3

Hearing

To read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new.

—Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”

Another, less eloquent way of stating what Sedgwick says is, if you read reparatively, you open yourself to surprise, to the sometimes unwelcome sense that you do not already have at hand the tools you need for hearing and responding. Such an experience can be unsettling—and so we may understand why what Sedgwick calls paranoid reading so often predominates in critical scholarship. Paranoid reading is a kind of insurance policy against the disappointment that comes with wanting the world to be one way and finding that it is not that way. If, when you analyze the world, its people, and events, you arrive at the analysis always already knowing that what you’ll find is oppression, violence, and abuse of power needing to be debunked, you won’t be disappointed when that’s what you find. One of Sedgwick’s points is that if that’s your technique, you may, in your search for the theory-structure that explains the objects of your focus, miss ambiguities haunting the world of those objects. In doing that you may also inadvertently have subscribed to a theory of communication as transparency, where what gets said means only what is said and the truth sets things aright. And if that is your belief, you may, as Sedgwick notes, fail to note that uncovering abuse does not accomplish repair on its own. Sometimes it doesn’t even help.

Reparative reading opens the reader to surprise, to finding a world in a state she did not expect, for better and for worse. Persons open to being unsettled may, at certain times and in certain places, be most able to improvise new responses to harms that no preexisting remedy fully comprehends. The self with a will to repair needs to be open to being interrupted, to hearing something other than what she expected. And that matters because some loneliness is made of a failure of hearing. Such failures may happen even in institutions designed for hearing: courts, archives of testimony, truth commissions. When a speaker speaks in an institution designed for hearing, and an audience empowered to listen hears something other than what she says, it can be difficult to determine who is responsible for failed communication, especially if we get stuck thinking that responsibility equates with culpability. If we think instead of responsibility as the duty to respond or to be responsive, other possibilities may present themselves.

Human communication is fragile. Misunderstandings abound, and their causes are so plentiful that no amount of thoughtful design could avoid them all. And so, places designed for hearing are always sites of irony. The first irony: institutions aiming to adjudicate loss may impose loss of a different kind.

Risks always attend irony—even when irony is a speaker’s intent. Unless you and I already possess between us a fairly wide array of shared meaning, I am probably going to have to explain to you any attempt I make at irony because of the gap that can open up between what gets said and what gets heard. If I just assume that you know what I mean, we might end up in the situation Jonathan Swift found himself in when people thought that his essay “A Modest Proposal” was a horrifying call to cannibalism rather than a biting criticism of the average rich person’s indifference to poverty.

I’ll begin with a banal example. I might use verbal irony to express my feeling of being at odds with the sense of what is fitting in a situation, as when I say, in a committee meeting, “This committee meeting is a very good use of my time,” when what I mean to communicate is that it is not. At the college where I teach, some colleagues might take me to be making a sincere statement of my attentiveness to important points of running the college; others would hear my intended meaning, an expression of impatience with how the running of the college is going in the present moment. In this example, I intend my statement to be ironic, and its being taken as ironic by listeners depends on how those listeners understand both me and the larger situation in which we find ourselves.

The same situation might transform from verbal irony into dramatic irony if I say, “This committee meeting is a very good use of my time,” and I mean it sincerely, but some observer of the overall scene has access to information I lack in making the statement, perhaps knowing that none of the issues under discussion will matter because the Board of Managers has already made a decision that is binding. As such, my statement would be ironic, but I wouldn’t know that.

Those are both low-risk scenarios produced by inequalities of knowledge. In this chapter I am interested in how the tension between what is said and what gets heard manifests itself in riskier scenes, where inequalities of knowledge have harsher effects. To set the scene I’ll begin with some classic irony from the Western tradition.

IT MIGHT HAPPEN ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM

The Roman poet Horace begins one of his Satires with these lines: “I happened to be going along the Via Sacra, thinking, as I tend to do, on some trifle—I don’t remember what—and was entirely absorbed in it, when a man whom I knew only by name ran up to me and took hold of my hand, saying, ‘How are you, dearest thing?’”¹ To this man Horace responds, “Pretty well, all things considered,” and then he keeps walking, only to become aware that the guy is following him. So Horace, feeling annoyed, asks the man whether he can be of help but really means “Stop following me.” The guy, hearing Horace’s words but not their meaning, answers, “Yes!”

