Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934-1957

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0:00Intro Yonjou, lwa ginen yop tounen, yopi ni, ni tie peyi ya, mette diab yode yo, ou pep vanyan, kapab rebati la Kaye. Se mesaj sa ak te genan chante yo, se mesaj sa ak te genan kout tambou yo, se mesaj sa ki fe tambou pa chom, si Sponbat. Se mesaj sa ak te genan koutou, se mesaj sa ak te genan koutou, se mesaj sa ak te genan koutou.

0:36Patrick Jean-Baptiste Professor Matthew Smith, tak koutou, brother. Moula, moula. Kouma tout mounyeh? Good, good. Moula, moula, moula, moula. Moula, moula. The title of your book is Red and Black in Haiti, Radicalism, Conflict and Political Change, 1934-57. What were some of the gaps in the scholarship at the time that compelled you to write this book?

1:03Matthew Smith Sure. First of all, I want to just say, Patrick, it's a great pleasure to be able to talk to you. I've admired the work that you've been doing on the podcast with Neg Moula. I've listened to a few of them, and they've been really exciting. And it's a great service to all people who are interested in Haitian history, which includes, of course, to Tahitian, but also everybody who is interested beyond Haiti and the Caribbean with all the sorts of excellent work that people have been doing on Haiti. And it's a pleasure to be able to speak with you, but also an honor to be among a group of scholars whose work I respect a lot, to be in the Neg Moula hot seat, as it were. So this is very exciting. Yes, my book, Red and Black in Haiti, really developed out of work that I had done as a PhD when I was a student many years ago at University of Florida. And that was when curiosity that I had for a very long time around the history of Haiti and how integral that history has been to the shaping of the history of the rest of the Caribbean. Being from Jamaica, of course, Haiti figures very large in my concept of who we are as Caribbean people. And I sort of pursued that interest into looking at an aspect of Haitian history that I had read about generally, but for which there had not been enough detailed information. So as I deepened my knowledge as much as I could on Haitian history and got all the great books, and sometimes not so great books, but a lot of the books that covered this broad and dramatic and moving history of Haiti, I found that the years after the occupation of the U.S., straight up to this sort of eve of the Duvalier dictatorship, had not really been given the sort of due attention that I felt it deserved. And as often happens, I think, with many people who have intellectual curiosities, when you discover something that's not there, you feel moved to try and actually fill in that gap and to look at it closely. And for me, it was two things. It was one, trying to understand where Haiti was at that time. What did it mean to come out of the U.S. occupation, which, while formerly an occupation in many respects, also reflected something very much like colonialism. And that's something we all in the Caribbean understand very well, and the legacies of colonialism. And so what did it mean to be independent and to be then going through this process of foreign presence and control in many respects of your sovereignty? And then to start to chart a path for how the country could look coming out of that. And it wasn't just a path that was created anew in the 30s into the 40s, but it was also it was a path that was very much linked to Haiti's long history going all the way back to 1804. And that's really what was a huge motivation for me to do that. And in the work, I discovered, this is the second point, that Haiti was in many respects, intellectually, culturally, artistically, in terms of also political movements, way ahead of the rest of the Caribbean at that point, certainly in terms of the way in which questions around Black identity, Black consciousness, and so on, figuring into a very national ethos on what being Haitian meant and what a future for Haiti could mean. So all of those things really motivate me to really plunge deep into the study of that period.

4:29Patrick Jean-Baptiste Yeah, and we'll certainly get deeper into some of those ideologies a little bit later. Now, in the acknowledgement, yes, audience, I read the acknowledgement too when I read books. In the acknowledgement, you wrote about challenging discussion you had with colleagues that helped you sharpen your arguments for this book. One, what were some of the pushbacks or kind of arguments you faced? Also, did those arguments reflect the arguments that were going on with the Haitian radicals in the period you cover, which we'll get into a little bit later?

5:03Matthew Smith Yeah, sure. Some of them were, I wouldn't say pushback per se. I would say, when I say sharpening and the challenging questions, is really some colleagues and particularly Haitian historians, a couple of generations ahead of me who are tremendously respected, were really forcing me to look at Haitian society completely, to not just see and examine the radicals and their ideas in relation to the state, but to see it as the ideas as a response to what was happening in Haiti at the time, to really look very closely beneath the veneer of state functioning or how particularly we as academics or historians are often trained to look at societies, that there are certain groups of vested interests and each one has its own way of arguing and developing its agenda. It was really a challenge to look beyond that and to realize that here is a society that's like from the society and from Jamaica, that's complicated and that people may not always advocate what you think they advocate. And there's something in that that you need to look at and account for. And in particular, it was the great Haitian historian, Michel Hector, who I had the privilege of meeting several times. And early in the research, I met in Port Prince, and we had a really deep conversation about the history of the labor movement in Haiti, very deep. And again, I had come to him with certain presumptions based on the documents I was reading about affiliations and explanations for positions taken. And he was the one who really pushed me to not look so closely at that, but to think more on a level that understood society and where society was at that time. And that kind of challenge, that kind of push, something I took with that work, but also something that I take with me through all the work that I do to really make sure that, to quote the great Guyanese historian Elsa Govairo, that you see the society whole. That has to be the task that you might be looking at political elites, but those political elites are operating in a society that is largely non-elite and a society in which demands were being made from people and sources and areas quite different from their own. And that has to be taken into context. So that's really what I meant.

7:22Patrick Jean-Baptiste Okay. What's the significance of the colors red and black from the title of your book?

7:30Matthew Smith Yes, that's an important one. I spent a lot of time closely thinking about the right title for the book, and that one really struck me as the most appropriate one with several that I'd come up with. Red and black has multiple meanings. Of course, red and black as colors have a significance in voodoo. There's also red and black having a significance in a game that had been played in Haiti going all the way back to the 19th century, if not before, where two die are rolled, a red die and a black die. And the numbers, when they appear, they're sort of like a game of chance, right? People would roll the red and black die. Red and black quite literally could also refer to red being the communists and black being the noirists and the black consciousness side of the political debate that was raging in Haiti in the 40s and 50s. So you get that as well. And very importantly, by calling the book red and black and not black and red, which always still irks me when sometimes when people refer to the book incorrectly as black and red in Haiti, because that's more a reference to do valiorism. And this book is not about that. It's about red and black, which is a very different proposition altogether. So all those multiple levels of meaning are in there. And I felt that title spoke to the fact that what on one side on the surface could mean something else quite differently, depending on how you look at it, very prismatic. And as simple as the title is, it actually evokes many more multiple meanings that are very much part of Haitian history and life.

9:06Patrick Jean-Baptiste On a scale of 0 to 10, 10 being David Nicole's conclusion and his book, Dessalines to Duvalier, where you write that he argues color divisions supersede virtually all other issues. Where would you put colorism on that 0 to 10 scale? Also, touch on issues you have with Nicole's conclusion regarding the role of colorism.

