The art of silencing the Voices from the past

Michel-Rolph Trouillot was a Haitian American academic and anthropologist with a distinction for peeling untold narratives from popular history and explaining the mechanism of how that could be done. His works give voice to the voiceless.

 The importance of this work from Trouillot is not in the history he is talking about, rather, in the explanation how history can be nuanced and been 'Managed' during the time it is created, recorded, and later interpreted. In fact, the history of Haitian freedom he is talking about, while introduces the finer points of the colonialism, freedom struggle from France and the racial fault lines that mad up the Black community, further goes on to explain how the process of creation, recording and interpreting history is inherently biased and needs re-reading of the proofs and contexts that were hidden either intentionally or unintentionally.

"History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots."

Hence the power of the book lies not in the history it narrates, rather, in the ability to use the principles Trouillot is putting forth, to apply and reanalyze any historical event to expose the roots of the problem.

That comprehension can happen when we understand the role of each actor and their stakes in the narrative which they use to influence, subvert and mobilize based on that history. we have numerous examples for this in each of our popular history.

"Tracking power requires a richer view of historical production than most theorists acknowledge. We cannot exclude in advance any of the actors who participate in the production of history or any of the sites where that production may occur. Next to professional historians we discover artisans of different kinds, unpaid or unrecognized field laborers who augment, deflect, or reorganize the work of the professionals as politicians, students, fiction writers, filmmakers, and participating members of the public. In so doing, we gain a more complex view of academic history itself, since we do not consider professional historians the sole participants in its production."

By simply naming the fortress as Sans Souci, created a Mythical, non-existent historical connection with that of the Prussian Emperor, Frederick the Great's Potsdam Palace and simultaneously hiding the role played by a person by that name in Haiti is a classic case study of what Trouillot explains as silencing the History actively and passively. By that, it is incredible that the role played not only by the former Bossale slave, Colonel Jean-Baptiste Sans Souci but the entire 'Congos' has been hidden, overwritten and erased by the Creoles successfully.

"It is Retrospective significance can be created by the actors themselves, as a past within their past, or as a future within their present. Henry I killed Sans Souci twice: first, literally, during their last meeting; second, symbolically, by naming his most famous palace Sans Souci. This killing in history was as much for his benefit as it was for our wonder. It erased Sans Souci from Christophe’s own past, and it erased him from his future, what has become the historians’ present."

How the larger Haitian society hides the guilt by bringing in a negative connotation to the word Congos and Bossales is telling response on how societies play a role in hiding the past in the aftermath of any historic event.


"For the Haitian urban elites, only Milot counts, and two of the faces of Sans Souci are ghosts that are best left undisturbed. The Colonel is for them the epitome of the war within the war, an episode that, until recently, they have denied, any retrospective significance. This fratricide sequence is the only blemish in the glorious epic of their ancestors’ victory against France, the only shameful page in the history of the sole successful slave revolution in the annals of humankind."

"Words like Congo and Bossale carry negative connotations in the Caribbean today. Never mind that Haiti was born with a majority of Bossales. As the Auguste brothers have recently noted, no one wondered how the label “Congo” came to describe a purported political minority at a time when the bulk of the population was certainly African-born and probably from the Congo region."


Also, while peeling away the layers of history of Haiti, he explains how the Western society actively Silenced, Muted and later played a role in distortion of its own complicity and the resultant feeling of guilt over Slavery.


"Colonization provided the most potent impetus for the transformation of European ethnocentrism into scientific racism. In the early 1700s, the ideological rationalization of Afro-American slavery relied increasingly on explicit formulations of the ontological order inherited from the Renaissance. But in so doing, it also transformed the Renaissance worldview by bringing its inequalities much closer to the very practices that confirmed them. Blacks were inferior and therefore enslaved; black slaves behaved badly and were therefore inferior. In short, the practice of slavery in the Americas secured the blacks’ position at the bottom of the human world."

Even the great western thinkers of yesteryears were graded with shades only differing in the amount of gray as far as Slavery is concerned.

"Buffon fervently supported a monogenist viewpoint: blacks were not, in his view, of a different species. Still, they were different enough to be destined to slavery. Voltaire disagreed, but only in part. Negroes belonged to a different species, one culturally destined to be slaves. That the material well-being of many of these thinkers was often indirectly and, sometimes, quite directly linked to the exploitation of African slave labor may not have been irrelevant to their learned opinions."


The western societies response, irrespective of which side they belonged to - Liberal or Conservative - was to trivialize the struggles against the slavery as a set of isolated events triggered by petty concerns of the Individuals who were slaved. By doing so, they refused to acknowledge the vice as whole but condemn it as discrete events of individual discontent due to specific Condition and Context, ensuring the system was never questioned.


"Most Western observers had treated manifestations of slave resistance and defiance with the ambivalence characteristic of their overall treatment of colonization and slavery. On the one hand, resistance and defiance did not exist, since to acknowledge them was to acknowledge the humanity of the enslaved."

"Built into any system of domination is the tendency to proclaim its own normalcy. To acknowledge resistance as a mass phenomenon is to acknowledge the possibility that something is wrong with the system."

By this, Trouillot explains how History is never a binary narration but is built by multiple facts and narrations layered one over the other and that itself distorting the way it is manifested to a reader who is unaware.

It is a revelation to us, when Trouillot goes into the past of Haitian history and reveals how a victor in the past had built a Palace over the dead body of his most dreaded enemy after vanquishing him, that the reason for the construction of Sans Souci by Henry-I dawns on us. Instead, all along the history the Western historians spin a non-existent story of the Prussian Emperor being an inspiration for Henry-I of Haiti to have created a structure in line with the one in Potsdam!
This is a classic case of History being Created, erased and maligned all that happening together to Silence the memory of Colonel Sans Souci.

For this reason, this book is a valuable tool and a revelation for those who are interested in history and want to elevate themselves into a better understanding about historical events.