Historians as Wanderers: Silencing in Historical Narratives

Historians as Wanderers: Silencing in Historical Narratives

What is history? This is a question that has been repetitively discussed by intellectuals and scholars. During the age of the Enlightenment, history was increasingly perceived as a science conducted by a historical guild based on the belief that everything could be understood through reason. These positivist views of history were criticized by Michel-Rolph Trouillot because they fail to observe the account of the production of historical narrative. Instead of asking what history is, Trouillot asked how the historical narratives were produced through a cumulative effect of silencing, by discerning crucial moments from history-as-process: the moment of making sources and archives, the moment of fact retrieval, and the moment of retrospective significance.

In chapter two, Trouillot told the story of Sans Souci, which perfectly illustrated the silencing effect in the making of sources and archives. In this story, the words “Sans Souci” possessed three layers of meaning: the name of the palace built by Henry Christophe in 1813, and the name of a palace built by Frederick the Great in 1747, as well as the name of Colonel Jean-Baptiste Sans Souci who resisted the French invasion of Haiti. The Colonel refused to give up fighting even after the main revolutionary officials had surrendered to the French and were later killed by Henry Christophe through trickery. There is no single historian who has tried to connect the naming of Christophe’s palace to the Colonel who Christophe had executed. In contrast to the Colonel who was forgotten, the palace which was massively destroyed by natural disaster still towers over the town of Milot, and through the ruins people can imagine its past glory and splendor. Since the palace was the product of the finest of Haitian architects and craftsmen, it should be held on parallel with the domicile of that great Prussian king Frederick II, Schloss Sanssouci, even though no German influence has been found. In such context, how could Christophe’s palace then be possibly connected to the Colonel, who left almost no record after his death? The enormous amount of records, both physical and literary, left by Christophe, in comparison to scanty evidence preserved regarding Colonel Sans Souci, best exemplifies the silencing effect in the making of records and archives.

The Haitian Revolution was silenced because it was “unthinkable” to contemporary Europeans. The idea of scientific racism originated during the period of the enlightenment when white people increasingly encountered non-white people in the 18th century. The white male was perceived as the only kind completely “man”, while non-whites were considered less “man,” and black people were at the bottom of the hierarchy. Blacks were thus seen as unable to govern themselves and destined to be enslaved. The Haitian Revolution, the first black revolution in world history, was thus unthinkable to contemporary whites because admitting the fact of a massive organized black rebellion was to admit black people’s humanity. Both before and during the Revolution, whites in France and Saint-Domingue refused to believe that a Haitian revolution could and then did happen. What was more important was that the revolution was seldom discussed in France, even though Saint-Domingue was particularly important in French colonial history. Therefore, European intellectuals did not possess the ideological instruments needed to analyze, interpret and accept the Haitian Revolution. A black revolution was “unthinkable” to westerners and the event was silenced in western narratives. The Haitian Revolution was further marginalized in the Bicentennial of the French Revolution when massive works were published on the issue while the colonial revolution was completely ignored. The very silencing was not only conducted by western scholars, but also by Haitian historians themselves, when Colonel Sans Souci’s rebellion against revolutionary officials, a “war within a war,” was ignored and demonized. The Colonel was reduced from a potentially important character to a nobody.

The silencing and the myth-making are two sides of one coin. While historians enjoy the benefit of hindsight which enables them to understand the importance of historical events from a retrospective perspective, they also isolate and mythicize particular historical events, like the landing of Christopher Columbus on the Bahamas, October 12th, 1492. Columbus was not a big name in the 18th century, but by the end of the 19th century, he was celebrated as a hero in both Spain and the US. Columbus was first used as a tool for Italians and Irish Catholics to assimilate into the US, and then the very figure himself as a symbol augmented the US claim of ownership of the American continent. In contrast, Columbus was celebrated in Spain as a way to revitalize the national spirit in a time of economical downfall. No one cared about the truth of that Genovan sailor, and so the meaning of Columbus’ “discovery” was only seen through a retrospective lens.

Columbus Day is celebrated differently today than it was in the 1890s. The minorities in the US denounce the celebration of Columbus’ conquest and try to redirect its historical narrative. Similarly, no historian today would deny the humanity of black people. What’s the implication of this shift of opinions to historians? Some people might argue that the development of the historiographical methodology in the 1960s extended historical narratives to minorities, while Trouillot claimed that these different ways to treat Columbus’ conquest were essentially the same because they all revealed retrospective significance. Columbus’ discovery was viewed in one way up to the 1890s, and then it was viewed in another way up to today. This implicates that the production of history is itself historical. The problem is that many historians do not realize the existence of such a historical context when they are separating the past from the present. The cumulative silencing effect caused by uneven power makes history even more messy and difficult to trace. Historians depicted by Michel-Rolph Trouillot lose their heroic role of rediscovering and restoring the past; instead, they are wanderers who are lost in the sea of history and blindly follow the waves.