9:31Matthew Smith Yeah, the answer to the 0 to 10 one is really going to depend on which period in Haitian history you're looking at. But if we were to look at it broadly for the sake of discussion, I would say that you may find it somewhere around 6 or 7. These things are always artificial anyway. But they meant a lot at questions of color, meant a tremendous amount in the period covered in that book, quite certainly, definitely, and have meant a lot in social world, in the social world of Haiti. Always, right? That emerges quite strongly. However, color, not only in Haiti, but across the Caribbean, is a very tricky thing to get a hold of because it has a way as a sort of way of reading into activities of people in a society or even explaining a society. You can see things too dramatically divided along color lines that don't account for the multiple other factors in which allegiances are formed, decisions made, and so forth, that have other elements other than color as deciding factors. This was a big debate of the 1940s, right? Are we looking at questions of class or are we looking at questions of color? And often that debate took place, interestingly, among people who were of a social class that was what we could classify as elite professionals, right? Black middle class and people above that station in Haitian society. So it's looking at it from one vantage point to suit a certain political need at a certain period in time. And again, this is something that if one were to peel behind the layers of many Caribbean and Latin American societies, you'd see the same operations going on there. How color is used and misused to achieve certain ends. Now, of course, this doesn't mean that color doesn't serve a function of separation. It does. And that function of separation that it serves often is outcome of a situation in which people who seek to have control over other people use color as much as they use education, language, appearance, economic access, those sorts of things, to be able to justify and legitimate their social rule or superiority over others. And color figures into that. How I differ from Nichols is that I see those complications much more strongly in my mind. And my job, really, as a historian of the Caribbean is to account for those complications. What does it mean when somebody who you may think, because of their color, because of their, even their political rhetoric, should be on one side or making a certain position and you see them do something else? You have to analyze why they do that something else. And what does that tell us about the sort of fluid way in which these structures and these sorts of ways of looking at a society blur in certain regards?

12:39Patrick Jean-Baptiste Okay. So let's dive into post-occupation Haiti for a minute. It's 1934. I think we're about four years into Stenor Vincent. I think 11 years. I think he wrote from 1930 to 41, if I recall correctly. Right. So 11 years of administration. The U.S. empire just left Haiti, physically anyway. So pick it up from there. What's going on in the country? Is it ideologically and politically in a kind of transitory state? Who did it make it to the country? Say, up to 36. We'll do 1937 after. What's percolating in the country?

13:18Matthew Smith Lots of changes, lots of expectations, lots of a sense of hope and possibility that the ending of the U.S. occupation, which is treated almost as if a new post-colonial phase, is embraced as a moment in which the eras of the past that had created the situation for occupation in July 1915 had been outgrown. On one side, there were elites who believed that there were institutions now in place left by the Americans, but not just the Americans, but just by the circumstances of occupation. By that, the outpouring of a sort of intellectually led resistance against foreign domination, which had sharpened the national consciousness in Haiti going into the 1930s. That could mature and evolve. And that energy, which was often a youthful energy in many respects, could be translated into a new way of life, a new way of governance for Haiti. So that was a big part of what was happening in 1934. Interestingly, in subsequent research I did after I published Red and Black in Haiti, I discovered a lot of pan-Caribbean newspaper articles that were equally celebratory of the ending of the U.S. occupation as Haitians were. This was a moment for that reclaiming of the ideas and ideals of 1804, which were shared by people across the Caribbean. That could happen in 1934. At the same time, and this is where my book starts, at the same time there were divisions around how the future of Haiti should take shape and what it should look like. And those divisions operated on a spectrum that ranged from a sort of status quo continuity of how social and political relationships had been arranged, especially from the period after 1920 coming down, when there was so much institutionalization during the occupation of systems that promoted a light-skinned elite. Rulers, political administration with vested powers and interests and not supported a Black middle class that was rising. And so that tension was there, and that tension was manifest in the sorts of political activities that I described in the book. The formation of a communist party, the formation, the early sort of formation of a sort of Nor'ist idea or group of ideas. This had always existed in Haiti going back to the 19th century, but there's a different way in which that was being posed in the 1930s, in which the possibility of a Black middle class, intellectually-driven control of the state could actually benefit the majority of people in Haiti. And that was a lot of what was happening with the work of the ethnographers at the time, ethnologists, and that sort of work.

16:22Patrick Jean-Baptiste What is the definition of noirism in the Haitian context?

16:27Matthew Smith Yeah. Again, just like some of the stuff we said earlier, that's going to vary based on time. Noirism in 1956 looks different from Noirism in 1936. But in the period that we're looking at here in the 30s, it was essentially an idea that looked at questions of color as fundamental, or in fact, reawakened these questions, because these were questions that had always been there, as fundamental to the future prospects of the country. So that means the ruling of the country by a group of people who were more closely associated with the Black majority of Haitians was read as being more beneficial to positive outcomes for Haiti. That's a significant point. And it's worth mentioning very quickly too, Patrick, that so many places in the Caribbean at that point in time, particularly the English-speaking Caribbean here, were still colonized by Britain. And so the idea of a Black rule, a rule of a Black middle class that speaks on behalf of the majority population, was seen as quite revolutionary at the time, for, if you're looking at it from another part of the Caribbean, that's still under colonial power in which the concept and even the imagination of a dark-skinned person ruling the country was still far off. This is why when Paul Maguire came to Jamaica in the mid-50s, I met people when I was doing research for that book, Red and Black in Haiti, in Jamaica, who remembered vividly how proud they were when Maguire came to visit, that there was a Black man who was running a country. They'd never seen that before. They'd never thought that was possible before. So all of this was happening within a space of intensifying political conflict. And a lot of that conflict, if I could find one reason for it, it was which idea would guide and shape Haiti going into the 1940s. And that was the root of a lot of it. And that becomes more intensified as we get into the 40s.

18:41Patrick Jean-Baptiste So I just want to get some of the isms out of the way, so the audience can get the context as we talk broadly later. What is Haitian ingenism?

18:53Matthew Smith Cultural movements that dominates in the 1920s, that look very closely at questions of Haitian life, folklore, culture, religion, as being fundamental to Haitian identity in a way that had never really been explored before. So Creole, voodoo, folk tales, all of those things, which had often been seen as anachronistic holdovers, were now celebrated as fundamental aspects of Haitian society and identity. And the best example of that is the great work of Jean-Pierre Smas, who really is a foundation figure for Caribbean thinking about culture. And here, I'm not even saying Haitian, I'm saying Caribbean. That's how profoundly I hold Price-Mas and his work. It was tremendous what he did and what he wrote about. And decades later, people would be picking up on things he said and not even knowing that what they're doing he had said before. So indigenism really comes out of that movement. It wasn't him alone. There are many others as well. But he becomes a sort of central figure in that regard.