Horace keeps walking. Horace speeds up, he slows down, but the guy stays with him. Finally, when they pass by the Roman Forum, the man—whose name we never learn (although we know that Horace knows it)—reveals that he has a court date there and that he wants Horace to come in and advise him in his case.

Horace replies that he can’t bear standing up for that long, and anyway he knows nothing about law. The man, knowing he’ll be found in contempt if he doesn’t appear as scheduled, nonetheless decides to stick with Horace in the hopes of being introduced to some of his influential friends. One can assume that he lacks the power, money, and influence that would add up to a successful court case, and so he pins his hopes on Horace. However, as fate or satire would have it, as they continue on their journey, they happen to encounter the plaintiff in the suit in question, who accuses Horace’s unwanted new friend of being a scoundrel for not being in court and asks Horace to be a witness to his arrest. Horace agrees, mostly because he just wants to be rid of the guy.

So, one of the many ironies in the story is that a man in need wanted Horace to help him with his legal problems, and Horace does “help” him, but not in the way the man would have wanted. Instead of standing up for him in court, he acts as a witness to his arrest. The story speaks to how law, power, and communication come together, and also to who the winners and losers in that mix usually are.

HANNA F. AND THE DIFFICULTY OF HEARING

Toward the end of a ninety-minute interview done for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University, an interviewer asks concentration camp survivor Hanna F. how she felt when liberation finally came.² Her immediate response is, “That I am alone in the whole world.”³ She had nowhere to go, no loved ones left living to reunite with, she could not return to her home in Poland, and so she was “simply lost without words.” One of the interviewers then asks her how she feels about being Jewish now given that she spent all of the war either pretending she was half Jewish or not Jewish at all. She says, “It took me a while till I met my husband after the war that I still had my assumed name. And afterward I went back to my old name, my own identity. To my own Jewishness. And I am Jewish all right.” Then a second interviewer adds, “And very plucky. You were able to survive because you were so plucky, when you stepped back out…” The interviewer is referring to how Hanna got out of Auschwitz a second time. Because she had papers that proved she was Aryan, she had been selected to be sent to Germany to work. But once she was in line to board a bus, a soldier told her to get out of the line because her head was shaved—apparently camp officials didn’t want hairless women returning to Germany, making the camps look bad. When that soldier looked away she got back in line. He saw her and ordered her out again. Then he left and she got back in line a third time and made it onto the bus. That makes her “plucky” in the eyes of one interviewer. But to the suggestion that she is plucky, Hanna responds, “No, dear, no dear, no…no, I had, no. I blocked my…. How should I explain to you? I know that I have to survive. Even running away, even being with people constantly, especially the second part, the second time being back in Auschwitz. That time I had determined already to survive, and you know what? It wasn’t luck, it was stupidity.”⁴ The interviewer adds, “And a lot of guts.” Hanna corrects her, saying, “No, no, no. No, but there were no guts, there were just sheer stupidity.” The interviewer counters, “Well, but you stepped back in line.” Hanna responds, “I just, you know…” And then one of the interviewers stands up, blocking the camera, and says, “I am going to take your microphone,” ending the interview. It is a curious exchange, one in which failure to hear abounds. An interviewer tells Hanna that she was plucky; she hears “lucky” and responds to clarify that luck had nothing to do with it. The interviewer doesn’t catch the miscommunication and so states in other words what amounts to the same thing, “You had a lot of guts.” Meanwhile Hanna is trying to correct the misperception—to describe what really allowed her to survive—but that is what we do not get a chance to hear from her.

