The fort that shelled the French now belongs to Ogou Feray

Visiting Cap-Haitien for the first time in late October 2010, Le Glaunec walked out along the bay to the ruins of Fort Picolet and found the site in active religious use. His guide showed him stone recesses blackened by ceremonial smoke and wax stuck to the walls. Ogou Feray, the spirit of iron and war, favours the colour blue, and traces of blue are on the masonry, the ground and the stones. In one corner branches had been tied together to make a place of worship with no walls or ceiling, divided by a small painted balustrade, with a red central post where spirits and people meet and where initiates dance to the drums. On a second visit in the summer of 2013 he saw wooden structures used by traders who gather there during religious festivals. A rusted cannon lies beside an earthenware plate.

An analysis published in 2011 tested samples taken from masonry blocks in Port-au-Prince buildings of various ages that had been damaged in the earthquake. The concrete measured between 545 and 1,135 pounds per square inch. The minimum acceptable standard set by the American Concrete Institute is 2,500 pounds per square inch, so the weakest samples came in at about a fifth of what the material was supposed to deliver and the strongest at under half. The assessment also worked out the remedy. Raising the proportion of cement in a block from one part in thirty to one part in six, and using better aggregate, doubled the compressive strength. The ratio was known and the ingredients existed. What was missing was money to buy cement at the price Haitians were charged for it, and any institution able to insist that they did.

Human rights organisations inside and outside the Dominican Republic argued that stripping citizenship by circular contradicted the constitution itself. In 2010 the country adopted a new constitution which says that children of foreigners in transit or living illegally in the territory are not citizens by birth. The founding document was thereby brought into line with the migration law of 2004 and with what registry offices had already been doing. The same constitution created a Constitutional Court of thirteen judges charged with enforcing constitutional justice. Because the audit of the civil registry ran backwards, a birth recorded in 1983 could be suspended under a rule written in 2010, and the government also kept the Book of Foreigners for Dominicans of Haitian descent who could not prove their parents were legally resident. Generations of children born in the country are entered in it at birth.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot died in Chicago in July 2012. He was born in Port-au-Prince into a family of historians, left Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship, and spent his career in American universities, the last of them the University of Chicago. His first book, written in Haitian Creole in 1977, retold the revolution for readers who spoke the language the revolution was fought in. Haiti: State Against Nation, published in 1990, described a state sitting on top of a peasantry it taxed and did not serve. Silencing the Past, published in 1995, is the work that travelled furthest. It argued that power enters the record long before any historian arrives, at the moment a fact is made, filed, retrieved and finally told as a story, and that the revolution in Saint-Domingue was unthinkable to the Europeans who had to write it down. Scholars in fields with no interest in Haiti now use his terms to ask who kept the documents and what was never written at all.