20:02Patrick Jean-Baptiste Another is the Negritude movement. How does it differ from the other, from Noorism, for example?

20:11Matthew Smith It differs quite markedly from Noorism, but it's much more closely related to indigenism. Negritude is a cultural movement. And it actually emerges more broadly outside of Haiti, principally among three leading figures in French-Piribian, Césaire, Senghor, and gosh, I'm forgetting the other person's name. Forgive me on that. That's fine. But that starts actually in Paris when there are students in Paris and they're looking at the elements of Black culture that are being absorbed and embraced and looking at Negritude in the arts, in the music, in all of these various ways very positively and reflecting that positive aspect to it. Up to the period of World War I, and this is a very general statement, but I think it is worth noting, the idea of Africa and African-derived culture as being worth embracing and valuing was really not conceived of at all by many people, including people in the African diaspora, because the view was that European civilization was a defining civilization of the world and all to demonstrate your capacity to achieve as Black people. You had to get closer to that. World War I showed just how violent this European civilization was. The news of the war, when that came back to us in the Caribbean, shocked people. Here we had been taught that the French and the British and the Spanish had all been these great civilized people who were bringing to us the bounty and gift of their civilization to save us from ourselves, but they're killing themselves in trench warfare. Marcus Garvey once said of his generation, we are the generation made by the Great War, and by that he meant we are the generation who are awakened by the reality of what European civilization has done to itself and what it really is. And that emboldened this new search for Black identity that was very much driven and found in aspects of African and African-derived culture in other parts of the world. And in Haiti, the indigenous movement was one strong aspect of that, and more broadly, negritude was another. Noirism is a strictly political idea. It takes elements from, in particular, indigenism, because the people who had started noirism, or who at least advocated it in its 1930s version, were inspired by the indigenous movement, but they saw it more as a political movement. And what they pushed was a political movement, but it was a political movement that absorbed cultural elements, but it was not a movement that was as purely cultural as the indigenous movement. And so for that reason, the cultural aspects were almost anti-responses in some aspects of noirism to give that sort of kinship and tie to the indigenous movement. But it was not the same. That's why Jean-Pierre Sommers would later state how upset he was when people linked him to Duvalier. He says, no, it's not the same. What I was writing about and advocating in the 20s and 30s was a cultural movement. It was about understanding a deeper, fundamental Haitian identity. It was not a justification for any political rule from one group to another.

23:39Patrick Jean-Baptiste You're quite fond of Caribbean music. So this question has to deal with something you write about, how the marine invasion brought two things to Haiti, one being American jazz and the radio. Can you talk a little bit about the group Jazz des Jeunes and their role at the time?

24:00Matthew Smith Jazz des Jeunes is... Let me tell you a story about Jazz des Jeunes, Patrick, because I'm smiling as I speak this, because you're right. Music to me is fundamental to everything. It's a huge source of inspiration in many ways for, I would say, everything I do. But I think this will tell you how important I think Jazz des Jeunes was at the time, but also how important Haitian music is, and if we want to understand Haiti. There was someone I was interviewing when I was doing that book, and I went to interview this person who was a member of the labor movement, MOP, in the 1940s, which had been led by Daniel Fignoli. And he was a bit skeptical to interview me. And every time, he was quite advanced in age at the time when we met in Port-au-Prince. And each question I posed in particular, he kept saying, he can't remember that, he can't remember that. Just because it's a painful memory for him to go back to that period, because it really meant going back through the Duvaliers, back to that earlier period. But also early period in which he was doing a lot of galvanizing on the ground with the urban workers. This was a person who was deeply involved with that. So I wanted to understand the functioning of the labor movement. How did it operate? I had got enough knowledge from my research on its ideas, its formation and so on, and how it was really guided so heavily by Fignoli. But I wanted to get that deeper sense of the day by day. What happened each day? Where did they meet in Port-au-Prince? Who organized the meet? Those sorts of details. I could get that sensibility for it. So each question I posed to him, he just kept giving me a sort of brick wall response. At a certain point, I felt that this was going nowhere. So I began to relax and start to talk to him more casually. And in that casual conversation, I started to say to him, let me switch tack. Let me just ask you, did you ever go to any Jazz de Jeanne shows? And he lit up. He lit up. And I told him about Jazz de Jeanne and how much I enjoyed their music and how that album, Saturday Night in Port-au-Prince, was one that I would always play. It's music, but it's so lively, so vibrant. He got so alive, Patrick, when I mentioned that to him. He got up. He went behind a sort of, he had a piece of furniture that I barely noticed when we sat down.

26:33Patrick Jean-Baptiste And then I saw it immediately when he got up and went towards it

26:36Matthew Smith and pulled out a record, a Jazz de Jeanne record he had. And he put it on the record player and he was playing it. And we just sat down there listening to the music. And then about halfway through the first side of the record, he then turned to me much more relaxed and said, all right, let me tell you how MOP operated. And he just went back straight into the whole history of the labor union, deep history. And that's how the code was broken through music. And that's how music lifted that relationship. And he and I became good friends after that. Every time I went to Haiti, I'd go look for him. He's no longer with us, unfortunately. And sometimes even if I never looked for him, he'd find out where I was and find somebody to bring him to me. Terrific guy. And all of that friendship that he and I had opened up because of Jazz de Jeanne. That idea that music, like other forms of culture, is this sort of glue, this sort of way of you finding a narrative for what you're going through that often we can't find a word for, but musicians do. And it's not even words. It's sounds. It's screams. It's wails. It's those things that they find a way of expressing the sentiment of a larger group of people so powerfully. And even if it is sometimes light, and it can be very light, and it can be about dance, but even if it is about that, there's something in that is also what we're feeling. Joy, sadness, anger, all of those things. And it can be expressed in the music. So for this person, deeply involved in organizing labor unions and meetings and so on, that music defined so much for him, more than any sort of quote I could give him from any book or newspaper I'd been reading.

28:23Patrick Jean-Baptiste What was his name? I'd rather not say, if you don't mind. Okay.

28:27Matthew Smith Yeah. But those listeners and readers who would look at my book very closely might be able to figure it out, read between the lines

28:35Patrick Jean-Baptiste and some of what I've written.

28:36Matthew Smith Okay.

28:37Patrick Jean-Baptiste So technology, radio, what did it do for the radicals and their ideas?

