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

Introduction

There is a message in my inbox that I won’t ever delete: a pair of straightforward sentences, written by Michel-Rolph Trouillot in December 2011 (sent with the assistance of his wife Anne-Carine), granting me permission to translate into English his first published book, Ti dife boule sou istoua Ayiti (1977) or Burning Issues in Haitian History, a provisional title. Beyond allowing me to interpret his (nearly impossible to find) text, Trouillot kindly thanked me for my interest in his work and wished me luck in the endeavor. It is auspicious to now be carrying out this timely translation project with my colleague Benjamin Hebblethwaite, a specialist in French and Haitian Creole linguistics at the University of Florida, and Jacques Pierre, who teaches Haitian Creole at Duke University, has agreed to provide help with complex ideas and idiomatic expressions. Thanks to recent support we have received from the National Endowment of the Arts, in the form of a Literature Translation Grant, this enterprise is progressing apace.

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 objective of the translation underway is to render Ti dife boule accessible to a wide public for the first time through an original English translation and critical apparatuses; the final manuscript will include an introduction, rich annotations (footnotes, endnotes, and an index), and a glossary of key Haitian Creole terminology. Ben and I intend to make freely accessible to the public as much of the translation and critical apparatus as possible; at least some part will be placed within the Digital Library of the Caribbean. In the reflections that follow, we will briefly describe our engagement with Trouillot’s work, highlight some of the complexities and creative features of Ti dife boule, illustrate how it lays the groundwork for some of his later thought, and finally offer some speculations about why Trouillot waited many years to authorize the translation of this important text into English.

I came to this translation project somewhat circuitously during my graduate studies at Duke University, where I focused on Spanish and French Caribbean literature and history. In retrospect, Ben and I were fortunate to enter the profession at a time when Caribbean and Haitian Studies were becoming much better established, Latin American studies programs were expanding to include Caribbean Studies, and publishing in Haitian Creole applied linguistics was making Haitian Creole and English more accessible than ever before (Freeman (1996–2004), 2010; Valdman et al., 2007). Today I appreciate more fully that Trouillot (1995) was the impetus for many of these developments; his work influenced my research from the beginning. Reading his Silencing the Past in Sibylle Fischer’s seminar during my first semester was illuminating, and Jean Jonassaint’s course on 20th-century Francophone literature in migration familiarized me more with diasporic Caribbean cultural production. Jonassaint was later my Haitian Creole teacher, encouraged me to attend the Florida International University (FIU) Haitian Summer Institute, and introduced me to his friend Frankétienne. As a final project for a subsequent independent-study Haitian Creole course with Jonassaint, he recommended that I translate into English the first two chapters of Ti dife boule, which had never been previously translated. This exciting challenge led me to engage with—and often spar with—the Creole language on a new level, as well as to closely consider Trouillot’s revisionist history of Haiti. For his part, Ben discovered an original copy of Ti dife boule as a graduate student working at the Indiana University Creole Institute’s library, lovingly maintained by Dr Albert Valdman. Since then he has toted around a photocopy.

In 2003, as a graduate student, I proposed to present on Ti dife boule for the Haitian Studies Association conference at FIU-Biscayne Bay, where Trouillot himself was to be recognized for his contributions to the field (and I was petrified). He was unable to attend due to health reasons, unfortunately, but a sizeable audience was enraptured to hear quotations read in Creole from his earliest published work (and several people offered to reimburse me if I would mail them photocopies of my copy of the text!). A welcome surprise followed that event: Robert Fatton of the University of Virginia invited me to contribute an expanded version of my talk to the special bicentenary issue he was editing for the Journal of Haitian Studies. Although Trouillot deserves better, this remains the only scholarly article to specifically address Ti dife boule (Past, 2004). It was some years later, in the context of Duke’s Haiti Lab, that the idea of completing the translation resurfaced. I had returned to Durham during a year of leave, having completed my doctoral work and accepted a position at Dickinson College; while there, Deborah Jenson and Laurent Dubois asked me to join a working group, “Creole texts and contexts,” and assist with discussion of Ti dife boule. Afterwards, they suggested that I seek Trouillot’s permission to complete the English translation so that a wider audience could read it. Two more years elapsed until I finally did. In the interval, a new Haitian Creole edition of Trouillot’s book appeared with the spelling updated (Trouillot, 2012).

