piece, because I know that every sentence has got to land and hit home. And so if I think of a metaphor, or I think of an apt phrase, or I think of something that I needed to remember, to put in there, I want to do that. But that was also where I learned short sentences are better and again, not hitting the reader over the head at the beginning. Because I think when I write an op ed, it is different. You've got 750 words. Op eds usually have a very strong voice. They've got a very strong argument, and it's get it and get out. But I really like the longer form, narrative essays, either personal essays or political essays, and there, if someone's going to read for 3000 words, think like Atlantic style or New Yorker style pieces, you have to pull them along, because if you tell them everything, you lay out all your cards in the first paragraph, then what are we doing here? And most stories are actually usually a lot more complex than then you could just hit someone over the head and get them to believe you. And that is, again, I think, where my training as a literary critic did actually help in I had to learn how to tell strong arguments that keep their thread all the way through. And again, that's not to say historians and biographers have arguments, but the way that literary critics craft them is actually quite different in terms of just really laying out the evidence constantly and parsing it, parsing what people say, rather than just kind of footnoting it or linking to it. And I think those longer form essays have really enjoyed that, because they provide the space and for and to talk about more contemporary things, which sometimes we don't get to do when we're so we're so much in the past. We study the 18th and 19th centuries, in my case.
Kate Carpenter 32:03
Why is that, I mean, you've just touched on it, I guess. But why is that kind of writing important to you?
Marlene Daut 32:07
You reach a different audience and a larger audience. And I think, you know, being in academia, I grew up in an era of academia where a lot of public writing was frowned upon. If somebody was in The New York Times, it was like they should be ashamed of themselves, that they lowered their standards enough so that, like a fourth grader or something, whatever could read like people would say that, Oh, to write in the Times, you've got to write for a fourth grade audience, which is absolutely not true. Like anybody who actually reads the pages of these newspapers and magazines can see that some of them do have complex and long sentences. I remember reading Ta-Nehisi Coates and I thought, No way. Clint Smith, no way. This is not, these are not, they have not dumbed anything down for their readers. And that was inspiring to know that it is not that you are dumbing it down, it's that you are talking to people who are not experts. So if doctors speak together, they use one language. But when my doctor is explaining things to me, you know, he or she explains it in a language that I can understand, which isn't dumbing it down, I need to know what's going on, but it's me, but it's talking to me in a in a common language that we share, that can be complex, but that is necessary to transmit information. And so I have nothing against academic styles of writing, because just as the scientists use one register when they are meaning something to be an internal document that's shared among scientists, I think literary critics, historians of certain anthropologists, sociologists, all have that mode of writing, but when we want to reach out to the public to tell them why a phenomenon or historical event or person is interesting, we need to use that more common language, because that can change minds. That can change, when I'm dealing with a place like Haiti that has been so demonized, I don't want to just have internal conversations. I want to change the narrative in the wider world so that people understand Haiti is not a cursed land, it's not doomed, that its troubles have internal and external causes, and we should be reminded of that, so that we that we don't fall into the trap of the blame game, which is so much of what I see in public discourse.
For the last part of our conversation, I want to turn and talk a little bit about your own influences. Are there people that you turn to regularly for feedback on your writing?
Oh yes, absolutely. I would say, I mean, this is like the shout out portion, maybe. But Julia Gaffield, who is has a remarkable biography of Jean-Jacques Dessaline coming out with Yale University Press in June called I Have Avenged America. So I do want to say that it's remarkable. She is my sounding board when I have an idea of when I decided not to go too far into speculative history. But before that, what do you think about this thing? You know, and we're both kind of having these conversations and writing these biographies of people who've been demonized. I would also say Gregory Pierrot is one of my co authors. We edited a book called Haitian Revolutionary fFictions together, but we've have a long standing friendship. He's the person I turn to when I'm encountering 18th, early 19th century handwriting. And I am like, what is this? I'm showing my husband, who speaks French. I'm writing to people, and then I show it to him, and he says, oh, yeah, that's this word. I I am amazed by his brain. And so there are people like that. Laurent Dubois, Kaiama Glover, I'm very lucky to have people who will read my work. They'll read it generously. They will critique me. They'll say, I don't think you quite have it right, or this is too long. You need to cut out 50,000 words. Thank you, Laura Wagner and and I, I'm grateful for that, because I think even though I write alone, as I mentioned, I write in a solitary way, that is when I'm drafting the work. But when I seek feedback, I love feedback, and I especially loved feedback for The First and Last King of Haiti, because it's a trade book and it has all these internal readers to the press, who can say, is the story working? Is it moving along? But I wanted also people had the background to tell me, am I getting something not quite right? Is there, do I need more nuance here? And that was really, I relied on my colleagues and friends for that.
Kate Carpenter 36:29
You've mentioned some of them in terms of who you rely on, but what else do you read as inspiration for your own writing, or maybe even other forms of media you consume?