What makes this failed communication even more puzzling is that, for the entire space of time during which Hanna is attempting to correct the mistaken idea that she is plucky or lucky, we can hear the two interviewers offscreen arguing about something, temporarily not listening to Hanna. We can hear one of them say something about “why the time gets crazy”—maybe it means they are out of time, or they are concerned that Hanna’s testimony does not follow a linear temporal order. They may be having a disagreement about whether the “plucky” line of questioning should have been posed in the first place. But the outcome is that we don’t find out what it means to Hanna to survive through stupidity. Interviewers set up a scene for hearing and then fail to listen. An irony.

Lawrence Langer uses this scene to draw our attention to moments when interviewers encourage certain kinds of testimony and discourage others. In his rendering of the conversation, when Hanna says she survived through stupidity, “the two interviewers laugh deprecatingly, overriding her voice with their own ‘explanation,’ as one calls out, ‘You had a lot of guts!’”⁵ Having also watched the tape, I am not certain that that is what happened. It is possible that one of the interviewers is being deprecating, but more likely that she really wants to support Hanna’s strength in pushing her way through situations that many did not survive. After all, it is no small thing to get out of Auschwitz alive twice. It is also clear (to me) that the second interviewer is not being deprecating but rather is trying to establish something with the other interviewer (though it isn’t clear what that is, or why it had to be discussed at that moment). However, either way, the outcome is that Hanna doesn’t get heard at precisely the moment when she seems to be opening up the most. It is a scene of failed hearing.

Much of Hanna’s testimony is resistant or difficult. She says multiple times, when asked to describe her experiences, things like, “No, it is very hard to describe it,”“It is very hard to go into every detail,”“I cannot go into the details that you want to. Some of them are so gruesome. I really cannot go back so far. It hurts,” or, “Must I go back to those things? I would rather not.”⁶ She often starts to tell a painful story, then pauses for a long while, then changes the topic, resorting back to a more controlled narrative. That may be because “lots of survivors compartmentalize the issues and retrieve the memories in disjointed fashion to protect themselves from being overwhelmed by the whole memory,” as psychologist Mary Fabri observes.⁷ Or she may have other reasons for not answering the questions put to her. In the video it seems clear that she tells the story she wants to tell rather than the one she is being asked for. In her telling, the story is not about being plucky. Hanna’s interviewers seem to want redemptive stories about the resilience of the human spirit and the drive to live against all odds. Because that is what they want, that is also what they hear.

Langer points out that, while there may be redemptive stories to tell, many times survivors of grave abuse do not marvel at the strength of the human spirit, especially not their own. Instead they “mourn its fragility when the isolated self has no support from the surrounding milieu to validate it.”⁸ In other words, if we listened well to what testimonies such as Hanna’s try to convey, it might interrupt our preconceptions about what testimony after violence should accomplish. We might also find ourselves face-to-face with our own responsibility as listeners who have the power to hear or fail to hear.

Of course, those who are put in the place of the hearer of testimony may have reasons for not hearing well. They may be constrained to adhere to the facts of the case or the established laws and procedures. They may have a political interest in a restorative discourse. They may be overwhelmed by how far the demand for help exceeds their capacity to offer assistance. Or they may be protecting themselves from the trauma of hearing. After all, stenographers, interpreters, and journalists working on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) developed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder from listening.⁹ One need not even hear the stories in person in order to undergo effects of trauma. Priscilla Hayner reports that “a number of commissions have found that the staff who are most disturbed by the harrowing tales of torture and abuse are not those taking statements directly from victims but are instead data entry staff charged with coding and entering the information into the database.”¹⁰ It might be someone’s job to spend long days entering data in codes for abuses such as forcible abduction, amputation, beating of head against wall, pulling out teeth, removal of fingernails, being buried alive, being burned with chemicals, head submerged in water, being forced to watch the torture of others, genital mutilation, gang rape, burning of body parts, disembowelment, and so on. Exposure, even in the abstraction of codes, to the breadth, depth, and volume of the terrible things human beings have done to other human beings may take its toll.