Although I never had the pleasure of personally meeting Trouillot, I remain profoundly grateful to him for the insights he sparked in me, which I took for granted early on: the concepts of Haiti as revolutionary catalyst, Haiti as an example (instead of an exception), and Haiti as fundamental agent for the development of a Caribbean—and, arguably, a Latin American—identity. 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. 21–22)

Challenging stereotypes and traditions, Trouillot insisted on a critical examination of Haitian history, including its received truths and heroes, and he has greatly influenced a new generation of scholars.

Contextualizing Trouillot’s first book

So how does Ti dife boule fit into this intellectual trajectory? Trouillot’s first book was written and published through Kolèksion Lakansièl ¹ immediately after he immigrated to the United States to escape the brutal repression of student activists by the Jean-Claude Duvalier dictatorship. Trouillot had not yet completed his BA in Caribbean history and culture at Brooklyn College, City University of New York (1978). He was simultaneously working as a cab driver to cover educational costs and support his family, while also writing poetry and journalism. The young author’s unassuming signature to Ti dife boule, “Brooklyn/September 1975/May 1977,” evokes an era of intense social change and political struggle: these 16 months were part of a second major wave of Haitian immigration to the United States, Canada, and beyond, wherein the diaspora grew by leaps and bounds and Haitian communities became better established in New York, Boston, and Miami, and Montréal. ² Dubois clearly frames the political context surrounding the genesis of Trouillot’s first publication:

Writing in New York City in the late 1970’s as a member of the diasporic opposition to the “Baby Doc” Duvalier régime, Trouillot was intent on mobilizing history to urge forward political resistance in the present. In order to do so, he needed to wrest the narrative of the Haitian Revolution away from the Duvalier regime, which had expertly shaped and appropriated that narrative to support its own power. 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. Historical works, along with plays and poetry, were privileged at first; later, increasingly, prose and works in the social sciences were published in Creole. Dubois (2012) points out that many political figures, such as Thomas Madiou (1848) and the popular political leader Daniel Fignolé (1947), published in the historical genre, but

Trouillot’s experiment […] represented a different and bold step: no one had ever written an in-depth history in Creole […] Bridging that gap was part of a larger attempt to bridge the chasm between elite and popular Haiti, to seek out the foundations for political alliances that could help generate a truly participatory democracy in the country (pp. 26–27).

Accordingly, Ti dife boule focused upon “song, ceremony, objects, story-telling, painting and debates in households like those [Trouillot] had listened to growing up” (p. 26). Trouillot has since influenced a number of studies or essays written on Haitian history in Haitian Creole: Casimir (2000, 2004) and Roy Fombrun (1985). At the time of its publication, Ti dife boule circulated to some degree among Haitian and Haitianist intellectuals, but rarely beyond that circle (Dubois, 2012: 27). The book’s Creole re-edition in 2012 has made it somewhat more accessible, though still to a limited audience, and the new edition suffers from various editorial shortcomings and errors.

In terms of its readership, Ti dife boule, though published in New York, clearly addresses a Haitian audience. As the Haitian-Canadian, Maximilien Laroche (1991) points out, the book represents an early example of the inside versus outside dilemma facing many Haitian writers today who live in the Haitian diaspora but publish in Haiti’s majority language, Haitian Creole. Sounding the depths of their language and culture, authors like Patrick Sylvain (2005), Jan Mapou (1996), Émile Célestin-Mégie (2003), Jacques Pierre (2012), or Georges Castera (2013), like the standard bearer, Trouillot, have devoted themselves to writing and publishing in their nation’s majority language in order to contribute to the development of a Haitian Creole corpus of publications.

