Summary Of Abina And The Important Men

It is important that Abina’s story remains at the heart of the narrative of the court case, because doing otherwise would severely undermine the efforts of the authors to present history from the “common man’s” perspective, and would only further the concept of telling history from the views of “important men”, thus losing an important facet of history: the true nature of the past that most people lived through.
To begin, one must first understand as to why “Abina and the Important Men” was written. In Part IV of the novel, Professor Trouillot talks about how there are 4 levels of silencing voices when it comes to constructing history. He explains, how historians tend to have their own biases when reconstructing, or deconstructing, history,
The author of the novel then goes on to explain that Abina’s voice was silenced at the first level, due to her being a person of color and poor/illiterate. It is for these reasons that the author chose to write about Abina’s perspective, so “we can now hear her”, and make right what previous historians have done wrong: That of silencing the voices of those society has deemed “unworthy”. By placing Abina’s narrative at the heart of the court case, the author made it so that we would finally hear about history that is not from the perspective of “important men” as it so often has been, but about those that we have not heard about often. Furthermore, hearing about history from the perspective of the everyday person also leads to fairer representation, which in turn lends itself to a far more accurate picture of the past than it would if we only focused on the lives and writings of those in power, such as politicians and wealthy persons. An excellent example of this can be found, once again, in Part IV of the
To further explain, consider the historical context described in Part III of the novel. To summarize the description of the wealthy and powerful, they owned slaves, a lot of land, and a lot of wealth. Of course, it is important to consider that the people could “monitor, and even overturn..” the actions of the King/ruler, but at the end of the day, power is power. The differences between the powerful and wealthy from society to society simply vary on culture, and that’s about it. But when concerning the lives of the average citizen, that is where things get interesting. The lives and culture of the average person are what truly make up the foundation of the society, and culture will not be the only difference. So will their cuisine, their work ethic, how they live, how they work, what they work, etc. So when the British arrived, it changed a great deal for the average citizen. As explained further in Part III, the “British managed to create a system of agreements… that was formalized in the creation of a Colony and Protectorate”. As in the story, the British technically outlawed slavery, but didn’t go out of their way to root