Silencing the Past: Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Cry Finally in French!
Finally, good news! Thanks to Lyonel Trouillot and Pierre Buteau for the prefaces and afterwords! A book that shook the Anglophone world like an earthquake is now translated into French: Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Silencing the Past is published under the title Faire taire le passé.
By La Rédaction · Port-au-Prince
· 2 min read · Updated 24 April 2026
Translated from French — AI-assisted and reviewed by the editorial team. The French version is authoritative. Read the original · About our translation policy

It compels us to examine how powers manufacture oblivion, how invisibility becomes history's supreme weapon. To govern, to remember, to write, to transmit: everything is connected. And in this mirror, we see our own elites summoned to responsibility: how to govern without memory? How to claim to build the future if we do not confront the ghosts of the past? Trouillot Among the Constellations With Faire taire le passé, Michel-Rolph Trouillot remains alongside Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, C.L.R. James, in the luminous circle of those who reinvent narratives, refuse imposed silences, and give voice to the erased. This book is more than a text: it is a seismograph of consciences, a gentle weapon, a key offered to reopen history and let in the light. Michel-Rolph Trouillot's Faire taire le passé is available today in Quebec, and on October 3rd in Europe. And what if, instead of John Brown Avenue, we had a Michel-Rolph Trouillot Avenue?
And what if a road connecting Cap-Haïtien Airport to the Citadel bore his name? Yves Lafortune
Miami, September 24, 2025