In a strictly Haitian framework, Trouillot’s choice of publishing in Haitian Creole went against the practice of most Haitian authors who routinely pursued publishing in French in order to access foreign book markets and revenue—and there is no blame in feeding one’s family. And yet, even though 100% of all Haitians speak Haitian Creole, power in Haiti is exercised by a small group of elite urban-dwellers who speak French in addition to Haitian Creole (only approximately 5% are considered balanced bilingual ⁴ ). The only way to ascend the social ladder in Haiti, whether one is rich or poor, from a bilingual family (French/Creole) or one that is monolingual (Creole-only), is to master the French minority language. Therefore, Trouillot’s decision to write Ti dife boule in Haitian Creole represents a decisive and Haiti-changing statement about language rights and language inequality in Haiti. He was showing Haiti that Haitian Creole was fully able to engage any science, any matter. His language policy reflects a Marxist analytical framework that implicitly critiques the Haitian establishment’s use of the minority language, French, to limit access to power just as they bind it to their families. Today, in a nation where the majority language is still marginalized in the context of the state and education, Ti dife boule stands tall among the first generation of books that initiated the process of expanding the Haitian Creole corpus of scholarly publications. As Lodge (1993) points out, publishing represents the foundation of language empowerment.

Jean Jonassaint (2002) regards Ti dife boule as a towering example of this emerging trend toward Haitian literary production in the Americas:

The 1970’s […] saw the emergence of a number of Haitian-American places of publication, notably in 1975, which was quite exceptional in displaying a certain “taking charge” of Haitian writing in the American space. [In particular, a bilingual French-Haitian] literary journal in New York, Lakansièl, which allowed Michel-Rolph Trouillot to experiment with his work in Haitian and to define his aesthetics and his relation to the Haitian socio-political arena. […] It was not by chance that he published his first book, in 1977, under the Lakansièl imprint. This was Ti dife boule sou istoua Ayiti, a magnificent historical work written in Haitian from a Marxist perspective, but framed like a popular Haitian narrative. It was the first text of its length in Haitian (some 200 pages), and also, along with [George] Castera’s Konbélann […], the most significant work in Haitian written by a Haitian in the United States […] The [close of the 1970s] confirms the emergence of the Haitian language, and marks the next period as the decade of the essay and of the emergence of English as the language of choice for Haitians in the United States. (p. 438)

Several decades before “World Literature” programs became mainstream in universities, Trouillot’s Ti dife boule emerged as part of a burgeoning new movement in diasporic cultural production; however, it did not receive the attention—then or now—that it deserves.

Steeped as it is in the formative period of radical Haitian politics in North America, Ti dife boule is arguably one of Trouillot’s most important works, yet remains the least known of his publications. The Marxist critique of colonial history that he develops through the prism of Haitian history is an incisive contribution to New World historiography, political science, and the social sciences. Trouillot’s book is significant in that it shows how Haiti’s Revolution holds the clues to interpreting and critiquing Haiti’s more recent history. Instead of following the epic tradition glorifying revolutionary heroes, Trouillot delivers an iconoclastic critique of the European-inspired traditions of governance displayed by the Haitian rebel generals while re-examining the fundamental but underappreciated contributions of the ex-slave Haitian warriors in the Revolution and War. In a well-documented and accessible manner, drawing from Haiti’s popular storytelling tradition, proverbs and songs, Ti dife boule explores the rivalries, murders, and gamesmanship that mark the formation of the Haitian State and traces their harmful effect upon the evolution of the State in independent Haiti. Although the Duvaliers are not explicitly mentioned in Ti dife boule, parallels are implied in the analysis of Toussaint’s nationalistic and paternalistic ideologies—ones that often ran and run in the opposite direction from the hopes of the Haitian peasantry and urban proletariat, the majority social classes of the nation.

