In the only successful slave revolt to take place, self-liberated slaves rose up against French colonialism in Saint Domingue, finally declaring their independence as Haiti. The Haitian Revolution was a turning point that marked the idea of racial equality as finally imaginable as an important part of universal rights. Despite its momentous strides and victorious outcome, though, the story of the revolution was erased, banalized, and little told. In Silencing the Past, Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Touillot present an analysis of historical narrative and discusses why some stories are heard while others are silenced, especially in the context of the Haitian Revolution. Trouillot conceptualizes globalization historically as a compilation of what is not silenced by focusing on the role of power dynamics, the application of silences at different points of historical production, and the responses to the Haitian Revolution.
Power firstly serves as a means of production for the narrative itself, as it makes some stories possible while silencing others. “History is a story about power, a story about those who won,” as those in positions of control influence (5). Touillot refers to the Sans Souci palace, one of the only remnants of the Haitian Revolution whose every mention, even “the very resilience of the physical structure itself,” covers up any focus on Sans Souci the man, the African-born slave and later military general (48). Henry Christophe, another leader in the Revolution who eventually became King of Haiti, effectively wrote Sans Souci the man out of the country’s history by having him killed and building the elaborate palace to replace the meaning of his name. Christophe essentially controlled the production of history through his power, overshadowing the story of the first Sans Souci. Thus, while the “ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility,” Touillot challenges it through the “exposition of its roots,” finally telling the silenced story of Sans Souci the man (xxiii).
Silences enter the process of historical production during fact creation, assembly, retrieval, and retrospective significance, thus resulting in the conceptualization of globalization as what remains unsilenced. Firstly, there is a silencing in the making of sources, in the decision-making of which events are described, remembered, and recorded. This silencing in sources carries over to fact assembly through archives, where some records are preserved, while others compete for narrators’ attention. Again, choices are made when narrators themselves select which stories they will focus on, since archives are extensive. Not every narrative, however, becomes a part of the general past, the standardly accepted historical narrative, so what eventually becomes known as the “history” of a particular event, person, or place only consists of the stories that were not silenced in the four crucial stages of historical production. In this way, narratives become more important than truth because what society has accepted as history does not reflect the whole reality of the past but rather only the parts that were selected for. *** need evidence here
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The Haitian Revolution’s reception as unimaginable and unacceptable further corroborates the role of power dynamics and scientific racism, leading to silencing at the source. Western thought simply did not allow for the idea of a collective, organized, and victorious slave uprising against the white authority to exist, despite how brutal of a slave regime the colonial planters enacted in Saint Domingue under the Code Noir of 1685, under Louis XIV’s edict. Black people were in fact the majority of the island population, yet opposing views attributed the Haitian success instead to the contribution of outside factors, such as military efficiency of the slaves and French susceptibility to yellow fever. The West’s failure to acknowledge the most successful slave revolt in history resulted in gross distortions in how the events were portrayed and recorded by sources and in how narratives were selectively built around these sources. The National Assembly in France claimed the situation of “unfree persons in the colonies” to be a colonial issue, not a national issue; the “unthinkable” nature of this revolution reflected the world’s deep prejudice against the black race.
