By Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Using a unique combination of history and memoir, Michel-Rolph Trouillot attempts to examine and explain the processes by which history is produced, silenced, and understood in his book Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Arguing that humans participate in history as actors and narrators, Trouillot wishes to explore these roles in terms of what he believes are the two sides of historiocity, “ what happened” and “that which is said to have happened” (2). Through is selection of historical examples including the Alamo, the Holocaust, the Haitian Revolution, and landing of Christopher Colombus; Trouillot introduces his reader to another side of history, how and why events are celebrated or forgotten.
The crux of Trouillot’s argument revolves around a series of forgotten or neglected pieces of history or “silences,” as Trouillot refers to them. These silences are an important factor that must be understood as part of the process of producing historical narratives as they are deeply entwined with the historical process:
Silences enter into the historical process at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives; and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance). (48)
This understanding of the act of suppressing or forgetting material as it relates to the four steps of creating history is displayed in specific narratives throughout the rest of Silencing. To illustrate his arguments about silences, Trouillot refers to three specific stories: the story of Sans Souci, a forgotten Haitian Revolution hero; the general neglect of the Haitian Revolution in Western history interpretations; and the redefinition of Christopher Columbus’ discovery and its meaning of Columbus as a figure throughout the world. Trouillot goes to great pains to demonstrate the process by which history is created and how the relative power of different groups played a role in the creation of historical narrative. However, Trouillot explainst that there is still room for some reinterpretation of history, but he restricts that “historians build their narrative on the shoulders of previous ones,” and to contribute new material historians must, “both acknowledge and contradict the power embedded in previous understandings” (56).
This room for reinterpretation is not without use in Trouillot’s eyes, especially in the case of his example of the Haitian Revolution, which Trouillot explains has been neglected in Western history due to erasure and banalization. Having just taken a class on the Caribbean in the age of revolutions, this neglect of the subject both shocked and upset me as the Haitian Revolution had far reaching consequences in the greater Atlantic world. Yet, Trouillot, a native Haitian, moves beyond this neglect to prescribe a new doctrine for future historians so that they might be able to influence the future development of narrative in a more balanced nature understanding the complex interplay of power, silences, identity and the present upon historical interpretation. As he states,
“As various crises of our times impinge upon the identities thought to be long established or silent, we move closer to the era when professional historians will have to position themselves more clearly within the present, lest politicians, magnates, or ethnic leaders alone write history for them.” (152)
On this note, Trouillot sends forth his reader educated in the basics of the production of history and a mission to influence the production of future narratives for the better. A mission that might perhaps remove historians from the comfort of the past, to the understanding of the present.