28:42Matthew Smith For the radicals and for all Haitians, it was a way of connecting more broadly, right? Radio really comes on stream during this period covered in the book. And so there's a way in which that connection, communal gathering around a radio and hearing a broadcast was absolutely critical and crucial. And this figured most importantly, I would argue, for the labor movement of MOP on the charismatic Daniel. He only had this incredible presence. He was just tremendously magnetic. And everybody I interviewed, all the things that I found and people from that generation will tell you that there were really, there are few people in 20th century Haitian politics who could compare to Daniel Fignoli. and Fignoli being able to present that in a certain way in Creole, on radio, with captive heirs, and also finding a way to translate terms that were used in the street and applying them in new political contexts. And even in his talk, creating new terms that then become reapplied in the street shows you that sort of communion he had. And that communion was heavily facilitated through radio. So radio was absolutely crucial for that. There were debates on the radio. There were, by the time we get to the presidential campaign of 1957, some of the contenders for that, for the presidential campaign would have on-air radio debates. So this was a major development at the time. And even music broadcasts coming on the radio. Under his presidency, Magua would have these concerts at the palace that would be broadcast over the radio and people would get to hear them. It's just a powerful tool for sort of not only communicating ideas, but also giving this sense of community in itself, radio.

30:40Patrick Jean-Baptiste And that's what, is that, you think, how the Black intellectuals found a way also to connect with the peasantry or with the popular masses to connect their ideas? Because now they could, people could hear them in the remote parts of Haiti, who perhaps don't come from the same classes as...

31:00Matthew Smith Yeah, it was one way. Yeah, but as we will know and have to note, of course, that I'm from Jamaica, Patrick. So to me, Haiti is a big place. The first time I went to Haiti, I couldn't, I was surprised when people kept saying we're a little island. It's huge compared to where I'm from. But you have to know that in each area you go, whether you're in the north, southwest, or in the central part, or even near the border, that there are ways of doing things in each of these places. It's not homogenous. And it's often misinterpreted as somehow being this homogenous society, which is a gross insult, really, the diversity and complexity of Haiti. And so even though they might have been able to broadcast on the radio, they understood and they had to understand that that could mean nothing to somebody in San Luis de Nour, unless you had some sort of other way of connecting to them, or sharing me, unless you had a way to connect to them. You have to be able to go there and know that and create these networks, which is why some of them could not leave a certain location. Finneal is a great strength for all of what I've just said about him, which we can hold as very much not just part of his legend, but part of the reality. But it couldn't really go that much further outside of Port-au-Prince. Because there had to be other things that would make that connection. And one of them was the press as well, because a lot of these radical groups that I document in the book had their own radical organs, their own presses and journals. And they used that as another way in which they could connect to people. But of course, the reach of that beyond Port-au-Prince wasn't always very far. And then, of course, there are regional presses and regional experiences. And there were versions of Finneal in other parts of the island as well, right? So we do sometimes obscure these realities if we focus on the centralization of Port-au-Prince. But allowing for that, for those differences and those important reminders I've just suggested, radio achieved something that couldn't have been fully achieved before. By comparison, when Antoinette Fermé, another great Haitian intellectual, Caribbean intellectual beyond Haiti by far, so much so that there were people in other parts of the Caribbean who used to urge publishers in these places to translate Fermé's work so that more people could read it. When Fermé was running for president against Noralexis, Noralexis, who was a man of the North, who had strong, deep roots and connections in the North, could go to the North and parts of the North, further out than Cap-Acian, and basically say, and also the South, that he's a light-skinned man, don't vote for him, which is not true. But because the reach and awareness of somebody like Fermé in other parts of Haiti was limited, that could be used to their advantage. So radio begins to bridge some of that. It never entirely bridges it, but it does open up spaces through which political aspirants could be heard beyond Port-au-Prince and beyond the sorts of realms in which they normally congregate than move.

34:10Patrick Jean-Baptiste So beware of the Republic of Port-au-Prince trap.

34:14Matthew Smith Yes, definitely. Okay.

34:16Patrick Jean-Baptiste Let's move to 37, 38, the Slea Massacre. What happened there for some in the audience who may not know? And please discuss how Steno Vincent's administration, Steno Vincent and Trujillo, their interactions during this tragic period.

34:35Matthew Smith Yeah. What happened in 1937 was in the fall of 37, President Trujillo, the brutal dictator from the Dominican Republic, had issued order for the murder of hundreds, thousands of Haitians living on the border. And this was a very dark moment in the history of both countries and, again, the history of the Caribbean. And it was extreme violence that was motivated by racism. It was motivated by despotism. And it was motivated by a sort of power-hungry way of controlling, of seeking to control all realms of the Dominican Republic at the time, including that area on the border, which had always been, as it is today, as we know, a very fluid area that has this interchange of Haitians and Dominicans. But the massacre spoke to, the Parsley moment in 37, it spoke to that deeper underlying animosity between the two countries that occupy Hispaniola, taken to an ugly and brutal and horrific extreme by the president at the time, Trujillo. It's a very layered event. And without going too much into all of the layers beyond what I've said so far, because there are some very good historians that, for any listener out there, would do well to read the histories of this. American historians, Lauren Derby and Richard Turitz, have done tremendous work interviewing people back, I think, in the 80s and the 90s, who were survivors who had lived through that period, getting very vivid testimony of the operation that was carried out by Trujillo. What I'd like to say, though, is in response to your question, Patrick, was the way in which the Haitian state, as well as the Dominican state, responded to this massacre. Now, Trujillo, his motivations, as I said, were driven by a complex of things that fundamentally hinged, in my view, on this deep-seated racism towards Haitians. And Vincent, as the president of Haiti at the time, and Ile Lesko, future president of Haiti, but at the time Haitian minister to the Dominican Republic, took little action to deal with this issue on behalf of their country, and their countrymen and women. And a lot of the reason why was, in some senses, a fear of Trujillo at the time, because Trujillo being a staunch, despotic dictator, had also allied with various groups in Haiti, political groups of which Lesko and Vincent were connected. So there was this fear that there would be exposure there as well. So this political self-interest, one over national interest in the end, in how that horror was dealt with. And in my book, I go into some discussion of that, looking particularly at how 1937 became a moment of great detachment from the people who had bought into the rhetoric of second liberation that then sold. That 1934 was a moment of Haiti's second liberation, and he was a liberator, and all of that stuff. It was very clear that's not what was happening. with the news of what happened. And it also strengthened and solidified a movement against Vincent's rule that would eventually mature a few years later once we get into the 1940s.

38:26Patrick Jean-Baptiste I want to discuss, I want you to explain to us the two U.S. hemispheric policies, the Big Stick Initiative and Hoover's Good Neighbor policy. Why were those two policies important within the Haitian context and the Haitian radicals at the time?

38:45Matthew Smith Big Stick actually starts earlier, and that's associated with President Theodore Roosevelt. And the idea was the United States commercial expansion into the Americas. And when that happened, that if the countries that the United States wanted to go into were in any way opposed to it, that the United States could intervene when it so decided to, quote-unquote, correct them and make them see the light that was really emanating from U.S. foreign policy and not from national interests in the countries there. And so it's really, it's a term that derives from, quote, attributed to Roosevelt, that you must walk quietly but carry a big stick. Once the might of U.S. power was shown and demonstrated, people would eventually fall in line. And in some ways, that big stick policy consciousness has been a defining aspect of U.S. foreign policy for a very long time, long after Roosevelt's era, of course, and going well into our own century. Good Neighbor policy was meant to be a redress of that. It's most associated with the other Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, even though some of its initial framing had been instituted by Herbert Hoover. But after Franklin Roosevelt comes to the presidency in 1932 in the United States, he pushes through a foreign policy that's non-interventionist.