Dori Laub lists six ways in which those who listen to traumatic testimony try to insulate themselves from hearing what it says: (1) mental paralysis, brought on by a fear of merging with the atrocities; (2) outrage and anger, unwittingly directed at the victim; (3) withdrawal and numbness; (4) a flood of awe and fear—the impulse to endow the survivor with sanctity and thereby keep her at a distance, to avoid the intimacy involved in knowing; (5) foreclosure through facts, circumventing human experience through an obsession with details, or by only hearing what you already know; and, finally, (6) hyperemotionality, where the testifier is drowned in the listener’s defensive affectivity.¹¹

So, listeners have a responsibility to hear well. But they may have conscious or unconscious resistances to hearing well. The problem is likely even more complicated than that, however. Why do so many of us want to hear the narrative of resilience rather than the story of destruction? Psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman has argued, using studies and her own clinical work as evidence, that human beings have a need to assume that the world is benevolent and that responsible actions can lead to good outcomes. That is another way of saying that human beings want to be able to take existence for granted, and so they work very hard—sometimes to the point of denial of reality—to make of the world a place where they might do that. Even though it seems to inhabit the opposite end of a spectrum, the will to believe in the world’s benevolence is related to what Sedgwick calls paranoid reading in that it, willfully or not, structures experience of the world for predictability. Dan Bar-On has shown in his studies of the descendants of Holocaust perpetrators and survivors a will to distance the self from a difficult truth. In one case a man who had finally asked his father about his job as a train conductor in Germany during World War II learned, after his father’s initial denial, that his father had watched a large group of prisoners shot to death on a train platform. A year later when Bar-On reinterviewed the man, he “did not remember his father’s disclosure, or that he had in turn repeated the story to Bar-On.”¹² Judith Herman, in commenting on this case, describes Bar-On’s metaphor of a “double wall erected to prevent acknowledgement of the memory of crime. The fathers did not want to tell; the children did not want to know.”¹³ That is part of how we shield ourselves from painful knowledge. It is also how we perpetuate the pain of those who lack the capacity to erect such mental shelter. James Baldwin puts it well in The Fire Next Time: “This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know and do not want to know it.”¹⁴ Like Jean Améry, Baldwin recognizes that conditions for apology or reconciliation are not met and, beyond that, that few even recognize their absence.

Herman observes that the human tendency to want a benevolent world can distort the perceptions of bystanders—people who live in a violent or unjust world (this world) but whose daily lives still allow them to think otherwise. She writes,

Like the son of the man who drove the trains in wartime, we have been reluctant to know about the crimes we live with every day. We have sought information only when prodded to do so, and once we have acquired the information we have been eager to forget it again as soon as possible. We can see the phenomenon of active forgetting in operation as it pertains to crimes against humanity carried out on the most massive scale of organized genocide. It operates with the same force in the case of those unwitnessed crimes carried out in the privacy of families.¹⁵

We may fail to hear because we are indifferent to what has happened, because cultural difference makes a story difficult to understand, or because it is painful to absorb the truth of violent events. We may also fail to hear because we don’t want to be confronted with something we didn’t foresee, or because there is no common frame for the experience being described. No matter how heroic or apt the choice of words and narrative convention of a survivor’s testimony may be, someone who has never been tortured may not be able to understand what it means for a tortured person to live on with the physical and emotional scars of that abuse. And if being tortured breaks selves, perhaps it is not all bad that we cannot imaginatively put ourselves in the place of the person being tortured. Our resistance may be a good adaptation of a psyche that somehow knows how much knowledge it can live with. But if ethical loneliness consists in being abandoned by humanity and then not being heard, then the will to believe in the world’s benevolence—the drive to take existence for granted—contributes to that loneliness whenever it fails to hear the stories survivors tell of misfortune and injustice. Hanna wanted to tell a story made up of equal parts resilience and destruction. We need to hear both parts. Wanting to hear only the story of resilience shares with paranoid reading’s certainty that the world will offer up horrors a determination not to be taken unaware by any revelation: nothing will surprise either approach.

