Trouillot dies, leaving the archive itself under suspicion

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.

Two months after the ruling, in November 2013, President Danilo Medina announced by decree that a regularisation plan would be created, and the plan itself was established in December. In 2014 the Dominican Republic passed Naturalisation Law 169-14. It divided people into two groups. The first was the roughly fifty five thousand people born in the country whose citizenship had been annulled; the law restored their nationality, and five years later about half of them had actually recovered their documents. The second was people born in the country whose births had never been registered, because they were born outside a hospital or left one without papers. To become citizens they had first to declare themselves Haitian nationals, enter the register for foreigners and wait two years for a naturalisation procedure nobody had defined. Enrolment took repeated journeys and money for transport. Before the deadline, 8,755 applications were filed.

Jean-Claude Duvalier returned to Haiti on 16 January 2011, twenty five years after leaving, having spent the whole period in France without ever being troubled by the authorities there. Duvalierists gave him a triumphal welcome at the airport and declared that the country had been in better shape under him. Onlookers cheered a president for life whom their own age made it impossible for them to remember in office. Police and soldiers of the United Nations mission escorted him to a hotel in Petionville. On 19 January the first victims filed complaints against him and his associates. Haitian justice charged the former dictator that same day with crimes against humanity, financial crimes, corruption, embezzlement of public funds, theft and criminal association. In February 2011 plaintiffs and human rights organisations formed the Collective against Impunity. The general population said little in public, and most victims kept silent for about a year.

Pottery excavated at sites in Puerto Rico and the islands beside it comes in two styles of the same date, and archaeologists have argued for thirty years about what that means. Irving Rouse and others treated the makers of the Huecoid wares as part of the same cultural stock as their neighbours, holding that a difference in decoration is not a difference in people. Luis Chanlatte Baik argued the opposite, that the pottery and the carved stone ornaments of these sites are distinct enough to mark a tradition with its own origin. The dispute went nowhere for a long time, because the evidence was thin and each side could read the same sherds either way. Excavation with controlled stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating has since settled part of it, mostly by establishing which deposits are genuinely contemporary. Keegan and Hofman use the case to show a limit of their discipline. Ethnic and social boundaries in the ancient Caribbean have to be inferred from what people threw away, and objects move between communities more easily than identities do.