Marlene Daut 36:37
so I mentioned I was reading a lot of investigative history, investigative journalism. Rather, I read Ariel Sabar's Veritas. I'm going to get the subtitle wrong, but about the Harvard professor, the con man, and the gospel of Jesus's wife, I think, I mean, it's quite a read and great writing. I also read Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. But I really read widely. I read Elena Ferrante. I reread during the pandemic, all of Toni Morrison, half of James Baldwin. Then the pandemic ended and I had less time, but I wanted to reread works, or even in the case of James Baldwin, read some of them for the first time, because it wasn't really introduced to him, other than on my own in my undergraduate education, sadly, but I took inspiration from their storytelling skills, from the way that they created suspense and wonder and anticipation. But I also read a lot of books by my colleagues. I read history books widely. I read Sudhir Azareesing's The Black Spartacus. I wanted to find out, how have others told this story. And then I returned to classics like CLR James, The Black Jacobins, which I can see now in terms of my writing on Christophe, that, you know, it's not the best source for it, but what a great storyteller CLR James is. George Lamming, Aime Cesaire, like I wanted the fire, too, the fire that some of them have. And I continue to just read widely. I'm reading a book about Lord Byron. I'm just trying to soak up and absorb what, you know, the immense amount of books that are published every year and the amount of information that they have to transmit to us, because I want I'm a student above all, and I'm constantly wanting to learn about things that have nothing to do with the topics that I write about, like Marcus Aurelius, but also, what a fascinating history, let me tell you.
Kate Carpenter 38:33
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Speaker 1 38:36
Deborah Jenson, when I was writing my first book, she told me, you have to find something that the historians missed because they didn't think it was important. And I think it's just not necessarily specific to historians, that I was writing a literary history at the time, but, right, other writers missed, and that was so influential in the Christophe biography, because I approached it as an investigation. I was in a metaphorical interrogation with all the writers who came before, many of whom I call Christophe chroniclers. And I was in an interrogation with the things that were supposedly facts about his life. So by not taking anything for granted, his place of birth, his year of birth, who his parents were, when and how he got married, and under what circumstances when he first began to participate in the freedom struggle that became the Haitian Revolution, that I was able to uncover different information. I went to different sources. I used many sources in this book that don't appear in any other printed account as I as far as I'm aware, there are names in this book that don't appear in any other printed account of the Haitian Revolution, past or present, as far as I can tell. And that was because I approached this as Do you want to find out what happened to a certain extent from a certain perspective, or do you want to just tell a story that people can feel like they know his life, right? Because you think about the way that investigative journalism operates, it's not just I'm telling the story. It's like, do I actually want to know and understand what happened? Is really more so the goal and so it's and it began with trying to find something that others may have come across. I never use the word discovery. I have these doc, these boxes have been worked over by historians from the early independence period till now, the ones held in French archives, for example. And people may have come across it, but it wasn't the name they were used to associating with the Haitian Revolution or so maybe they missed it. That's sort of what I think about, about that it's not a discovery. It's simply bringing to light something others may have missed, and showing what's important.
Kate Carpenter 40:45
I love that. Well before I let you go. This is a deeply unfair question whenever someone has just published a new book, let alone when they have published two new books in two years. But is there anything new you're working on that you're up for talking about?
Marlene Daut 40:59
Oh my goodness. So I would always I get, yeah, I get trepidation. I feel trepidation, but, but I have a couple of creative things. One is an exhibit of artwork related to the kingdom of Haiti from the 19th century to the present. And then the other one is, I just decided that instead of lamenting that there's no big productions of the Haitian Revolution, or Christophe's life, in particular, on stage today, on the screen, that I'm going to try my hand at writing a screenplay. So that's what I've been doing. I've been trying to, I've been taking screenwriting classes again, forever a student, and I've been working with my instructor on the best way to tell this story from a historical fiction standpoint, it's not a documentary, to bring the story of the Haitian Revolution and Christophe's kingdom to a wider audience.
Kate Carpenter 41:50
Oh my gosh. I love this. That's the best answer anyone's ever given.
Marlene Daut 41:55
I don't have another book right now I'm working on, but I am, I am working on that.
Kate Carpenter 41:59
That's fantastic. I can't wait to follow how that goes, and I hope, at the very least that it is wonderfully enjoyable to work on and to explore. Dr. Marlene Daut, thank you so much for joining me on drafting the past and talking about writing with me.
Marlene Daut 42:14
Thank you so much for having me. This was true, a true pleasure.
Kate Carpenter 42:17
Thanks again to Marlene, and thanks to all of you for listening. Be sure to sign up for the podcast newsletter at draftingthepast.com to stay caught up on new episodes. And while you're there, check out show notes, links to everything we talked about in this episode and ways to support the show. Until next time friends don't let friends write boring history.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
