Émile Nau wrote with the audacity of a man who understood that history is not merely what happened, but what we choose to remember. In the shadow of a young republic still aching from the lash and the fire, he turned his gaze not to the familiar chains of the Middle Passage, but further back—to a time before Blackness had even been inscribed upon the land.
In Histoire des Caciques d’Haïti, Nau reached for the lives of the first Ayitian chiefs—the caciques—those sovereign rulers who walked the island long before Columbus dragged his crosses and kingdoms ashore. These were not his ancestors by blood. They were not African. But Nau claimed them nonetheless—not out of appropriation, but out of reverence. He understood that the soil remembers every footfall, not just the ones shackled.
It was an act of radical solidarity: a Black Haitian writer honoring the First Peoples of the island which will later be known as Hispaniola, refusing to let their erasure stand. In an age where empires were still mapping the world through conquest and forced forgetting, Nau mapped something else—dignity, continuity, loss. He insisted that Haiti’s story did not begin with slavery, nor end with emancipation.
And in doing so, he invited us to hold more than one truth in our hands at once: that we are born of rupture, yes—but also of roots far older, stretching into a time before the world broke open.
