In this book, Trouillot attempts to understand why it is that events such as the Haitian Revolution and Columbus’ landing in the Americas—extraordinarily significant events in history—continues to be ignored or misrepresented today. In the case of the Haitian Revolution, giving the event the proper degree of recognition was impractical and challenging politically when it happened, and it has been forgotten in subsequent narratives because it did not fit in as neatly into the chain of Western historical events. With the story of Columbus, Trouillot showed how a figure can be claimed or misrepresented by countless groups with their own agendas, which, incidentally, vaguely reminded me of Dowling.
The first thing that struck me about this book was that it was a sort of half-history and half-memoir. Trouillot shared a great deal of his personal thoughts, feelings and experiences and then interspersed these reflections with the historical narrative. While I would not normally think this would be a very effective strategy for writing a history book, and at times Trouillot did ramble a bit too much, I found it to be generally effective. One of the major themes of the book was how the Haitian Revolution has been largely ignored at worst and at best dismissed or undermined by historians. The anecdotes and discussion of historical theory helped explain why this might have been the case, and also provided some individual examples of the dangers of forgetting the Haitian Revolution. One which particularly stood out to me was the conversation Trouillot had with one of his students in his course on the “Black Experience in the Americas.” The anecdote exemplified a major theme of the book: the dangers of omitting certain parts of history, such as the Haitian Revolution, and how this could skew people’s perspectives of other historical events, such as slavery in the South.
I found Trouillot’s explanation of how the Haitian Revolution was unthinkable and how that made it difficult for people at the time and subsequent historians to process in the historical narrative particularly interesting. As historians living in the present day, when we look back on events and movements, it is easy for us to forget how unexpected or different they are. Just as slavery would be unthinkable to the average American or European today, the idea that slaves could successfully revolt to achieve independence in the late 18th century was equally unthinkable to the average American or European 220 years ago. While it all makes perfect sense, I was still very surprised that the response to such a—pardon the pun—revolutionary event would be to ignore it completely. It makes me wonder what types of events are going on in our modern world today that we are choosing to ignore or undermine for our own political or cultural purposes.