40:15Patrick Jean-Baptiste Around this time that you begin to see U.S. withdrawal

40:18Matthew Smith from some places, including Haiti. And the idea, of course, is not that marine or military withdrawal means an ending of U.S. influence, not at all. That U.S. influence continues and continues to shape invisibly, sometimes very visibly, how the United States sort of functions in its relations with its neighbors. But it meant that in terms of the actual boots-on-the-ground type of intervention, that the good neighbor policy was sold as antithesis of that, that the United States would seek through organizations like the OAS, Organization of American States, to be a mediating force, to offer diplomatic guidance, to assist where it can, but not to intervene in other countries. So that's essentially the two guiding concepts of big stick and good neighbor policy. Now, whether or not they were adhered to is another thing, because we have seen we need not go into the long history of U.S. intervention throughout the world. Now, as it affects Haiti and Haitian radicals, it's very clear to many Haitian radicals at the time after the occupation ended the good neighbor policy years that the United States' influence in the direction of Haitian politics remained absolutely strong and clear and apparent, very true and very obvious. And so that affects the way in which people, the confidence they have in state leadership as it was then, where they begin to realize that their state leaders, Vincent Lesko, were ultimately aligning themselves with United States prerogatives.

42:01Patrick Jean-Baptiste What ultimately caused Senor Vincent's demise while he couldn't get a third term? What were some of the causes for that?

42:11Matthew Smith That's a complicated one, but one of them is, if I was to simplify, there had been a sort of breakaway from Vincent in the Haitian army at the time. They weren't called the army yet, but it was the guard deity that became the army a few years later. And that discontent within the armed forces with Vincent was an important thing. There was a sergeant's revolt that had largely not succeeded, but it had demonstrated that he was losing favor from the armed section of the Haitian state. So that was important. The other thing is that we can't underestimate how he mishandled or the 1937 massacre by Trujillo, which also worked in losing his popularity. And then, another standing issue that we see in Haitian political history, that there are other people who wanted his position. There are other people who wanted to become president, who felt that their time had come and that Vincent shouldn't remain in power any longer. and that sort of tracking within the structure that had enabled his presidency, all of that is happening around the same time. And the United States as well begins to feel that if they continue to support their sovereign power, it could lead to a political unraveling in Haiti. That could also, by in turn, have negative consequences for their own interests in Haiti. Combined, all of these things led to the last phase of the Vincent years in 1941.

44:06Patrick Jean-Baptiste So, I think it'd be a good time now to move to Lisko, in 1941. You say that his era was critical for the development of radicalism in Haiti. In what sense? He's coming out of the war.

44:23Matthew Smith He so happened to have been president at the time in which the world was at war. And after the war ended, there was, again, a sort of new World War II, that is. There was a sense of a new kind of radical democracy. and that radical democracy, when mixed with the type of political consciousness that had been growing and widening among radical elites in Haiti from the 30s, created an opportunity for this coalescence of ideas, socialist ideas, communist Marxist ideas, which had previously been seen almost entirely as an elite people with privilege who could think, who could have the opportunity to think these ways and have that level of exposure to, say, French Marxism, which some of them did, that had now become option that young people at the university were now engaged with and discussing and became aware of. So that's happening at that point in time. That's sort of fueling this. And I should add, though, very quickly, that the Marxism that we're talking about in Haiti in this period is not the kind of Marxism that we'll see later on, even in Haiti, but in other parts of the world come Cuban Revolution. That's a different sort of Marxism. And there's a lot of good work that's been done by Haitian historians who have looked very closely at the question of how Marxism took shape in Haiti, including René de Peste, the writer, who was a teenager at the time. De Peste has written about his own upbringing and saying that a lot of their exposure to Marxism really came through a few books they were able to get through the French embassy. There was somebody in the French embassy who was named Escapesy at the moment who was sympathetic to these young writers and intellectuals and would give them books. And in some of those books it would be, some of them would be written by Marxists. So there's a way in which Marxism when it comes to the Caribbean and it's not unique again to Haiti, we see in other parts of the Caribbean if you look closer at the history of Marxism there, comes through these various channels that are not direct streams but then become interpreted. It becomes interpreted in relation to power structures in the places where they are. And that was what was happening in Haiti under the Lesko period. So Lesko was becoming, starting to look like Franco and Lesko was starting to look like power-hungry European rulers. And the alternative to that was a communal alternative that Marxism had promised. The sort of Marxism they were reading at the time. There was a developed Communist Party in the Hispanic Caribbean that was more entrenched and had a stronger sort of footing. And Cuba, of course, being extremely important in that regard. The history of the Cuban Communist Party is a big one. But there was also a Communist Party in the Dominican Republic, largely underground, a socialist party that didn't have a lot of prominence. But there were still networks there. So the Lesko years, and I think I mentioned in the book that he had a sort of misfortune of coming to power. So this is a man who really wanted power badly. And he comes to power when he finally gets it. He had maneuvered, negotiated, skillfully organized himself in terms of his career and in terms of his alliances so that he could become president. And it happened. And as it happened, there is this other force that's growing in Haiti, which I generally refer to as radicalism. That needs to be unpacked to look at what I mean by that. There's a noirist who are also sharpening through their experiences, their ideas, through their experiences in Haiti under Lesko, but also through their own personal experiences. Duvalier becomes a doctor. He spent some time in Michigan studying there. so they're maturing, they're being exposed, they're reading more widely, and all of this is being rolled into the way in which they're seeing Haitian society. And of course, it is in Lesko years that Daniel Finioli becomes emergent as a very important voice. And it's a sort of rapid emergence to Finioli, but it's very significant. To me, this is a really exciting period in Haitian history. Absolutely fascinating because you have, you have, on the one hand, people like Jacques Roumain, Max Oudicou, Max Sam, these very well-known, left-of-center, radical intellectuals who are, they're reading about poetry and art the same time they're reading Marx and Engels, and the same time they're reading about voodoo, and the same time they're trying to understand their country by going into the countryside and listening and looking and absorbing. Then you have Jean-Pierre Svas, the dean of so much of that sort of interest and intellectual thought, still very active, still writing tremendously about a lot of these issues. Then you have Duvalier and L'Origue Mauduny doing their work as well, which some of it is actually very interesting work, thick work, no doubt, in the sense that it's layered with so much ethnographic work that they're looking at, and some of it seems so overly scientific that it's difficult to fully understand, but it's still demonstrating a level of engagement with something, a level of reading, a level of trying to adapt science to understanding society. All of this is happening. Then you have Daniel Signoli in the middle of this, emerging as this charismatic, galvanizing leader. Duvalier and Denis published in 1945 their book, The Problem of Class Throughout the History of Haiti. In that book, they go through the whole of Haitian history, really trying to understand class, which is almost synonymous with color in the way they describe it, as an explanatory tool. The one thing that unites all of these various groups that are traced in that book is this commitment, sense that Haiti can be something else and they have the right idea to take it in this other direction. That is happening. Let's not forget, of course, that there is social elite that controls a lot of the social and economic power in the country that wants a place to stay exactly as it was and they don't want it to change. So there's bound to be all sorts of collisions in that sort of scenario.