Trouillot’s populist oral history of Haiti confronts forms of hero-worship and the mythologizing of historical figures and events common in Haitian popular discourse and post-revolutionary historiography. Ti dife boule relentlessly challenges the assumption that Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe were leaders who were attentive to the suffering of the former slaves who fought the Haitian Revolution, and it argues that the goals of this long and violent conflict were incomplete and only partly successful. These ideas are echoed in a more academic style in Trouillot’s (1990) later, highly-acclaimed work, Haiti: State against Nation, where he writes,

In retrospect, it is easy to see that the major weakness of Louverture’s party, and the fundamental contradiction of his regime, was the leadership’s failure to face the fact that the goal of unconditional freedom was incompatible with the maintenance of the plantation system, despite the massive exodus of white planters […] Even though state and nation were taking shape at the same time and as a part of the same revolutionary process, they were launched in opposite directions. State and nation were tied by the ideal of liberty, but the nation measured its liberty in Sunday markets and in the right to work on its garden plots. The Louverture party, on the other hand, embryo of the state-to-come and ferocious defender of this same liberty, was firmly attached to the plantation system. The leaders wanted export crops; the cultivators wanted land and food. […] The politicians and ideologues who emerged during the struggle were busy sketching the themes of a nationalist discourse while the emerging national community, pushed into the background, was beginning to shape a peasant world view of its own. Political independence only increased the gap between leaders and producers, because while it confirmed the end of slavery, it also confirmed the existence of the state, that embodied the gap. (pp. 43–45)

In Chapter 7 of Ti dife boule, Trouillot sharply criticizes the “father myth” propagated by Toussaint. And in State against Nation he observes,

Toussaint Louverture was the first politician to baptize himself “Father” (M.-R. Trouillot, 1977). [Such nicknames …] suggested positive relationships between those in power and certain segments of the masses. To this Duvalier added the positive-sounding appellation “Doc,” familiar nickname for beloved and respected doctors. (p. 240 n)

Such parallels between Trouillot’s first publication and his later scholarly work abound. In Ti dife boule, after roundly critiquing the legend of Louverture and the chasm separating his objectives from the interests of the ex-slave Haitian revolutionary masses, Trouillot goes on to trace the genealogy of the corrupt nativist ideology that has influenced Haiti for two centuries. The essentialist black power philosophy grew strong during the period of the US Occupation in Haiti. Authors like François Duvalier, among many others, argued that they could speak for the impoverished black majority, but they ultimately reproduced colonial patterns of government, using terror and violence to repress any form of dissent, thereby enslaving the Haitian population. Ti dife boule underlines the socio-economic and political contradictions and inequalities found in the colony of Saint-Domingue, outlines the impact of these tensions on the Haitian people in contemporary Haiti, and proposes alternative revolutionary heroes to the leaders who are generally heralded as icons both inside and outside of Haiti. (One example is Moyse, the more left-leaning nephew of Toussaint Louverture, whom the general had executed.)

Throughout Trouillot’s work runs a strong egalitarianism, one form of which being that historical knowledge should be accessible to anyone. It is the responsibility of intellectuals to counter the tendency toward maintaining boundaries or withholding truths and critiques in order to support ulterior personal or familial advantages. Ti dife boule was the opening salvo in Trouillot’s intellectual effort to dispel widespread ignorance and calumny toward and inside of Haiti. He critiqued what he saw as passivity about the past among Haitians themselves. Throughout his life, Trouillot resisted entrenched stereotypes depicting Haitians as powerless and predisposed to failure and misfortune; he inspired Haitians both at home and abroad to collective action undergirded by unity in Haitian Creole.

