Mariana Past reads Michel-Rolph Trouillot's first book, written in Haitian Kreyol in Brooklyn in 1977, as a work whose form carries its politics. Ti dife boule sou istoua Ayiti treats Vodou songs, prayers, proverbs and ritual vocabulary as historical sources rather than as local colour, and Past traces passage by passage how that choice reshapes the account of the revolution. The ceremony at Bwa Kayiman appears there as religious and political at once, supplying the enslaved with an organisation and a conviction they had no other means of acquiring. Past also follows Trouillot's harder claim about what came next, that Toussaint Louverture's government drew on the same popular religion to keep the labouring population in place, and that these class arrangements hardened into a predatory Haitian state. Writing in Kreyol for a Haitian readership living under Duvalier, Trouillot made language and religion the twin supports of resistance. Past argues the book remains badly understudied.