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 18^th 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.

Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
Michel Rolph-Trouillot

In Silencing the Past, Trouillot gives the reader cause to re-examine encounters with historical process and historical knowledge. He delineates two faces of historicity — what happened and what is said to have happened — and emphasizes four moments of fact-production throughout the crafting of historical narratives. It is within this framework that Trouillot looks at events that have either been silenced, skewed, or somehow mis-presented: the Haitian revolution, the battle of the Alamo, Columbus’ landing in the Americas. He brings the analysis to a fruitful conclusion in the closing pages:

“…historical authenticity resides not in the fidelity to an alleged past but in an honesty vis-á-vis the present as it re-presents that past.” (150).

Under this premise, the historical silences that Trouillot points to, created between what happened and what is said to have happened, are important in their historical context but gain far more meaning in how we, as “actors and narrators” of history, engage them in the present. Trouillot draws on the memory of the Holocaust, saying that no amount of collective guilt about The Past or visits to concentration camps can be as powerful as protesting against skinheads in The Present.

I found this challenge quite relevant, especially upon spending the past semester in Berlin: In a city where the appropriateness of memorials and monuments is publicly — and heatedly — debated, where certain historical narratives are suppressed in favor of others, where walking down a street is an exercise in honoring history authentically. The other somewhat tautological, but often overlooked, fact Trouillot emphasizes with his “silence-moments” framework is that for every thing that is recorded, some other thing is left out. “Silences are inherent in history because any single event enters history with some of its constituting parts missing” Trouillot writes. This, he argues, is a byproduct of a number of contextual factors, including, among them, the vocabulary of the times, the capacity of the audience to understand the facts created, the accessibility (or “consumability”) of the narrative presented. The allusion to Censors from Roman antiquity is both appropriate and illuminating with regard to fact-silencing.

Trouillot rightly offers a defense of his silence model, assuming readers might take his argument to the other, albeit hyperbolic, end of the spectrum: the inclusion of every piece of information exactly at the moment it happens so as not to leave any thing out:

“If the account was indeed fully comprehensive of all facts it would be incomprehensible. Further, the selection of what matters, the dual creation of mentions and silences, is premised on the understanding of the rules of the game by broadcaster and audience alike.” (51).

With this, Trouillot outlines the differences between historical production and fiction. The extended sports metaphor aside, Trouillot is emphasizing the crucial responsibility historians have to authentic presentation of facts. Yet, he notes the “corner” (151) academia has pushed itself into regarding this issue: the guild is obsessed with facts and, I think he believes to its detriment, not with present-day contextualization and situated perspectives.