Inspiring his fellow Haitians to listen, think, and take action is Trouillot’s goal in Ti dife boule. Each chapter opens with lines of verse that draw the reader in by creating the sense of an informal oral performance. In this way, Ti dife boule calls readers to engagement with Haiti’s problems through an inalienable Haitian frame of reference, asserting the pivotal role of the Haitian people’s indigenous culture, Haitian Creole, which concretizes Haitian unity, and Haitian Vodou, which inspires warriors with conviction, in the still incomplete struggle for liberation. ⁵ As Dubois (2012) points out, woven into Ti dife boule are the

central themes that would guide and shape Trouillot’s work over the coming decades: respect for multiple historical perspectives, the centrality of the Caribbean peasantry in the region’s past, present and future, the power of silence, and the power of breaking silence. (p. 27)

Trouillot’s narrative voice in Ti dife boule draws from Haiti’s rich oral traditions in order to provide an accessible account of political ideologies. The emphasis on the historical roots of Haiti’s political culture in Ti dife boule remains central throughout Trouillot’s later scholarly works which were written in English and French and translated into numerous languages.

As a narrative Ti dife boule is difficult to situate in terms of genre because Trouillot simultaneously weaves together the narrative approaches of historiography, social sciences, Marxism, and oraliture in the form of Haiti’s storytelling tradition, proverbs and songs. The narrative is also imbued with a flourishing use of language, rich in rollicking Creole expressions and images. Ones like vouzan! “fuck off!,” kafou déchinnin, “enraged crossroads,” Tout banda chanpèt sé nan mòn, “Every country dance is in the hills,” chimen mangonmin, “the complicated way,” or yo té mouri kou mouch nan malatchonn, “they died like flies in a trap,” go to the very marrow of Haitian oral style. Most often, stories in Haitian folklore include a setting, or time frame, that appears universal or atemporal; specific temporal information about historical facts and events is not usually included beyond references to the objects in Haitian life like gold necklaces, radios, farming implements, drums, and so on (see Freeman, 2002). Oral folklore addresses power and greed by means of fictional animal or human characters like konpè Kabrit, konpè Tig, konpè Chen, Ti Bèf, or Bouki and Ti Malis, among many others (see Parsons, 1933–1943). In contrast, Ti dife boule presents many important dates chronologically in the Haitian people’s path to independence in order to support its Marxist analysis demonstrating (1) the profoundly radical nature of the Haitian Revolution, (2) its unfinished nature, and (3) how Haitian leaders acted against the people’s best interests from the very beginning. The earliest date cited is 1625, the earliest known date for the first French contact with the western third of Hispaniola (Trouillot, 1977:20); the latest date cited is 1825, the year that France recognized the independence of Haiti (Trouillot, 1977: 15). This analysis explores how French capitalists used financial, legal, administrative, military, ecclesiastical, and “class architectural” methods to establish, justify, and maintain a self-enriching plantation economy driven by imported African slave workers who were treated worse than animals. Massive financial windfalls were reaped by a coalition of plantation owners and French government administrators through a vicious racialist exploitation of human lives over several generations. Trouillot’s book contains a wealth of understudied historical information and its bibliography is replete with more than 50 published sources, including classic historical works by Madiou (1848), Ardouin (1958 [1853]), and Sannon (1920, 1932, 1933), in addition to numerous contemporary studies. The author cites these sources indirectly (instead of employing explicit quotations, notes, or even references to specific page numbers), and Ti dife boule is sometimes more tongue-in-cheek, descriptive, and parabolic than analytical in tone: for example, interspersed with syntheses and inventories of complex social or political realities and theories are proverbs, word plays, asides, rhetorical flourishes, popular expressions, metaphors drawn from the street, and drawings and songs from popular culture and Vodou religion. That language use points the reader to the deeper moral of the history he is reconstructing; the universals jolt the reader back-and-forth between the Haitian revolution and our own lives in the classism of our cultures.

