Past reads Michel-Rolph Trouillot's first book, written in Haitian Kreyòl in 1977 while its young author was writing from New York City during the Duvalier years, as a work built on oral material rather than official record. The essay works through passages where Trouillot folds Vodou songs, prayers, and vocabulary into historical narration, showing how that choice turns memory into evidence and puts ordinary Haitians at the center of the revolutionary decades between 1791 and 1804.

Both Vodou and the Kreyòl language, on this reading, took shape under colonial repression and became the binding forces of Haitian resistance. Past also follows Trouillot's account of nineteenth-century oppression under new masters and his unsentimental reassessment of Toussaint Louverture, whose government used Vodou to keep the population subordinate — a class-based pattern that hardened into Haiti's predatory state.

Past treats the book as an under-read masterpiece whose defense of Haitian spiritual practice and language deserves more attention now that both are under pressure.