With Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot is not so much commenting on the process of historical production as he is exposing and disenchanting it. Trouillot’s exploration into the Haitian Revolution transcends traditional historical debate in the sense that he is taking history into his own hands; examining why certain elements of the Revolution emerged to become “facts,” while others dissolved into the depths of obscurity. Perhaps Trouillot’s most compelling argument arises here, which holds that the historical production process is preceded by power, which controls what is to be included in the historical narrative and similarly what is to be silenced. The result is a constant interplay and dichotomy between what actually happened and what is said to have happened.
Throughout Silencing, Trouillot investigates why such historical inaccuracies, embellishments and omissions develop. Within the early pages, however, Trouillot points out that it often begins with how the individual regards knowledge. On its most basic level, historical narratives become flawed when we view knowledge as recollection, or adopt what is known as the storage model. This happens when history is regarded as an isolated and separate entity that can be accessed through the retrieval of memories. Employing logic, Trouillot argues that since nobody is alive today that actually witnessed the Haitian Revolution, and subsequently could ever access an authentic memory, the storage model leads us to start creating the past: selecting sources, making archives and retrieving what we consider “facts.” Reflecting on the common American education, one can only agree with Trouilott in that history during primary and secondary education is generally relegated to the memorization of dates and names associated with the common single-sided interpretation of grand events. Because of this, Trouilott delivers a revelation that is simple yet not easily arrived at:
“That some people and things are absent of history, lost, as it were, to the possible world of knowledge, is much less relevant to the historical practice than the fact that some people and things are absent in history, and that this absence itself is constitutive of the process of historical production” (48-49).
Trouilott devotes a great deal of Silencing to exhibiting areas of the Haitian Revolution that have been silenced in Western historiography, especially the identity of Sans Souci, a man whose integral role in the Revolution is often considered an inconvenience and a distraction from the neat and tidy message about the revolt that many historians seek to promote. Pursuing the issue further, Trouillot sees the silencing of Sans Souci in the context of the greater Western attempt to silence the Revolution itself, revealing just how messy the historical production process can get.
The most intriguing segment of Silencing came when Trouillot stops just short of justifying Western manipulation of the history of the Haitian Revolution:
“…I am not suggesting that eighteenth-century men and women should have thought about the fundamental equality of humankind in the same way some of us do today. On the contrary, I am arguing that they could not have done so” (82).
During its occurrence and even in the coming generation, the Revolution in Haiti was inconceivable to the West due to instilled ideas about slavery, race and colonialism. Because the idea of a mass slave revolt was so unthinkable, the Revolution, like so many other chapters in history, was destined to be silenced from the start. In his closing words, Trouillot maintains that the past will continue to be silenced as long as a “fetishism of the facts, premised on an antiquated model of the natural sciences” prevails in the production process. Like Trouillot, it seems that we need to transcend mere debate and take history into our own hands.