Maun argument, narrative, or effectIn the Chapter "Glory and Silences in the Haitian Revolution," Truillot shows how a series of historical events during the Haitian revolution (1791-1803) served as a base for different historical narratives. The author describes how these narratives were produced by silencing some actors, events, and places while rendering others historical significance.The author explains that historical artifacts and documents embody the presence and absence of historical events, places, and actors. These absences are actively created by different degrees of silencing and mentioning. Events and actors leave uneven traces in history through these silencing and mentioning. The author argues that absences are inherent in the process of production of historical narratives. The mechanisms through which some events enter records to become" facts" while others get silenced are the mechanisms that control historical production. Historical knowledge is built upon available facts, which are propagated and amplified and thus "gain their right to existence" (p.49).Different historical sources carry positionality that is imbued with meanings. The author emphasized that the production of meanings also includes the production of silences. Trouillot makes a distinction between a narrator and a chronicler. A narrator describes events that occur during a period. A chronicler records events as they are witnessed continuously through time. Trouillot argues that even the most accurate accounts have silences inherent in them. The author points out that the control of the record productions is uneven. For example, records often leave out events that are considered "marginal" (p.50). Thus, descriptions of the lives of plantation slaves in the Caribbean underreport the number of births. Practical reasons explain the frequent omission of births in these records: due to the high rates of infant mortality, it was easier to adjust the record after a specific time if a child ended up surviving until a certain age. The author argues that the records of slave plantations enter historical records" with the added value of inequality" (p.52).Records and artifacts are further transformed as they are organized and stored. The authors refer to Archives as institutions with power hierarchy inherent in them. The role of archives, according to Trouillot, is not only to collect but also to "set up both substantive and formal elements of narrative" (p.52). Archives, the author points out, are "the institutionalized sites of mediation between the sociohistorical process and the narrative about this process" (p.52)Moreover, archives serve as educational and scholarly resources, informing the development of historical knowledge. As the result of archives' position in the intellectual hierarchy, historical narratives "are premised on previous understandings, which are themselves premised on the distribution of archival power." (p.55)Application for my work In my work on the relationship between women's health and the history of trauma and structural violence, I look at the relationship between women who have experienced trauma and the ways these experiences are recorded in medical histories. Women refugees often underreport events in their lives that we could consider “traumatic”. Underreporting of certain events by women refugees leads to misunderstanding or misinterpretation of these events by healthcare providers and by clinical researchers. Without understanding meaning and context of traumatic events in women’s lived and reasons these events are omitted in the records, our ability to provide care for these women is limited,A health care system is commonly described as a network of organizations that provide medical services such as diagnosis, treatment and prevention of diseases (e.g., Ericson et al., 2020; Barranco & Ventura, 2020). This concept of the healthcare system is based on a biomedical model that informs how US healthcare organizations define illness and health, and how they make intervention decisions. The biomedical model also shapes the way patients’ information is collected, organized, stored and used. According to Trouillot (2015), as artifacts and accounts of past events transforme through the time into historical facts and narratives, they are subjected to manipulation at each step of the process. The process of production of historical knowledge involves formation of narratives and formation of facts, organization and storage of artifacts, and retrieval and recollection of the stories. Patients’ health stories, as they move through the healthcare network, get modified and rearranged to fit the biomedical model. The processes of manipulation at each stage are nor neutral, rather different units of information are assigned different meanings and significance. However, healthcare organizations are not set to adapt to complexity and socio-cultural diversity of illness experiences. .
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