Ti Dife Boule sou Istwa Ayiti as Haitian civic education

Abstract

Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s scholarship examines the world economy in relation to structural alliances between state leaders and commodity traders. His work suggests that the majority of formerly enslaved agricultural producers in the Caribbean became a politically marginalized “reconstituted peasantry.” In Ti Dife Boule sou Istwa Ayiti, Trouillot employs narrative tools characteristic of oral storytelling and magical realism to analyze such relationships during the Haitian Revolution. The text, written in Haitian Creole, interjects on debates about the relationship between colonial economies and metropolitan governments, the historicity of uneven development, and the foundational rupture between the Haitian state and nation. This article argues that Trouillot selects Grenn Pwomennen, a true product of syncretism, an erudite scholar clothed in the uniform of Haiti’s ubiquitous peasant working class, to artfully demonstrate that the solution to Haiti’s challenges remains with its peasant classes. Published in 1977, within the context of his immigration and personal sense of responsibility for the Haiti he left behind, Ti Dife Boule sou Istwa Ayiti reveals itself to be an ideal text for civic education and politicization among Haitians who only understand Creole.