Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History Book Review

In his book “Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History”,  Michel-Rolph Trouillot highlights the power in the narrative. Through analysing the duality of the word “history” and relating it to specific historical events, Trouillot questions the importance of truth in and expounds upon the power held by the narrators of history. 

Trouillot states that the ambivalence of history is that the word means “both the facts of what happened and the narrative of those facts.” In history, the story that was told of what happened is just as important as the facts of what happened, and history is “...a story about those who won.” This simple statement relays an immense amount of power to the victors because they are the narrators. In the reality of the world we live in, the victors are European colonial powers. Europeans possessed the language and the conventional method of keeping records and so their stories will forever be in the narrative.

The Eurocentric nature of history is not due to the absence of record-keeping by other cultures and societies, but rather the oversight and deliberate disregard of non-Western record-keeping methods and languages by academia in the West. Foreign societies are deemed un-historical and are therefore removed from the narrative, if ever mentioned. Their methods are too ‘primitive’ for the European who assumes that “history requires a linear and cumulative sense of time that allows the observer to isolate the past as a distinct entity.” Therefore the narratives of societies whose concept of history is not dependent on time and chronological record-keeping is ignored. Europeans and the West continue to justify this ignorance with the belief that other cultures’ history places little importance in truth. Trouillot states that this belief is disproved by the use of evidentials in non-European languages. These languages have grammatical structures to assess evidence and rules that force the narrator to report the manner in which the evidence presented was collected. Such structures would provide a more accurate manner of story-telling . They do not exist in most European languages, yet these indeginous societies are stripped from the narrative and the power of the story is reserved for the Europeans. 

The issue of the single narrative then begs the questions: What is the importance of truth in history? Trouillot discusses the two methods in which  academics and historians deliberate this question. The constructivist manner “stresses the overlap between the historical process and narratives” . This viewpoint places great importance in the story and therefore great importance in the power behind those recalling the story. The positivist manner “[emphasizes] the distinction between the historical world and what we say or write about it”. The positivist viewpoint relies heavily on evidence and therefore in the supposed truth. It raises arguments about the motives, biases and personal agendas of those who collected the evidence. 

Although there is no accurate method to perceive history, it can be deduced from Trouillot’s analysis that history and power are thoroughly intertwined. One could provide their own speculations about the connotations of this power and its effect on the modern world. Does it further the personal agendas of the narrators? Does it justify certain wrongdoings by the narrators? Whatever the answer, the fact remains: the issue of the single narrative is one that needs to be resolved by the representation of indeginous stories in history.