Janoff-Bulman observes that when a human being undergoes a trauma inflicted by another human being, “the world is suddenly a malevolent one, not simply because something bad has happened to the victim but because the world of people is seriously tainted. Trust in others is seriously disturbed.”¹⁶ Such violation damages a person’s sense of her own self’s boundaries and may destroy her trust in the world. Ruth Kluger adds, “For the sensation of torture doesn’t leave its victim alone—never, not to the end of life. It isn’t the pain per se, it’s how it was inflicted…. What matters is not just what we endure, but also what kind of misery it is, where it comes from. The worst is the kind that is imposed by others with malicious intent. That’s the kind from which no one recovers.”¹⁷ Recall Améry’s discussion of how the loss of his sovereignty came to him as an experience of abandonment: “With the first blow from a policeman’s fist, against which there can be no defense and which no helping hand will ward off, a part of our life ends and it can never again be revived.”¹⁸ Recovery from such harm can be difficult at least in part because the shattering of the initial view of the world as kind and caring cannot be undone. Those who work to recover from human-caused trauma often face a difficult choice between letting go of old assumptions about how the world works—in particular that it is benevolent and that selves are sovereign—and living with the frightening prospect of building a new world in which one must give up the old security and admit one’s vulnerability to harm.¹⁹ Howard Zehr, a founder of the restorative justice movement, argues that victimization violates “our vision of ourselves as autonomous individuals in a meaningful world.”²⁰ Susan Brison, who writes that trauma “not only shatters one’s fundamental assumptions about the world and one’s safety in it, but it also severs the sustaining connection between the self and the rest of humanity,” knows this from experience.²¹

If any of us are lucky enough to have remained intact and unviolated, we don’t want to hear that no matter what we do we might end up destroyed, that the fabric holding together the world that we experience as relatively safe is very fragile. We don’t want to know that, and so we may find it difficult to hear a story where that is the message. That is one complication in how we hear.

There is a further, related complication. A great many of us probably inherit our sense of our own responsibilities from ideas about the autonomous self who is responsible only for actions freely undertaken—in other words, the idea that we bear responsibility only for things we’ve done and intended. Surely there are sites of human judgment where that is precisely how we should think about culpability. Sometimes individually responsible persons, freely acting and fully intending to cause harm, do bad things to other persons. And we find them blameworthy for that, and that’s fine.

But does that story about responsibility correspond in any way to the harm undergone by Hanna? Even if we could find the person responsible for the years of abuse and dehumanization she endured—if, say, we could put Hitler or a camp official on trial—would finding him guilty do justice to the way a whole world of meaning had to be orchestrated around hatred and indifference in order to allow what befell Hanna to happen? Not just Hitler, not just the Nazis, not just everyday Germans but the whole world, standing by, saying nothing, doing nothing, many of them hating some people for what rather than who they are, and allowing the ghettoization, deportation, and finally extermination of the people they had abandoned. Recovery from that kind of harm doesn’t come from a finding of individual criminal responsibility—which is not to say that such a finding of guilt wouldn’t be just or welcome or contribute to a larger program of recovery (as we saw in chapter 2).

The two complications are related because denying you can be destroyed and believing you’re responsible only for acts you intend to commit are both outcomes of an incomplete view of human sovereignty, a view that thinks self-sufficiency is possible independent of social support. But, as we learned in chapter 1, sovereignty depends.

Seven years after her initial testimony Hanna returned to the Fortunoff archive and was interviewed by Dana Kline and Lawrence Langer. In that second interview we learn a bit about what it might mean to her to survive by means of stupidity. She reveals that throughout the war she kept wanting to believe that someone she loved would survive, and she calls that stupidity. When Langer asks her directly what she meant by “surviving through stupidity,” she explains that she had no fear. She would just do what she had to do. So stupidity seems to mean, for her, a kind of unreflective resistance to what was impossible about the situation in Auschwitz. My sense that this is the case gets partial confirmation from her statement late in the second interview: “You see, there was no brains. I had no fear…. Stupidity. I just made up my mind I have to go by and that’s all.”²² The interviewers ask her, “Do you think if you had been smart you would have been afraid?” She responds, “Scared. I was not scared at all for anything over anybody. Once I put my right foot forward I was determined. I was pushing. I was going.” Interviewers follow up with, “What do you think made you able to do that? Most people would have been scared.” Her answer, “Determination.” They follow with, “What gave you that determination? Something you did for yourself, your upbringing?” And then she reiterates her hope that someone else from her family would survive while also enacting her strategy of starting to say something difficult, pausing, and turning instead to something manageable: “I suppose the upbringing helped too. I was hoping that somebody will survive. That [pause and huge sigh] I never went home from work without a few potatoes. It wasn’t stealing, it was organizing.”²³ She tells a story about how, during the war, the verb “to organize” always pointed to theft.²⁴

