#trouillot

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing of the Past (p. 115)

Michel-Rolph Trouillot (”Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History”) 

"I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion wil have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active--not more happy--nor more wise, than he was 6,000 years ago. The result will never vary--and to suppose that it will, is to suppose that the foregone man has lived in vain--that the foregone time is but the rudiment of the future--that the myriads who have perished have not been upon equal footing with ourselves--nor are we with our posterity." - Edgar Allan Poe [1844]

One of the rudiments of my training in Africana Studies has been structural critique--it's never enough to just study instances of overt prejudice, it's important to understand the ideologies and structures that undergird, enable, and sustain prejudice, however subtle. One such ideological battleground: Time. In particular, the idea of the linear passage of time, the association between the future and progress.

One of the primary justifications for colonialism and slavery was that people of color were "backwards" and "primitive"--in other words, stuck in the past. Unable to progress. In need of a(n imperial) helping hand to propel us into the present and toward the future.

Haitian historian, Michel-Rolph Trouillot puts it more elegantly in his book Silencing the Past: "The classification of all non-Westerners as fundamentally non-historical is tied to the assumption that history requires a cumulative and linear sense of time that allows the observer to isolate the past as a distinct entity." (Trouillot 7)

Poe, whom I'm reading on the recommendation of my committee chair, seems to be suggesting something similar. He refuses to believe in "human perfectability"--or the idea that humanity perfects itself (or progresses) with time. To suggest that we improve with time suggests that those who came before us were simply rudimentary versions of our more advanced, complex, better selves. Why is this a problem?

This reminds me of a question one of my students asked me in class once. While studying The History of Mary Prince (one of the only surviving Caribbean slave narratives), one of my students said to me: "How could anyone have let slavery happen? Wasn't it obvious that it was wrong?"

My response: "How do we continue to let slavery happen today?"

When we think of the past--especially traumatic moments in human history like the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the Holocaust, etc.--one of our primary coping mechanisms is to think of those people who supported or participated in these institutions as completely alien. As beings who could never exist in our present-day world. We separate ourselves ontologically from them: "Things were different back then. Those people were just from another time. They thought differently than we do today."

While there's some empirical truth to this, the danger arises when we can't see ourselves in "those people." Is it really hard to imagine sitting idly by while human rights atrocities persist globally? (We're all well aware of the moral problematics of owning a smartphone, of buying cheap clothes, of visiting the Caribbean as a tourist, etc.) I would contend then that it is the denial of one's relationship to the past that masks the fact of how deeply one continues to identify with it.

On a personal level, I've done this a lot. I often look back on my journals from middle school and high school and say to myself: "I don't recognize that person." or "How could I have thought that was okay?" or "I was just really different back then."

But why do I feel the need to estrange myself from younger versions of myself? The immediate answer: Because it's embarrassing. Because I don't want to be seen as the kind of person who would think or act in that way. I'm protecting myself from the traumatic realization that I am who I am now directly because of (not in spite of) who I was then--it's a form of escapism. And truly, I have changed in a lot of ways, and it may be very difficult for me to remember how and why I would have behaved in a certain way. But reading Poe and Trouillot remind me: It is our responsibility to remember who we used to be, and to remember how we justified being who we were at the time. It's the only way we avoid repeating our mistakes.

As a person of color in a humanities doctoral program, I deal with a lot of liberal white people who are eager to identify and critique prejudice (particularly racial prejudice), especially as it appears in the writing of other white writers and critics. The theatricality of their outrage often rather obviously masks a deep sense of triumph--that their ability to identify and denounce prejudice is a sign of their fundamental difference from those they critique. It reassures them that they themselves are not racist. This, of course, seems paradoxical to me, because I am often witness to their consistent racial micro-aggressions.

Again, I think the swiftness with which they distance themselves from these writers is a sign of how much they continue to struggle with racism. Trouillot, again, puts it beautifully:

"We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be, but if we stop pretending we may gain in understanding what we lose in false innocence."

Poe's suggests that anytime we imagine ourselves as progressing, or improving with the passage of time, we are subscribing to the notion of human perfectability. We can explain away our behavior with the idea that we were primitive or immature--but ultimately we do a disservice to our sincere attempts at self-shaping by not taking seriously who we once were as fundamental parts of who we are now.

"We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be, but if we stop pretending we may gain in understanding what we lose in false innocence."