51:02Patrick Jean-Baptiste And one of the pushbacks came from the Catholic Church and the urban bourgeoisie. Can you talk about the anti-superstition campaign?

51:10Matthew Smith Yeah, this was a campaign that was launched by the Church and was one of several, a series of different levels of success of campaigns to try and fight against voodoo, which was seen as retrograde and anti-modern and all of those things. But also, it was part of their own way of trying to dominate and, you know, assert control at a time when there was a fear of Protestant religions beginning to emerge and spread in Haiti. And so voodoo was attacked then as it had been attacked many times before and after, but in a very systematic way. That's why the anti-superstition campaign is important because of the systematic way in which voodoo was attacked. And this meant use of members of the Haitian military to go to voodoo temples and to destroy them, to burn the drums, to, in some cases, there are reports of beating of Uga, beating of people, all of that. It backfired eventually, and this happened under Lesko, and it backfired terribly because Lesko, I think, my view of Lesko is that Lesko tried to use the sorts of power strategies of politics that had gotten very far in his life up to the presidency, which is essentially satisfying one group while closing up to another. And that worked to get him in his diplomatic positions, his position in Washington, D.C., where he was Haitian foreign minister to the United States. And it didn't work to become president, but it couldn't work in the maelstrom of the 1940s when he was president. So by essentially giving a carte blanche to the Catholic Church, because I don't think Lesko supported what they were doing fundamentally. He felt that would be one way to continue to get the security of support from the Church, which was then a very important play in Haitian power politics. The same way he did something like that with the military, it didn't work. It's a very different scale of conflict that you're setting up when you do that at the presidential level. And that's what backfired on him. And so that continued to alienate people from him, as did the rubber planting thing, Shada, the Americans.

53:31Patrick Jean-Baptiste Yes. Yeah, please talk about that. Talk about Shada, please.

53:34Matthew Smith Very quickly, I'll just say that what happened there was that during World War II, supplies of rubber to the United States war efforts had been cut off because the Axis powers, that's Germany, Japan, Italy, had blockaded the routes coming from parts of Malaysia. So the United States needed to find an alternative supplier for the rubber that's used in boots, used in tanks, used in so much aspects of war fighting on the front line. They discovered that, they didn't really discover it, it was known actually, I think it had started all the way back with some French explorers in the early 20th century who had done some work in Haiti, but it was discussed that there was a type of rubber planting that could grow in Haiti, that could grow quickly in Haiti, that could supply the needs of the U.S. warfare forces and their war production. And so for that reason, they signed a deal with the Haitian, they approached the Haitian government, Leicester was all too happy to sign a deal with the United States, which gave them the opportunity to build these rubber plantations in Haiti. now it was sold to the Haitian people as an opportunity to develop agriculture. So rubber would be one agricultural industry of several. So that's why they call it Shada, society, Haitian American Society for Agricultural Development, would be the English translation. And so the plan was that the rubber would be the first of a series of agricultural enterprises that would be funded jointly by the Haitian government state with support from the United States to supply these markets that need this product. Lesko went behind this very vigorously. Now, one of the reasons I argue why Lesko did that was because Lesko wanted to continue to get the support to the United States, which was difficult in his coming to the presidency. And Lesko also wanted to fulfill a certain desire that his predecessor had as well, which is to be the modernizing Haitian president, the president who brings modernity to Haiti finally. But what in reality, and Lesko knew this too, this is why I said I don't think Lesko fully grasped the scale of what he was operating with in that period. But in reality, what Shada ends up doing is that it displaces thousands of Haitian peasants. So land that belonged to the peasants were conviscated to be turned over to rubber planting. It's a complicated system, and there are lots of documents on this, some of which I've recently been looking at that shows just how complicated it was, because it also seems to me that there were members, both Haitian and American, who were part of the project, who actually believed in the sort of fever of the war, that this could be a way of reviving the Haitian economy. So I don't think it was, it's interesting that it wasn't completely malevolent from the beginning, but it was selfish. It was meant in essence to fulfill a US market demand with little regard for the cost of that fulfillment on the Haitian peasantry. That's when it backfired. And worse still was that the first, I think it only lasted for about two years, but the first yields of the rubber that was planted, and this was I 41, 42 around then, were far less than projected. And so, again, just like the anti-superstition campaign, so many moves that Lesko was doing, it backfired against him. And while it's backfiring in 44, we get into the closing stage of World War II, and getting into that space that described earlier, in which young radical Haitians are becoming absolutely disenchanted with any form of rule that is self-serving, and Lesko's government looked extremely self-serving.

57:42Patrick Jean-Baptiste And all the corruptions, and so on, and so forth, yeah.

57:45Matthew Smith Yeah.

57:46Patrick Jean-Baptiste Yeah, so now he's gone, Estime, right? His supporters, they're the real hope for social reform, let's say, I think, late 46, or something like that. Can you talk about Estime and his supporters?

