By Aylin Aarhus
A guest lecturer encouraged University of Maryland students and staff to rethink their understanding of the history of slavery in Haiti in a talk held Thursday in Juan Ramón Jiménez Hall.
Nathalie Frédéric Pierre is an assistant professor of history at Howard University with a Ph.D. in the history of the African diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America.
Her lecture, “Childish Bodies: From Invisible Traffick to Visible Debt,” examined the enslavement and trafficking of Haitian children following Haitian independence in 1804.
While slavery was officially abolished in French-occupied Haiti in 1793, Pierre argued Haitian children experienced a “second slavery” in the early 1800s. According to Pierre, children younger than 10 were often sent to labor in French-occupied Santo Domingo, while older children were trafficked overseas, often to the Southern United States, in exchange for rice.
A Haitian immigrant herself, Pierre came to the US as a toddler in 1990, following the collapse of the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. She grew up in a Haitian Creole-speaking household, and often found herself translating for her monolingual parents.
“It was a very stressful position, you know, because I come from a working-poor immigrant family,” Pierre said. “And oftentimes, if I mistranslated, that could mean the difference of my mom receiving her SNAP benefits or not.”
Despite the stress, Pierre said that experience has aided her in her work as a historian.
“In some ways, that work of translation from childhood helps me be a historical translator,” Pierre said. “It helps me make things that seem invisible clear in other contexts.”
Raymond Flowers, a junior French and computer science double major, attended Pierre’s talk.
“What stood out to me in particular was the challenge with learning history from a white, Western perspective and European perspective,” Flowers said. “It was really cool to learn history from a Haitian perspective.”
Cécile Accilien is a professor of French & Francophone studies at UMD and the former president of the Haitian Studies Association.
“Oftentimes, people don’t think of France as owning colonies,” Accilien said. “We cannot talk about France currently, or France in the past 100 or 200 years, without talking about Haiti, without talking about current West African countries or culture.”
Pierre is also board chair of the Flanbwayan Haitian Literacy Project, a nonprofit that promotes English language skills among Haitian immigrant youth in New York.
Pierre said her focus on Haitian youth in her work stemmed partly from her own experience of the disastrous earthquake in Haiti in 2010, which killed an estimated 220,000 people.
“As a survivor of the earthquake, one of the most difficult things to get over in terms of my trauma was the amount of dead children I saw,” Pierre said. “So when I came home, I would literally be thinking about these dead children all the time. And when I found this archival source that gave me the opportunity to zoom in on young people, it was kind of like a cathartic way to heal that wound.”
Pierre is working on her first book, “The Vessel of Independence… Must Save Itself: Haitian State Formation, 1757 – 1815,” which she plans to publish in 2027.
Featured image: Attendees are seated in the Juan Ramón Jiménez Hall for the lecture event on slavery in Haiti on Thursday. Photo by Christian Lee.