Acknowledging Ancestry and the Roots of Reconciliation: The Story of Jacques by Valencia Clement

I spent the majority of my formal education learning histories through the lens of whiteness and it greatly impacted the way I saw the world. As I interrogated my professional and epistemological values, I became drawn to social pedagogy. Social pedagogy is about learning through interactions, experiences or in community with others. Social pedagogy represented a departure from traditional notions of formalized schooling that left me craving cultural-relevance, connection and intimacy. As I began to think of my most influential teachers, I realized my parents were an immense source of cultural curriculum. My parents taught me their native tongue, Haitian-creole, and growing up around my maternal grandmother and visiting Haiti helped me gain global perspectives from a young age. Their stories helped me understand and connect world history, Black history and our family history. The more I learned from my mother’s side of the family, the more I became curious about my father.

I always saw my father through the lens of my own positionality. In seeing him solely as my father, I neglected the person my father was before me, a young boy in Haiti whose single mother had immigrated to the United States.  I wanted to learn more about my father and hoped interviewing him would reveal cultural themes that would contextualize my father’s identity. I shifted my positionality from “daughter,” to compassionate researcher and saw how shifting my positionality helped me see my father differently.

My father was born in 1957. Though this year may not carry much significance in the U.S., it was a year that marked a significant shift in Haiti’s political climate. In 1957, Francois Duvalier (Papa Doc) was elected president of Haiti. The Duvalier reign was one of the most infamous regimes the country has seen, marked by violence, terror and murder. His campaign, which former U.S. President Eisenhower supported, stressed democracy, honesty and waging a war against poverty – his legacy was the antithesis of those values and commitments. Once Duvalier was elected, he quickly named himself president for life, dismantled the national army, developed a civilian security force composed of his supporters and engaged in a political purge campaign aimed at dismantling any institution that represented a threat to his political security. His administration threatened and demolished the army, the commercial sector, the education system, labor unions and democratic institutions. During his reign, hundreds of thousands of Haitians were disappeared, murdered or imprisoned extra-judiciously.

As I interviewed my father, I noticed his home life had several parallels to the authoritarian political regime that took sovereignty when he was born. He grew up under a dictatorship where censorship, political intimidation and corruption were rampant which, impacted my father’s perceptions of authority, politics and thus parenting. In his home, those dynamics were mimicked. He lived with his grandmother and maternal uncle after his mother migrated to the United States. He said, his grandmother “always wanted everything to be exactly her way otherwise you’d pay the consequence… when she whipped you up, she was like a man so, therefore, you don’t play games.” His childhood, like the political regime in Haiti, was marked by diminished personal agency and violence. He was taught that powerful people made decisions and less powerful people should take heed or endure violence.

As I interviewed him, I felt my empathies expand; the new context helped me to identify a thread of generational harm and history that we could heal together. I grew up in a democracy where personal agency, civil disobedience and diversity were celebrated as catalysts of societal progress. I spent the entirety of my life trying to understand why my father wasn’t like other parents because authoritarian parenting styles were condemned in my school psychology classes. I’ve learned my biggest error was comparing apples to oranges. My schooling and socialization in the United States only gave me the tools to compare his parenting against white, American upper-class norms when instead I should have seen it through the lens of his developmental context.

My journey learning about the experiences that shaped my father as both a man and a father has re-ignited my passion for social pedagogy. It also highlighted the wealth of Black knowledge that lives in spaces beyond the ivory tower. Social pedagogy allows research to serve humanizing and restorative aims that can be a core element of community and personal healing.  I am very grateful that I could bring research and theory home with me for the holidays to co-create new understandings alongside my father.

Valencia Clement is a Haitian-American doctoral student and poet at Arizona State University. Her research interests include womanist social change theory, performance ethnography and epistemic justice.