Eloge Pour Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Ti dife boule sou istoua Ayiti: Considering the stakes of Trouillot’s earliest work

“…The goal was to tell a different, popular history of the revolution […That] historiographical goal was pursued through a new experiment in form: writing the history as if spoken orally to a gathering of contemporary rural Haitians. (Dubois, 2012: 25, authors’ emphasis)…”

“…Writing in Creole, the language all Haitians speak, provided Trouillot a way of indirectly critiquing the Duvalierist interpretation of Haitian history by reaching out to all Haitians, not just the early wave of intellectuals who left the island and were often referred to as the “Frenchies,” as Jonassaint remembers. Dubois notes that this emphasis upon Haitian Creole was part of a more general movement, in both Haiti and the diaspora, to produce literature in the language accessible to everyone in the increasingly dispersed Haitian community (Dubois, 2012: p. 25); Frankétienne’s (1975) well-known novel, Dézafi , is the best-known example because of what Ben aptly describes as its pyrotechnical use of Haitian Creole and its innovative style that rocks between spiralist poetry and straightforward narration.…”

“…The linguistic choice made by the author of Ti dife boule was an attempt to “bridge the gap between the French language historiography written by Haitian intellectuals and the historical knowledge propagated in these other ways” (Dubois, 2012: 22). Haitian intellectuals had written in Creole since the mid-18th century, 3 and increasingly during and after the US Occupation (1915–1934) of Haiti.…”

“…Because Ti dife boule sou istoua Ayiti (henceforth, Ti dife boule ) was composed entirely in Haitian Creole, was never circulated widely, and has been out of print for decades, this narrative account of the Haitian Revolution and War of Independence has received little attention (US libraries collectively contain only 12 copies, and Ti dife boule is not cataloged in the Library of Congress, as Laurent Dubois (2012) notes (p. 25)). The unavailability in English of Trouillot’s early, understudied masterpiece represents a major gap in Haitian studies and in research on the development of his literary output.…”

“…The world’s first successful black slave revolution (1791–1803) and the New World’s first black republic did lend military and financial support early on to leaders of 19th-century independence movements such as Simón Bolívar (who rarely acknowledged Haiti’s assistance). These areas of study are at the center of debates in anthropology, history, religious studies, and literature today, as Dubois (2012) observes in a piece commemorating Trouillot’s life and work:[His] work was at the heart of that transformation as it made clear the ways in which the history of the region, and Saint-Domingue and Haiti in particular, are pivotal for examining questions of knowledge, power, history, politics and economics. (pp.…”