From the Ashes of Saint-Domingue

by Karrah Cheruiyot

Rating: *****

From the Ashes of Saint-Domingue unfolds the Haitian heritage of Alexandre Dumas, inspired by one of his most famous works, The Count of Monte Cristo. 

Spanning thirty years from 1762 and moving between France and Saint-Domingue, Cheruiyot focuses on the extraordinary story of Alexandre Dumas’ father, Thomas-Alexandre, and the equally astonishing life of his grandmother, Marie-Cessette, among others.

The story opens at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris in 1866, plunging the reader directly into Dumas’s first meeting with the scandalous actress Adah Isaacs Menken. Mesmerizing and deeply evocative from the start, Dumas emerges from the page as a larger-than-life, scintillating bon vivant, which Cheruiyot never overplays.

He is a man of sharp intellectual sophistication, yet his sparkling social intelligence masks painful self-awareness. Adah’s languid sensuality and overt sexual currency also disguise insecurities.  Cheruiyot writes them as a riveting couple, portrayed with vibrant authenticity, their meetings charged with latent eroticism and genuine affection.

It is their exchanges that cleverly frame the presentation of Dumas’ ancestry and this staggering tale of betrayal, revenge, retribution, and, ultimately, human resilience. The narrative initially moves back and forth between glittering mid-nineteenth-century Paris and the stifling, oppressive plantations of mid-eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue.

It works brilliantly, effortlessly transporting the reader between the two worlds. While Cheruiyot’s near-magical descriptive depth brings both continents and their characters into vivid, chromatic life, the contrast between them is also evident.

However, this is, primarily, the story of Saint-Domingue, and from Chapter 5, Cheruiyot plunges the reader directly into its sweltering black heart.  Marie-Cessette forms the spine of the narrative. Her experiences are barbaric, both emotionally and physically, yet she never loses her quiet, powerful dignity and maternal tenacity.  

The later scenes involving Adolphe, her younger son, are horribly poignant, the reader screaming at the page as chances are missed. However, the promise of a sequel suggests Adolphe will be revisited.

Antoine, Dumas’ grandfather, is the main protagonist at the beginning, and Cheruiyot paints him with subtle flaws while lending him sympathy. Yet, the reader is given a creeping awareness that there could be a moral hollowness within him.

All the characters, fictional and nonfictional, greater or lesser, are depicted with individuality and intensity, and each is completely investable, acutely observed, especially emotionally, and consequently intriguing. Focal point Thomas-Alexandre is a study in internal conflict. His life is a series of clashing emotions and aspects that only calm and find direction when he first meets the Chevalier and later when he alights upon the firebrand Marie-Louise.

The degradation and horrors inflicted by the plantation owners are darkly compelling. Cormiers Plantation owner, Henri Duclos, in particular, is a monster beyond comprehension, and from a psychological slant, so is Anna Maubielle. As the Haitian Revolution sweeps across the island, involving Marie-Cessette et al., its momentum mirrors that of the French Revolution, with Thomas-Alexandre fighting alongside the Queen’s Dragoons.

Cheruiyot structures her lavish, cross-generational novel expertly, seamlessly moving the reader from character to character and place to place, with the story often revealed through overlapping perspectives. Additionally, she weaves through tangled threads of symbolism, delicately dropped motifs and, as events gather pace and interests converge, proliferating connections through past and present.

Her prose is intricate, absorbing, wonderfully accomplished, and writerly. She has a biographer’s affection for her subjects without exclusivity and a historian’s searching insight as she skilfully intertwines fact with fiction.

From the Ashes of Saint-Domingue is toweringly good.  A sweeping, sophisticated saga and one of those novels in which a reader loses themselves, surrendering to the characters’ lives for long, engrossing hours and emerging enriched yet bereft at leaving them. Highly recommended.

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