Trouillot, Michel-rolph. Silencing the Past. Beacon Press,

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past. Beacon Press, 1997.

Much as historical individuals in real space and time make claims about their own importance and their proposed role in the future, early on in his own text the historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot states that the prospective project of his book, Silencing the Past, is to tell a theoretical tale about the relationship between history and power. He attempts to analyze how historical narratives are produced. In other words, Trouillot sees history as a narrative, as a production, rather than as a series of factual, unbroken events. "Human beings participate in history both as participants and as narrators," says Trouillot. (2)

This point-of-view of history, because it employs a literary as well as a factual understanding of historical narrative, perhaps inevitably suggests that the production of historical narratives involves the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals. Individuals at specific historical moments in time will always have unequal access to the communicative means of historical production. This may be because of a lack of education, as the poor lack the literacy to record their historical views in a time and place that prioritizes written history over oral history. Or if not due to class, this lack of access may be due to politics, as a repressive regime attempts to destroy not only all voices of dissent, but attempts to create the illusion that no ideology contrary to the ruler's own ideology ever existed.

But Trouillot's text is not purely theoretical in nature. His text specifically discusses the differences between the Haitian Revolution and the colonialist implications of Columbus' exploration of the Americas in the form of the current debate over Columbus Day, as well as several other historical examples in lesser detail. But perhaps even more importantly than the specificity of these examples, the author of this provocative text suggests a particular mode of reading history that challenges the conventional assumptions of popular and academic culture. He attempts to strike a balance between positivist and constructivist historical overviews, without entirely rejecting the assumptions of both 'camps.'

The author is a Haitian by birth and thus Trouillot, as an individual as well as an historian, has a particularly vested interest in imbuing the specificity of Haiti's revolutionary events with a particular theoretical significance. Critical to Trouillot's analysis is his stress upon access to the means of communication in articulating an opposition, a fact that perhaps becomes most raw during the 'writing' of the narrative of a revolution. Individual voices that existed during critical, revolutionary moments of historical changes, in time and place, are often silenced by a later, homogenizing voice of a controlling winner.

In Haiti, after the revolution, the reigning elite instituted a communicative structure that essentially silenced or rendered invalid alternative, oppositional voices. Such silencing is frequently done as a way of consolidating power after a violent transfer of power has occurred.

Trouillot's work stands as an ethical challenge to historians as well as a theoretical challenge because, while recognizing that competing groups and individuals may lack equal access to modes of communication, he maintains that the variety of voices was there and historians may simply have to work harder to bring them again to light so that a more multifaceted version of history arises in the eyes of the historian's readership.

Constantly Trouillot how is history produced as an artifact? In other words, history is not simply, like a nation, something that is discovered, by citizens or by historians. Rather, history is something that exists in the telling, in how it is told, and is something that comes to life anew as it is constantly retold and reconstructed in the imperfect forms of memory and propaganda.

History is both "what happened" and "what may have been said to have happened." (2)

History is neither one nor the other, though, Trouillot cautions. Instead, history is more of the interaction between both of these "happenings," between the realities of the physical, lived life of humanity in space and time and the multiplicity of stories told about this physical life. The Haitian revolution and Columbus Day are perhaps ideal examples of this, because to justify itself, the individuals who came to power in Haiti had to essentially construct a mythological barrier between past and present, where the past was seen as evil and fundamentally exploitative, as opposed to the 'good' present. Of course, this form of propagandistic grandstanding requires a highly selective interpretation of Haiti's historical 'story' and produced a silencing of dissenting views of the past and present.

Trouillot's personal experiences with this revolution, however, also nuance his status as a constructivist historian. Because he believes that all historical truth is not purely relative, that history does have material effects beyond that of what individuals simply say and perceive, he refuses to see history as a mere memory -- to do so is to erase the bloodshed and potentially to erase the lessons and real, physical suffering and identities of the past. Simply because the leaders wrote one version of history did not mean that their version was correct. However, not even the voices of the silenced masses produce a 'perfect' historical telling of the events. Trouillot suggests that an overly positivist history rejects the fact that there is a multitude of perceptions going on and that although revolutions may seem inevitable after they occur, they do not necessarily seem so during their lived moment in time, when they are actually happening. However, to simply equate historical narrative with the ability to create a myth about history is to deny the lived impact of economics, society, politics, and even literary and popular myths upon the reality of people's everyday lives. One can 'deconstruct' one's historical self to the point where starvation and privation are overlooked.