At what cost revolution?

In Fabienne Josaphat’s new novel, “Kingdom of No Tomorrow,” 20-year-old Nettie Boileau trades the turmoil of Duvalier’s Haiti for the tumult of 1960s America. Settling with her aunt in Oakland, she is drawn to the social programs spearheaded by the burgeoning Black Panther Party.

But her focus on healing and public health is soon subsumed by the revolution and her passionate relationship with Black Panther leader Melvin Mosley.

Josaphat drew on her own family’s history for insight into the activism of the Panthers. Her father, an attorney, was imprisoned during Francois Duvalier’s reign in Haiti. And she remembers reading her father’s books as a child, biographies and memoirs of leaders in the Civil Rights Movement.

“I remember starting to do my research about the Black Panthers and thinking to myself, ‘I think I know about this already but I don’t know how. Where did I learn this?’” she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “And then I realized, it was probably me going through [my father’s] books.”

Josaphat brings the gift of those books full circle with her new novel as she brings the inner workings of the Black Panthers to fresh light, including how the fight for social justice didn’t always mean equal rights for women.

Guest:

• Fabienne Josaphat was born and raised in Haiti. Her new novel “Kingdom of No Tomorrow” was awarded the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction in 2023.

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