Firstly, I will admit that I have not yet finished reading Silencing the Past (sorry Christina) but I am VERY eager to finish it. Even though I’m not done, I can say that this is probably my second favorite text we’ve read so far. I don’t know which prof picked this book, but I owe many thanks to them.
I’ve heard the question ‘is history real?’ many times myself, but I’ve never fully understood how to begin pondering this issue until reading this book. Everything Trouillot brings up is so thought-provoking, and I’m glad that he presents his views in a way that is completely clear and unbiased.
I can think back to my AP European History class, and I fondly remember my teacher saying that it wasn’t his job to simply teach history, but to teach us the meaning of it. That class ended up being one of the best I’ve had, and it made it even more interesting to read this book.
Now for a few points I thought were interesting about Trouillot’s views:
Connecting the different ways to interpret history to linguistics – I am a huge linguistics nerd, I’m not gonna lie, and I find it incredibly intelligent and refreshing that Trouillot included this little blurb in the first chapter. Not only is language made up of (and makes up) morphology, phonetics, and semantics, but it is plausible that history does as well. Morphology being word structures, or in history being the details of certain situations and events; phonetics being the echoes that are left behind by said events; and semantics being the meaning of history.
I also find Trouillot’s comparison of history to a memory store very fascinating. It is believed that long term memory has the potential to hold everything we’ve ever experienced in its depths, yet we don’t remember every detail of our lives. The same is for history. While the history we have come to know is made up of specific events and dates and people that are easy to memorize, what about all the people we don’t remember? They are part of history, but it is more about their relevance in the context they are in that makes them memorable. They’re certainly not fictional, but in places where there is little distinction between history and fiction, it is easy for people to disregard the fact that they did exist even if they didn’t do something important. I think this is sort of what Trouillot is getting at – just like some things enter our short term memory and disappear, there are parts of history that certainly have the potential to be relevant, but it depends on societal and environmental context to make them relevant. Therefore, history can only be made up of what we view as relevant.
I also find it very interesting to learn about Haiti. I don’t know much about the history of this country, and of course it’s even better to hear it from the point of view of a Haitian. I’m super excited to finish this book and now, read next week’s book. I think it’ll be easy to write about either of them (knock on wood).
One reply on “You Go, Trouillot”
I agree with you–this is one of my favourite books so far too! We have Jon Beasley-Murray to thank for choosing it. There is so much here to think about, so many complex and interesting arguments. I hadn’t put together the point about linguistics as well as you did, so thank you for that! I’m curious to hear more about the idea of the meaning of history; Trouillot talks about how his focus is not on what history is, but how it works, but I hadn’t thought of this quite in terms of “meaning” before. It makes sense to me in that we can ask about why certain things get counted as “history” and others don’t, and what that says or means about the workings of power. That may or may not be what you mean here, though!
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