58:02Matthew Smith Yes, the USE is Estime, uh, one of the Haitian presidents of the 20th century that never really got his due, if you ask me. And this is not to say that he was faultless, I would never say that. In fact, in the book I go through a lot of Estime's faults. But Estime was very much a man of a period in which there was this sense of destiny and direction in Haiti, and he seemed to feel and feel that as a personal mission. And so you mentioned social reform. There was a part of Estime that believed that part of his personal mission, as much as a national mission, was to reform the society. And to do, he invested a lot of time and energy into thinking through possible directions for aspects of Haitian life and society that had never really been rooted in terms of opportunity. Take, for instance, the labor movement, right? The labor movement had always functioned in a sort of loose way. He actually began to develop a way through the state of organizing a labor movement in which Haitian workers, urban workers, could take seriously and have space to air grievances. Those are things that hadn't existed before. minimum wage issues, looking at questions of the census, for instance. Do you create a census to actually get a proper stare on what the society looked like, how many people were there, those sorts of things? These are all aspects of social reform. But again, he comes to power at a time in which the sort of atomizing groups around the radicals, that is, the groups that are have one view against another, hit each other, and then sparks fly. There's a lot of that happening in Estime's first year in power. So he creates this cabinet, which is like a coalition cabinet. He has Fignoli in there. He has people from the Noiris group who supported him. There are people who already started to break away from Fignoli. Duvalier is working with Fignoli, and then he breaks away from him. He has members of the light-skinned elite there. he tries to create what Abraham Lincoln once called a team of rivals, right? That's been said of Lincoln. These people are in opposition and say, look, can we bury the hatchet and use all our great ideas, all our tremendous energy to make Haiti a better place, and sit at the table and be part of the same government and come up with plans and solutions for the country? He tried that. It didn't work. The reason why it didn't work is that Fignoli had plans for education, somebody else had plans for tourism, somebody else had plans for economic development, all of those things. And all of that sort of collision, that sort of people hitting each other and sparking, was because there were so many heavy ideas and feelings and emotions around the direction of Haiti at that time that were there. And it was difficult for that to be smoothed out. At the same time, SMA was trying to find, this is my view of SMA on a personal level now, how do you get that balance between creating something new, right, a force for change in Haiti, but at the same time doing so in a political culture in which power and what it looked like had been predetermined and set by your predecessors. Because remember, this is a person, a man who had come up through the Haitian political system to reach where he was, right? And he had achieved a lot too because this is somebody who was born in Verret and he had moved from there into doing well in school and becoming a member of the cabinet on the Vensau, tore the line, played the game, did politics really well and then got to this point. So he was a statesman, but then he's a statesman who has to somehow find a way of breaking that political culture that had been part of his own creation, that had been a source of his creation as a politician. Also listening to the will of a very varied group of people who had their own ideas and their own energy and forces and aspirations for what Haiti could be. and he's doing that within a context in which the United States continues to tighten the screws of its control on Haiti, continues to tighten that through its control of the economy, through its diplomatic pressures on Haiti, all of those things. So he sees himself as a man of destiny with a mission. He sees and reads the tea leaves in terms of the cultural direction of the country at that time. This is the era of the labor movement. This is the era of an independent press. He sees all of that as important as the era of a black consciousness in Haiti where that sense, not just of color, but that sense of your identity as a Haitian being so fundamentally tied to your identity with Africa and to those elements of Africa that have shaped the Haitian nation-state and shaped the Haitian psyche and consciousness is being really understood and embraced very powerfully. Creole, all of these things become part and parcel of who you are. And he sees himself as that man who has that incredible privilege of leading the country in a new direction. But these are tremendous constraints all around him. A big constraint to and determining constraint on estimate is the role of the Haitian army. He names it the Haitian army. It switches from God to Haitian army on the estimate. and the Haitian army has within it people who, in the top brass, people have their own ideas of how power should look and be shaped in Haiti. And he's in friction with that. So the SMA years were very short. From August 1950 to, sorry, August 1946 to early 1950. Were very short years. And all of what I've just described was happening in those short years. He's been squeezed into our corner. And it's a difficult proposition for him to find his way out of. And in the end, that political culture factor of how politics had operated in Haiti won out. And that is what he creeds to. Let me stay in power longer. Let the concept of democracy be further delayed so that I can actually carry Haiti across the bridge to where it needs to go. And that terrifies people because once you want to stay in power longer, or you make any moves to demonstrate that you're going to stay in power longer, all of these various groups, even those who are saying that they're your friends. And SMA had a lot of people in his cabinet and in the Haitian government at the time who sympathize, wrote. You can read in the newspapers of the period how celebratory they were of him. But behind, when he did that, they started to sharpen their knives and form allegiances with groups that they wouldn't have before. When it's the Catholic Church, the army, Trujillo, whoever it was, the United States, to try and undermine him so that he could get out. And that was the ultimate undoing for SMA. So when he started to move towards a reliance on a popular force to keep him in power against the will and growing strength of his opposition, who were making this uneasy alliance, as I just said, with these other vested groups, that was when it was clear that SMA would be overthrown. So in some sense there's a bit of sadness in it because you feel that were the circumstances different, perhaps it might have been a way that some of those reformist policies that he had started within the first two years, some of which, to be fair, were abandoned in the last two years of his presidency, but some of them were started in the first two years. Might have grown into something, but I think it's an era that deserves more attention and study and teaching in trying to understand Haiti. I know

1:07:03Patrick Jean-Baptiste you don't go too deeply into Duvalier. Can you, so he comes in, under what circumstances and how did he use all the machinations that occurred and the estimate to come to power?

1:07:20Matthew Smith When Duvalier comes to power, six, seven years after Estime is overthrown, Duvalier comes in a completely different climate than Estime. 1956 is not 1946 by any stretch of the imagination, even though some of the players are the same and even though Duvalier keeps talking about himself as the fulfillment of the Estime dream. In fact, what happened when Lesko was overthrown in January 1946 was referred to as the revolution of 1946 and Duvalier used that term a lot in his political speeches. He was going to fulfill the ideals of that revolution. But again, context was so deeply chaotic in 1957. It was a very messy period in Haitian politics. The implosions that are described under the Estime period became explosive by the 1950s. groups that had somehow begun to enjoy some degree limited as it was, but some degree of movement and space found that movement and space closing quite rapidly. The Haitian army became even more forceful in maintaining the intentions and the commands of the state because the state leader at the time, the president, was an army man himself, General Paul Magroix. So having that access to the army meant the evening of the army as a threatening force, not necessarily as an active violent force, but as a force in which its threat was becoming very visible. The Haitian economy was doing poorly. Often we think about the 1950s as a period of prosperity, but that's just because we're projecting a very blurred and wrong, sometimes very wrong impression of the United States economy coming out of the war and somehow assuming that anywhere that was tied to the US was economically was also doing well. That's simply not true. Even in the United States itself, there are great places and examples of deep poverty. But in Haiti, there was a lot of economic fallout in the 1950s. The hurricane had come, Hurricane Hazel had come, and had damaged quite a lot. In Haiti, the support for hurricane relief had been spandered by the state. A lot of it had been taken by corrupt political officials. So there was all sorts of messiness going on in the late 50s. And what Duvalier did was that Duvalier in a very strange way began to see that as maybe nugget for Haiti but positive for him. He started to see how he could use that as a springboard to his own grab for power. And it is strange really because Duvalier's own personal history didn't really indicate that trajectory in an obvious way, though it clearly was there prior to 57. and he then comes to a point where he is willing to broker deals with people that he had previously shunned or even still publicly didn't support in order to gain power. So that thirst, that desire, that is unquenchable for power becomes such a dominating force of Duvalier's actions in 1957. And ultimately it leads to him making the sorts of alliances that would help him get into power in September 57. And it really is a marker. It's not just Duvalier coming to power. It's that whole context in which he came to power is a marker for the ending of that period that I cover in the book. Because it is a very different Haiti.

