Analysis Of Michel-Rolph Trouillot's "Silencing The Past"

The world we live in today, in cases where justice is not manifested and helpless, it is believed that revenge will be taken in another world. It is always said that history will get revenge, and it will be remembered differently in the future. Historical events are constantly reviewed and “truth” will appear sooner or later. The people who were remembered as heroes might be remembered as massacres while traitors of a certain period might become politicians. There are alternate history narratives that vary and the concept of history, however, is based on an assumption. According to this, history records what is happening, accumulates material for evaluation of other types of events, to go into history and to interfere with the history as well as comes from the same assumption. This book tells us that the past cannot be understood by the metaphor of a warehouse, the injustices made in the future by the date he may not be compensated. History is of course a reckoning the scene, but the truth is not revealed sooner or later and cannot get out. Some people, some facts, some events and materials are being disappeared but life is continuing as if they had never been. Trouillot’s thesis was to question how history was created made and presented to us. He tried to clarify why history of Haiti and Haitian revolution were viewed by most of Europeans as an unthinkable history for few reasons.

To begin with, French government couldn't trusted eighteen hundreds of their exceedingly prepared soldiers who once vanquished hundred thousand Native Americans, were crushed by the fifty thousand slaves. In all actuality slaves have been a profoundly arrange defiance gathering. Secondly, reason Trouillot clarifies that occasions tested western culture most extreme personalities, since it at last demonstrated errors of the West that dependably imagined that slaves couldn't sort out or administer themselves. Thus, the West utilized its capacity and impact to hushed those verifiable occasions. This conveys one to the end, that Haitian upheaval was only a decent case of how West was quieting the snapshots of their oversights and dread of losing its global control. Trouillot also tells how Haitians lived during French colonization that slaves tried to be a drivers or coachmen in order to get an advantage of their position and meet other slaves who work in different plantations and permitting slaves spread across distant plantations to mobilize one. The reason why he thinks that Haitian Revolution unthinkable is that Western people could not even think that they can have revolution in one day. He also mentions that even two centuries has already passed the way of Westerns looking never changed scientifically because they can never put Haitians parallel on their revolution. Despite agreeing with most of his thesis I want to make a forceful argument for his case, history might be tried to be changed by western people, Haitians were under the colonialism of different countries in different time period, it might be hard for Westerns to accept their revolution why Haitians didn’t strongly tried to leave and explain their history by Haitian way with their writers.

As I have searched Trouillot was the first history writer of Haiti and first history book was written by him on 1977. In addition, we cannot say that that the revolution of slaves were “unthinkable” for all whites because we know there were always enough activists against slavery in Europe. Additionally, spreading of the slavery in Haiti was also the result of the lack knowledge of religion because we can see that there have never been slavery in Muslim world such as Ottoman empire who controlled the Europe and most part of Africa for more than six centuries and they have always were religious and govern the country with the rule of religion.

In conclusion, leaving the peace of art for history like Trouillot makes people to look Haitian history with Haitian eye and also strong resource for future Haitian generation. It could be hard to believe for some white people for the facts mentioned by author and some Haitians could not also believe some resources took place in the books that were written by white writers but when we read and accept them as only source of history then it will really be easy to understand and imagine the history. Silencing does not give every one of the appropriate responses, but rather it recommends a promising place to begin: a basic examination of how history is delivered and the mind boggling manners by which control produces hushes. Offering voice to these quiets will engage us to build up a more profound comprehension of the past and to all the more enthusiastically draw later on.