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.