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I wasn’t a great student.
My old report cards depict “a quiet child” who, nevertheless, could be “quite chatty instead of starting the work he is to do.” I was “quite a slow printer” who somehow also “tends to work rather quickly” at the expense of quality. In general, my work was incomplete or poorly done. Terms like “disorganized,” “satisfactory” and “unfocused” followed me from kindergarten through high school in the official documents, much to my parents’ frustration.
My old report cards depict “a quiet child” who, nevertheless, could be “quite chatty instead of starting the work he is to do.” I was “quite a slow printer” who somehow also “tends to work rather quickly” at the expense of quality. In general, my work was incomplete or poorly done. Terms like “disorganized,” “satisfactory” and “unfocused” followed me from kindergarten through high school in the official documents, much to my parents’ frustration.
My teachers tried. Some tried harder than others. One (grade 4) tried stuffing me in the corner until my mom complained. Another (grade 10) told me to give up on learning French—désolé Madame! A lot of them could see that I was bright. They described me as creative and insightful, but never studious. The trouble was I was boundlessly interested in things that weren’t school. School, as I saw it, was taking up time I could have spent learning about the things I really wanted to learn about. My teachers could never figure out how to meet me at this natural curiosity. At least one teacher got part way there. In grade 5, Mademoiselle Benson (who changed my name from Matthew to Matt) made me think I could be a writer. But the next year I was back to: “needs to make better use of time.”
***
A kid growing up in Ontario in the 1980s and 1990s first learns about history—about the breadth and variety of human experience through time and space—from pop culture. Seventy-eight days before I was born, Back to the Future arrived in cinemas, and stories about time travel were staples of my media diet. Period films, too. I’m talking Indiana Jones and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. These movies played a fundamental role in the early development of my historical consciousness. This dissertation probably wouldn’t exist if not for a bunch of (mainly Jewish) guys in Los Angeles like Stephen Spielberg, Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon, Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin. Other notable early authorities on the far-flung corners of humanity were Looney Tunes, Monty Python, They Might Be Giants, the NES, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Douglas Adams and an assortment of long-forgotten relics acquired at Jumbo Video, HMV and the local library.
Slowly, alongside pop culture, came so-called “high” culture. For me, that meant the culture of my grandparents. They took me and my siblings to see plays in Stratford. They brought us to museums and to the Iroquoian village at Crawford Lake. They encouraged me to listen to classical music and read “literature.” They even signed me up for golf lessons, but I was hopeless. My gramma Norma was the ringleader. I hold her personally responsible for the height of my brow.
My dad’s parents, Mary and Owen Robertshaw, emigrated to Ontario from Manchester, UK, a decade before I was born. For me, they were a living link to history. When I got old and bold enough, I plied them with questions about living through the war. They told me all about sleeping in bomb shelters while the Luftwaffe tried to level the industrial town where they lived.
My late grampa Gord (to whom this dissertation is dedicated) gave me my only connection to academia. He spent decades as a fixture of the Ontario Agricultural College at the University Guelph and made sure we all went to the annual open house weekend each March to see the cow with window in its side and the various other wonders of this secret universe.
When, at the “mature” age of twenty-six, I had the opportunity to start university, it had to be Guelph. In History, though; no see-through cows for me, thanks.
Crucially, the month before I started my undergrad, I found myself in Haiti. I had been working as a videographer and attending a church that had a denominational connection to Haiti. In 2011, while Port-au-Prince was still rebuilding from the earthquake, I started asking around about ways I could get involved. “Sister” Joan Sider let me tag along as a photographer and French translator with a delegation sent to attend a conference in Delmas 33. I met many Haitian friends and travelled around the capital and up to Gonaïves in the northwest. I asked endless questions, and our hosts—Oliam Richard, Elsa Hilaire, Michel Fortunat and Ludlène Baptistin—graciously indulged my curiosity and taught me the basics of their language (apparently quite different from French). I was hooked.
I returned to Haiti three times over the subsequent years. A friend, Mark Wallace, who works for an NGO, brought me along as a videographer and gave me some time to poke around in the national library, bookstores and a couple of museums. My time in Haiti and the friends I made there were essential to the processes that led to this dissertation. They helped me find Haitian books and also taught me things about their country that couldn’t come from books. In one of my fondest memories, I helped Elsa’s nine-year-old daughter Jhessicka prepare for a test on Haitian history. We quizzed each other. She won.