Ti dife boule deliberately and consistently resonates with the popular Haitian worldview. In Chapters 1 and 2, readers encounter a narrator, “Grinn Prominnin,” who is a familiar visionary figure who gives the villagers access to their collective past; he is fueled at least in part by a beverage called “té koton,” or cotton tea. According to Jacques Pierre, “té koton” is a kind of tea made of a leaf named “fèy koton.” Women usually drink this tea to help them have more milk for breastfeeding. Many Haitians drink it to calm themselves down after having been in a state of shock. This kind of tea will help soothe the reader’s nerves after encountering this narrative of war and the ways of power. Second, the “Grinn Prominnin” character is a wayfarer who sees things (good people, bad people, magic, etc.) that lay people will never see. That is why he asked another character in the book, Lamèsi, for the tea because he saw many things that troubled him in Haitian history and therefore “needs the tea to help him calm down.” ⁶ Grinn Prominnin and the folkloric tropes in the book are narrative devices that serve multiple purposes: they expand the readership of the book by employing beloved figures of popular culture and they help render underlying lessons more accessible; they are a culturally relevant way to draw the reader into the important lessons of history. Chapter 3 depicts the Haitian Revolution compellingly as a marble game, then later as a runaway truck without brakes on one of Haiti’s treacherous mountain passes. Trouillot provides a straightforward Marxist class analysis of the Haitian Revolution and War of Independence; to support reader comprehension, he constantly weaves in the style and culture of Haitian Creole popular culture and religion.

Trouillot’s implicit critique of contemporary Haiti is that many failures represent the cyclical repetition of behaviors and mentalities put into place by the French colonial regime. Ti dife boule views Haiti’s struggles as an illness or virus transmitted over generations that is capable of mutating into new forms: “Fò jé nou byin foubi pou nou ka ouè maladi-a chak foua li réparèt figi-l” (Our eyes must be wide open to recognize this malady when it reappears) (p. 213). As in Haiti, State against Nation, Trouillot shows that the Haitian people have become accustomed to mistreatment by megalomaniacal leaders; through the long history of predatory power, post-1804 rural culture has been isolated and has isolated itself from the shifting sands of the capital’s political landscape. But this disconnection from political power undercuts the wellbeing of the nation. Haitians should realize that they can be a powerful social force if they embrace the very forces that underlie Haitian independence and identity: the Haitian Creole language and the Haitian culture, including respect for, if not practice of, Vodou religion. The responsibility and potential for progress is in the zantray “intestines” of Haitians themselves and not to be found in the outside world. Until Haitians embrace this inner power, foreign aid and intervention will effectively bring about little change. In 1977, Trouillot wrote with the Duvaliers’ dictatorship in the background and today Ti dife boule resonates in a post-earthquake Haiti where foreign non-governmental organizations, periodic US interventions, and the United Nations blue helmets exert a foreign influence on the nation. In a nation where the majority language is still marginalized in the state and educational system, Ti dife boule stands out as a starting point in the process of expanding the Haitian Creole corpus of social science scholarly publications. As a unique work in the history of Haitian Creole publishing and a beacon of intellectual empowerment, the English translation will serve as a valuable resource for readers across the curriculum.

Concluding comments

Ti dife boule has an exciting journey ahead in the hands of thinkers, students of history, and movers and shakers. Given the book’s widely recognized status as standard bearer of the Haitian Creole publishing movement, what might be some of the reasons for Trouillot’s earlier reticence regarding the translation of Ti dife boule? (My understanding is that the author received several requests before my own.) As Ben’s and my work on this project continues, we hope to further explore this question in conversations with the late author’s family, including his brother Lyonel Trouillot and sister Évelyne Trouillot, well-known writers themselves, and his sister Jocelyne Trouillot, who has shared a strong commitment to the area of Creole literacy. To date, a precise answer to the question has been difficult to pin down.

