Imperialism and History

When reading Taking Haiti: Military Occupancy and the Culture of US Imperialism by Mary A. Renda, I was interested in the connection between this text and Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing The Past in the production of history and how silences can be created through holes in fact and truth claims. In Renda's text, we use interviews as part of the archive available to us to interpret the events. In 1973 General Noble, Chief of Staff of the brigade said “You can cut that out later. Doesn't sound good anyway” (p.88)When reflecting on impressions he had made of himself when relieving duty from Haiti – this was an American admittance to ignorance of Haitian feeling towards occupation. Ideas of “paternal guidance offered to a child nation in need”(p.42) was supposed to clarify the situation for marines, but it also signaled a further silencing of a truth claim in Haitian history.

This assertion of authority and control (and inherent ideas of superiority) reminded me of examples that Trouillot argued, since “inequalities experienced by actors lead to uneven historical power in the inscription of traces.” (p.48) This raises issues of whether Haitian resistance to domination was recorded in a fair way in historical memory. American marines were not completely prepared to understand the proud “living”(p.45) historical remaining elements of Haitian struggle, symbolised to them in the pumpkins and couch shells.

I also reflected on how important class was, yet again, in instances of conflict with race and gender, but this time within the marines, as on page 56, the racial immigrant status of marines often defined their place in the military hierarchy  and being the “Boy from nowhere, a good for nothing bum”, and so geographical belonging played a role in disgraced.