silencing

Michel-Rolph Trouillot's "The Three Faces of Sans Souci" takes the Haitian ruins of Sans Souci as a case study for his investigation into historiography and the "silencing of the past." What's interesting is that he regards the ruins themselves as both complicit in this silencing and as a form of resistance against it.

Sans Souci refers, in the first instance, to the lavish palace built by Henry Christophe, self-styled post-revolutionary King of Haiti (or rather, the north of the country) in the early nineteenth century. In the second instance, it refers to another palace of the same name, built a few years earlier by Prussian Emperor Frederick the Great in Potsdam, near Berlin. Finally, Sans Souci was also the name of a now almost forgotten Haitian revolutionary who had, in fact, been put to death on Christophe's orders.

Trouillot's argument is that the Haitian palace is named for Christophe's former rival, in order both to establish and to extirpate his memory. On the one hand, "Henry killed Sans Souci twice: first, literally, during their last meeting; second, symbolically, by naming his most famous palace Sans Souci . . . [which] erased Sans Souci from Christophe's own past, and it erased him from his future." On the other hand, "Christophe may even have wanted to perpetuate the memory of his enemy as the most formidable one he defeated" (59). However, now that it is generally assumed that the source of the name was its German precursor, even that original silencing is itself silenced and the revolutionary Sans Souci effectively disappears from history. The final result is "an erasure more effective than the absence or failure of memory, whether faked or genuine" (60).


Yet Trouillot also suggests that acts of erasure such as Henry Christophe's are "silences of resistance, silences thrown against a superior silence," specifically here the silence "which Western historiography has produced around the revolution of Saint Domingue / Haiti." In this context the now "crumbling walls" of the former palace "still stand as a last defense against oblivion" (69). They recall at least one move in the internecine strategies played out among those who led the Haitian revolution, disrupting both the heroic narrative preferred by Haitians themselves, and also the broader attempt to portray the revolution as some kind of non-event.

Finally, Trouillot further argues that history is necessarily incomplete, and so warns against the hyper-empiricist fantasy that "an enlargement of the empirical base" will necessarily lead to "the production of a 'better' history." No: "Silences are inherent in history because any single event enters history with some of its constituting parts missing" (49). As such, history is always a collection of ruins; it is history itself that is, at root, ruined in advance.