Many possibilities exist, however. One reasonable explanation is that Trouillot saw no need for his first book to be published in a language other than Haitian kreyòl. If his intention was to carve out a space for kreyòl as a legitimate language of intellectual inquiry, authorizing translation of the text to a major language might have detracted from that undertaking; Ben and I are grateful that our reviewers articulated this possibility. Might it also have been the case that, as Trouillot advanced in his professional career, he considered this early publication to be insufficiently formal, perhaps too creative or too ideologically Marxist to be taken seriously? Or did he consider the tone to be inadequately academic? No junior faculty member is free from the gaze and judgment of senior colleagues. Given that Trouillot went on to articulate many of the ideas expressed in Ti dife boule in Haiti, State against Nation—albeit by means of a different tone—might he have believed that this rendered Ti difé redundant? Could it be that the experience of writing this early text was extremely personal, or even painful, for Trouillot, because it was intricately linked to his departure from Haiti? Might he have surmised that the book, if translated to English, would not be fully understood or appreciated by an Anglophone audience? Along those lines—and here I recall the concept of opacité or ‘opacity’ articulated in the work of Édouard Glissant (1981)—might Trouillot have preferred to keep his earliest publication at a certain distance from an Anglophone audience, thereby retaining a measure of intimacy between the text and his original audience, a broad community of Haitian readers? Going one step further, given Trouillot’s experiences as a scholar, professor, and anthropologist in the academy, which he later came to critique, I wonder whether it is possible that he might have also wished to keep Ti dife boule from becoming fodder for what some have called the “Euro-North American critical machine?” Ben believes this is unlikely, and the argument is admittedly myopic.

What is unquestionable is that time has transformed the dynamics of the Haitian diaspora. Certain fundamental problems of course remain. Over the past 40 years, the population of Haitians living outside of Haiti has grown significantly; however, given the second-class citizenship of Haitian Creole in Haiti, a portion of Haitians and Haitian-Americans has never learned to read or write Haitian Creole. This indifference also afflicts Haitian studies. Even among many established Haitianist scholars, Creole proficiency is not common. For example, a colleague whose work I know well, who has published many French–English translations of Haitian literature, confessed to me in a recent email: “I think this [translation] is a worthy project—I have a Xerox copy of the book, but have never read it because of my limited vocabulary in Kreyòl.” In many respects, the dominance of French-language publishing in Haiti and beyond has produced a large crop of “Northern Haitianists” who are tragically bereft of elementary skills in Haiti’s actual dominant language, Haitian Creole. In the years that preceded his untimely death, Trouillot must have wanted to emphasize Haiti’s history, and the time-tested agency of Haitians, whether warrior ancestors or scholars armed with pens, when he agreed to authorize my translation project. Haitian Creole-based writing, learning, and governance represent the leading edge that Haitians and Haitianists must embrace in development and reconstruction—especially in the wake of the 2010 earthquake and the ensuing parallel governance by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the United Nations that undercut the Haitian government’s ambitions and field of action. Enduring narratives in the international media project a culture of power that is resistant to change and predatory. And there is no doubt that Haiti’s masses have been marginalized by a State and educational minority language policy that benefits only 5% of the population (Hebblethwaite, 2012). Trouillot’s work helps articulate the challenges and illuminate the possibilities for social change and development in Haiti and beyond.

It is our hope that readers of the English translation will come to appreciate Haiti and its exemplary revolutionary history in a new, more complex light, for contemporary media images do not do justice to Haiti, particularly in the wake of the devastating January 2010 earthquake. Bridging cultures, languages, and socio-economic groups was at the heart of Trouillot’s enterprise, from his activist days in the Haitian Diaspora to his later contributions as a ground-breaking anthropologist and political scientist. Creating new narratives and analyses for Haiti, shedding light upon the complexity and suspiciousness of received history, while flexing the muscle of Haiti’s one and only language of cultural unification, is an imperative and outstanding project. Haitian Creolists have long praised Ti dife boule in unanimity. An increased awareness of Trouillot’s critical contributions—especially this early masterpiece Ti dife boule—will be a valuable contribution to the endeavor to raise the profile of Haitian Creole in Haiti and abroad. Ben and I are honored to be collaborating on this project and we consider ourselves to be fortunate students of a great master.