1:11:21Patrick Jean-Baptiste And it's interesting you talk about the surprise of how he had changed because Le Grieux Duvalier, I was very sympathetic to that young Duvalier and his ideas. I was like, wow, this resonates with me. But what he became later on is just striking. So the conclusion of your book, which really blew me away when you talked about when you entered the Haiti and Port-au-Prince, how there was absolutely nothing for the 30 years of Francois and Jean-Claude's reign. There was nothing there. Can you talk about the absence of the Duvalier eras and what that meant to you?

1:12:07Matthew Smith The absence is a result of unnecessary psychological cleansing after the Duvalier period that Haiti had to go through, Deschoukas. They had to go through that period of erasing the source of so much oppression and violence and death and destruction and damage. It's a damage that I could go on to further about the ways in which Duvalier period really damaged Haiti and there's small ways in which we still see it today, even though we're so far away from it, but we still see the cracks because of that. And with work I've done in Haiti, particularly I did some work in Haiti after the earthquake in 2010, and there are elements that I had noticed in how certain civil areas of Haitian life function that because of my close study of the pre-Duvalier years, I knew that they don't function even as well as they did in the pre-Duvalier years. And I read that and read that as indication of what I mean by is damaged. But I won't go into that. What I'll say is that the psychological cleansing, if you will, or attempt to cleanse psychologically, because again, as I said, a lot of it linked to that period after 1986 coming down was necessary. And a consequence of it was a removal of the names and the memory and all of these things that were symbols that became very oppressive symbols for Haitians. And in that, though, is the danger of removing the knowledge of that history. Now, the memory is one thing. The knowledge is another thing. The knowledge is important because it has to be taught and told. We Caribbean people, we suffer so much in terms of our history, slavery, colonialism, natural disaster, political violence. We suffer so much foreign intervention, but we have to know what we have suffered. Even if we struggle with how we remember and recall it, that's natural. These are traumatic things. I taught for nearly 20 years at the university in Jamaica and often my students would say to me, please don't teach me anymore about slavery. I don't want to hear about slavery anymore. that is negative to me. That's not helping me. I have to say to them, I understand where you're coming from. It's trauma, but you need to know it because if you don't know it, your own understanding of how you've come to where you are now in this place, in this time, is great. I say the same thing in Haiti with this because when I remember some years ago, even before the 2010 earthquake, on a trip to Haiti, a group of students had asked me to help them study for their back, their history, components of their back. I was going through Haitian history with them, helping them get a way of understanding the chronology of Haitian history. By the time we got to the Duvalier period, I was so surprised that the girls in the group were saying to me they wish there was a Duvalier again in Haiti. I was stunned. I was like, why would he say that? He says, no, as long they resented that they could hear stories from parents and grandparents of a childhood of Port-au-Prince when they were more ball, more dance, more going out and so on, that as long as you never say anything about the dictatorship, you could enjoy that. And they said, instead, they're growing up in a Port-au-Prince with kidnapping and gangs and those sorts of things, and political factionalism and a million political parties and people fighting for the presidency. And I realized that there was an innocence in their statement. And as shocked and appalled as I was, I had to silence the historian in me and open the ears of a listener to find out where these girls were at. And so then I asked them, what have you learned at school? And they have not learned that in school. They had not learned it. And so that's how they could get to that point where not knowing it, as I said, it's a separate thing from memory, but not knowing of it, had been part of the damage of Duvalet still operating in the country. And that's the thing that's important. That's why when Jean-Claude came back to Haiti, people were stunned. How come he's allowed to go back and live there? And I thought about that night meeting with those girls in the courtyard of their school one day, who see very differently from you and I and others of a different generation who have approached and come to understand it differently. I think that what's changing now is that there are more spaces like Nekma, like blogs, like very active young Haitians that have the good fortune of being in touch with who've used technology and new sorts of the internet and broader connections with wider groups of people to keep this knowledge alive. And it's not just the knowledge of the bad things and the bad times, but the good things and the stories of Haitians who have achieved the stories of their history that they should be proud of since 1804, not just up to 1804, but so much that Haiti has done and achieved after independence till now, and Haitians have done and achieved after independence till now, to showcase that and to have all of that part of the story. But that story of Eurasia, that story of what you can deal with and what you can't, it's a condition that a lot of us in the Caribbean have to do battle with all the time. Yeah.

1:18:13Patrick Jean-Baptiste If you don't know what it looks like, how are you going to know when it comes back?

1:18:17Matthew Smith That's another way to put it. Yeah.

1:18:21Patrick Jean-Baptiste Really appreciate your efforts and the years and years that you put in to get this out. I would love to have access to some of the interview recordings that you've done,

1:18:33Matthew Smith but I won't push my luck.

1:18:35Patrick Jean-Baptiste The short tail end of this interview, I asked the professor about his second book, which I definitely hope to have him on to talk about it with us and where in the story he picks up. It actually

1:18:55Matthew Smith goes back in time. That book is called Liberty Fraternity Exile. So it goes back into the 19th century. I used to tease and say I studied the grandparents of the people I wrote about in my first book. But yeah, it goes back to that period. And in some senses I'm tracing the roots of some of these questions, but I'm also looking at that period on its own terms and trying to place Haiti as I always attempt to do in my work. And I hope I'm successful as part of the Caribbean, as part of a Caribbean story. And that's really important to me because I think all of us in the Caribbean, we owe such a humongous debt to Haiti. There's no question about it that our own sense of who we are, whether we resist or bristle and cuss and moan about it, but a lot of it really is rooted in the story of Haiti. And I wanted to trace how far that was and how people before us dealt with that history and that connection. That's what that second book is all about.

1:19:59Patrick Jean-Baptiste You got any final thoughts for me? Because I don't know if you can top everything you've said, all these gems you dropped today.

1:20:06Matthew Smith I just want to say thanks for all the work you're doing and also to the listeners who tune in and the fact that they're tuning in to listen to you and to follow the stories and the connections and discussions with the people who it's quite an interesting range of people from academics to practitioners to everybody shows that they want to know more about Haiti, their country, and the place it has had. and that great value that is past holds as unlocking our future. And I think that's really true and important that no matter how dismal and hard, and it is very dismal and very hard, I'm well aware that it seems in the present there is such a power that you gain from understanding the journey to that present, from looking at the past. and just this is a chapeau to all the listeners out there who tune in to hear Patrick speaking to me and to everybody else he talks to. Keep doing that, keep reading on your own, and one love.

1:21:06Patrick Jean-Baptiste Merci, merci, brother. Merci, un pil. I got a problem more for you.

1:21:10Matthew Smith Okay, next time,

1:21:11Patrick Jean-Baptiste Napali.

1:21:13Matthew Smith Okay, bye bye.

1:21:14Patrick Jean-Baptiste I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Please follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at Nèg Mawon Podcast. That's Mawo with a W, not an R.