Our comrade André Charlier, retired teacher, prolific Marxist intellectual, political activist and esteemed regular columnist at Haïti Liberté, died following a freak accident near his home in Queens, New York on June 27, 2024 at the age of 80.
He was born on December 19, 1943, to two leading figures in the Haitian Marxist tradition: Etienne Danton Charlier and Ghislaine Rey Charlier, leading figures in two of Haiti’s first communist parties in the 1940s and 1950s—the Popular Socialist Party of Haiti (PSP) and the Popular Entente Party (PEP)—as well as the authors of numerous seminal works, newspaper articles, pamphlets, and books.
So their son ” was a man of letters from the beginning,” write niece Vladimir Cybil Charlier and daughter Yamilee McKenzie in their obituary of André. “His parents, both intellectuals and political activists, instilled in him a deep love of reading. This early passion for literature and learning would shape the course of his life.”
Charlier came from aristocratic families in southern Haiti, sometimes referred to by North American academics as the “mulatto elite.” His paternal side Charlier came from Anse-à-Veau/Aquin and his maternal side Rey/Garoute de Jérémie, where he often vacationed with his brothers.
He was an excellent student and won first prize in Haiti’s first national history competition in 1961. A year later, he obtained his baccalaureate and then went to France to obtain a baccalaureate in political economy at the Sorbonne in 1971.
After college, André moved first to Montreal, Canada, and then to New York, where he worked as a teacher and journalist. He returned to Haiti in 1995 to work for the administrations of Presidents Jean Bertrand Aristide and René Préval, “because I thought they wanted to change things in my country”he wrote in a controversial 2021 article. “ But the way I went in was the way I came out: penniless.” He also continues his journalism and teaches in various private schools in Haiti.
In July 2010, he returned to reside in the Hillside neighborhood of Queens, New York and continued to teach and also began writing for the weekly Haiti Liberté in French and Kreyòl.
He kept in touch with several of his old friends, including his cousin Robert Garoute, a member of the Haiti Liberté advisory board, who also lived in Queens. “I was having trouble paying for my apartment, so Andre told me he had room for me in his house,” Garoute told Haiti Liberté. Unfortunately, this will never happen.”
On the evening of Monday, June 24, without telling the other members of his household, Andre decided to buy a hamburger on Hillside Avenue. As he was walking down the steep hill leading to this commercial boulevard, he tripped and fell, apparently hitting his head. In the dark, he was undiscovered for some time and fell into a coma. He was taken by ambulance to a nearby hospital, where efforts were made, in vain, to resuscitate him. He was eventually taken off life support and pronounced dead on June 27, 2024.
André was mated three times. He met his first wife, Dominique Françoise Bruneau, in Paris in 1966, but she died in 1975. He then married Marie Monique Edouard and in 1980 they had a son, Tristan Charlier, who died tragically at age 24 in 2005.
In 1984, André also had a daughter, Yamilee Mackenzie, with Micheline Mackenzie.
André is survived by his daughter, Yamilée Mackenzie, and his grandson, Cruz Etienne Colette; by his brother, Jean Louis Baron-Hyppolite; by his sons-in-law Saman Dashti and Stephan Flemens; his nephews and nieces Vladimir Cybil Charlier, Raymond Manicatex Charlier, Dielika Charlier, Bernard Charlier, Chango Elysée, Vélina Elysée Charlier, Clara Baron Hyppolite, Adrien Baron Hyppolite, Christophe Baron Hyppolite, and their children; his sisters-in-law Marie-Cécile Corvington-Charlier and Gérarda Elysée, as well as several great-nephews and nieces and relatives of the Charlier, Piverger, Garoute, Edouard, Dessables, Salnave, Roumer and Mackenzie families.
Funeral arrangements for our comrade André have not yet been announced.
It is fitting to close this obituary with a prescient observation made by André Charlier in one of his last columns in Haïti Liberté. In a French essay entitled “Le sang du vampire,” he reflects on the accelerated collapse of the American empire.
“Just as a vampire cannot live without sucking the blood of others, the Bretton Woods system cannot survive without plundering the planet,” he wrote. “This explains the current world situation. This is why we are currently on the brink of a nuclear war.
He observed that the American people are being pushed further and further into poverty and despair. “The reality is that in the final analysis, only international high finance, the power of money, benefits from Bretton Woods. It is capital accumulation pushed to its extreme limit, and at that limit, the American people are victims like everyone else,” he concluded. “But we, the Haitians, are the most victims. But by our very suffering, we also show what the future of the human species will be if we let financial capital do what it wants.”
And finally, this is how he describes himself in the controversial article cited above: “I myself have never held high office, big jobs with a lot of money… But my two flags, the red flag of the revolution and the flag that is blue like the sea… I will always keep them, and to take them from my hands, you will have to kill me.”
André died waving these flags.