Days after returning from my first trip to Haiti, I started at Guelph, and, for the first time, I started to succeed in school. I’d like to suggest that my teachers learned how to teach me, but, in classes of 300, the onus was clearly on me to learn how to learn. Fortunately, by this point, I had come around to seeing school as a gateway to knowledge, rather than an obstacle. My natural curiosity found a home, and I started to thrive.
Not to say I didn’t have some great teachers. Karen Racine, who ended up my Master’s advisor, stands out the most. She was my compass and my constant encourager. Victor Fernandez, who was a grad student on loan from the French Riviera, was the first French teacher who made me feel like I could réussir. I had the unmatched privilege of having Dawn Cornelio—in person, no less!—before she flew away to Scotland to be with her one true love. William Cormack, Peter Goddard, Christine Ekholst and Alan MacDougall also deserve honourable mention.
As I progressed at Guelph, I looked for opportunities to learn about Haiti. Drs. Racine and Cornelio both signed off on independent study courses about the country, since there were none offered. Soon, my passion for Haiti led me to Joubert Satyre (to whom this dissertation is also dedicated), a literature professor from Haiti who happened to be at Guelph. Joubert was a mentor and a friend, patiently correcting many of my ideas about his country, directing my reading of Haitian literature, all the while struggling with health issues. He ended up on my committee for my Master’s thesis. Sadly, when I returned to Guelph to teach in 2023, I learned that Joubert had passed away, far too young, from pancreatic cancer. He will be missed by many.
During my Master’s, I had the opportunity to travel to Boston for an intense, three-week Haitian Creole class. My instructors—Marc Prou, Patrick Sylvain, Lesly René—gave me the gift of speech. If not for them, I wouldn’t have been able to talk to Haitians in their language or access the growing body of writing in Creole. I would, in a sense, be sak vid pa kanpe—the empty bag that can’t stand up. I’m forever grateful for this gift.
***
I arrived at York in September 2017 with the notion of becoming a doctor.
It was a slog.
My second son arrived that November.
We went on strike (in fact, the longest post-secondary strike in Canadian history).
We had family health struggles and a global health catastrophe (I was supposed to be at the Schomburg Center in Harlem in late March 2020—I wonder if they’re still waiting for me to show up?).
Haiti, meanwhile, slid into a sustained period of instability.
Through it all, my classmates at York made the process twice as pleasant and half as demoralizing. Karen Dancey, the administrator’s administrator, kept me and everyone else in the department from getting lost at sea, bureaucratically speaking. And my distinguished professors made sure I kept sailing forward, doling out guidance and insights with apparently no end. Paul Lovejoy was first and foremost, but no less helpful and supportive were Marty Klein, Deb Neill, David Trotman and Margaret Schotte. Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall (whom I consider an informal advisor from afar) provided critical perspectives by way of Twitter—sinking ship though it was.
Finally, the exceptional work of lots of people I’ve never met has been fundamental to this project. There are too many to mention; their names appear in the footnotes and bibliography. But I would like to note a few: Marlene Daut, Laurent Dubois, Regine O. Jackson, Chris Bongie, Chelsea Stieber, Brandon R. Byrd, as well as the late Léon-François Hoffmann and Tyler Stovall. And, above all, Michel-Rolph Trouillot.
***
As any historian will tell you, no narrative exists in a vacuum. Multiple, intertwining stories always run side-by-side. I’ve sketched out my life story as a clumsy pursuit of knowledge, but a second, no less important plotline was going on all the while in the background. Or, more precisely, the foreground. Family is, in some sense, what this has all been about. Without my parents and grandparents, my siblings, my in-laws, my two sons, and most of all, my wife Kiersten, I might have gone in another direction at any point along this trajectory and you would be reading someone else’s dissertation. They kept me grounded and made my life exponentially more chaotic in the best ways. And while, at times, some of them may have slowed down the process (like when I was home with two rowdy boys during a pandemic) they saw it through to the end.
Although I’ve already dedicated this work to grampa Gord and to Joubert, it really belonged to Kiersten from the start. The whole time I was sitting at home reading and writing, she was across town at an elementary school teaching kids how to read and write. And you can bet she was meeting them at their natural curiosity.
30 September 2024