This second tape, rather than ending abruptly in confusion, ends with Langer thanking Hanna for her story, and Hanna responding, “You’re welcome. Maybe I’ll feel a bit better too. I unloaded a bit.” That ending might leave a viewer feeling good, as if something cathartic had just occurred and maybe the speaker had derived some benefit from speaking and being heard. That may even be what happened. It starts to undo how terrible it feels to watch the first interview’s ending. But one can’t listen to two interviews held seven years apart during which a survivor of grave harm narrates exactly the same stories in very similar ways and not be moved by what it would mean to have those be the stories that underlie the self’s sense of its own history.²⁵ If testimony works, it is not because someone gets to tell a story once, exorcise it, and then move on from past harm.

If hearing is meaningful, it has to be embedded in an openness where what is said might be heard even if it threatens to break the order of the known world for those who listen. Think about Hanna “surviving through stupidity.” Stupidity is her code for hoping that someone she loved would survive. Imagine inhabiting that bleak view as your only fragment of hope and then surviving, finding it unrewarded. Anyone who labels Hanna’s survival strategy “plucky” misses a deep source of harm that no amount of time, love, or justice could fully repair.

Nothing will fully repair such loss, but some approaches will do better than others at helping to rebuild worlds. The person whose world and self have been destroyed will need to rebuild a sense of self, of her own sovereignty in the world. That is where theories of the value of personal sovereignty, liberty, and autonomy come in handy. But the how and the why of that need for autonomy and what it takes to rebuild a self can’t be fully explicated if we begin by assuming that any person’s sovereignty is insulated from the surrounding world. No one is sovereign from the ground up. Selves can be destroyed because selves are also built, and built cooperatively, by human relationships of various kinds—rational, affective, intentional, unwitting, chosen, and unchosen. Even if selves were more self-sufficient than this intersubjective definition would have us believe, it would still be the case that before a self could rebuild her own sovereignty, she would need to feel safe. That, in turn, requires a surrounding world where safety is possible, though that is also what is destroyed by violence. A world, a cooperatively authored thing, can’t be rebuilt by a person acting alone, especially not one with a destroyed self. It is the job of the wider world to help with the rebuilding. So a person whose world and self have been destroyed may need to rebuild a sense of her own sovereignty, but responsibility for offering conditions where that is possible ought to fall very widely. That is so not only because only very wide disregard allows worlds to be destroyed but also because thinking of responsibility in terms of individual culpability may mend discrete harms but will never fix a broken world.

That is why, at the same time that a person whose world has been destroyed may need rebuilt sovereignty, the person whose world was left intact may need a bit of destruction of her own personal sovereignty—or a different telling of the story about it. This claim can’t be universalized in any simple way because we all carry with us varying amounts of damage and different levels of belief in our own autonomy. But I don’t think it’s too dangerous to say that a huge number of people could do with some destruction of their idea of the self’s autonomy. Just a bit more awareness that the self’s sovereignty is a fiction or a partial truth, and that the fiction can be as useful as it can be harmful.

YVONNE KHUTWANE

Fiona Ross describes the case of Yvonne Khutwane, who in July 1996 “testified about a variety of forms of violation. In the print media, her testimony was condensed to her experiences of sexual violation. Reported as a ‘story’ of rape, that framing was taken on and repeated in the Commission’s 1998 report, and in a talk given at a conference on Transitional Justice at Yale University by Commissioner Wendy Orr.”²⁶ Ross shows how material from Wendy Orr’s talk was then reproduced in a scholarly book by Martha Minow (the widely read Between Vengeance and Forgiveness) and then also became part of the basis on which the effects on women of proceedings like the commission were analyzed (for instance, in Priscilla Hayner’s well-known book on truth commissions, Unspeakable Truths).²⁷ Ross’s telling of Khutwane’s story does a good job showing just how far out of the control of the speaker a TRC testimony can spiral. Many people reading this chapter will have read Minow’s and Hayner’s books, and perhaps a few will have read the transcript of Khutwane’s testimony. It doesn’t render anyone blameworthy for having encountered Minow or Hayner first. But it does show who has more power over Khutwane’s story. Upon reading a transcript of what Yvonne Khutwane said, one is reminded of how much patience and respect the TRC commissioners showed so many who testified. Khutwane wanted to tell a story of her humiliation, and she did so on her own terms, which were sometimes meandering or difficult to follow. Her story was difficult to follow (if it was) in part because Khutwane did not wish to tell the story that the commission most wanted to hear. One can read her testimony as an assertion of agency, a form of resistance to the expected narrative form, and an attempt to reclaim her self by means of her own story. Commissioner Gobodo-Madikizela helped her along and asked some questions designed to bring what harmed her to the fore, and in doing so consistently steered her back to the story of rape rather than to the wider array of harms Khutwane was attempting to narrate. Upon reading the transcript one might surmise that Gobodo-Madikizela had her reasons for doing this—rape was a common reality for women caught up in the struggles around and against apartheid, but gathering data on that abuse was difficult because of cultural taboos around speaking about sexual violence. In addition, the main objective of a TRC hearing on human rights violations was to gather information on such abuses, so commissioners would, while allowing victims to tell their own stories, consistently work to make sure that those who testified revealed the abuses that would help build the larger truth about South Africa’s history and also potentially qualify victims for reparations.

Gobodo-Madikizela did succeed in getting out of Khutwane a story about rape. But the “guiding” of her testimony at times seemed to make Khutwane impatient. She would remind the commissioner that she was still telling her story. Since Khutwane did not mention rape in her initial written statement, and Gobodo-Madikizela gained this testimony only through persistent (but gentle) questioning, it seems likely that Khutwane had not intended to tell the story of sexual violence in as much detail as she ended up doing.²⁸ Ross observes, in regard to the rape charges, that Khutwane “sometimes evaded the questions posed, or answered them briefly…. She was not reticent in describing the other violations she had experienced. She told of being threatened, hit, beaten with the butt of a gun, strangled, suffocated, squashed. She described arson and her child’s death, and her feelings of alienation from her political community.”²⁹

Some of the humiliation Khutwane described did include sexual violation, but the point that she comes back to repeatedly in her testimony is that she was dehumanized by young people the age of her children. They slapped her and touched her inappropriately and generally disrespected her. Since she comes from a culture that respects its elders, the violation of that respect, when added to the other losses and abuses she describes, gives us a fuller sense of what destroyed her world. In her words, “It was so painful because I couldn’t stand it, because these kids were young and they were still at a very age they had all the powers to respect and honor me. They were just the same age as my children and what were they doing to me.”³⁰ Of course she was harmed by being sexually violated. But the story she wished to tell framed what happened in terms of a broader destruction of world.³¹ The TRC let her do that for the most part. The larger world of news media and academic writing then effectively reduced how Khutwane’s testimony would be heard outside the TRC to a narrative of sexual violence. The hard irony here is that an institution designed for hearing may use procedures that silence some stories, and even when a resistant story gets told and, miraculously, heard, the larger world may not be willing to hear it for what it is.

Ross argues that the TRC model “assumed that what preceded the Commission’s work was voicelessness and silence about the apartheid past.”³² She points out that stories of apartheid had been told for many years in diverse genres, including “stories, songs, political rhetoric, magisterial orders, court cases, newspapers, scholarly work, parliamentary debates, at funerals and rallies and so on.”³³ So what the TRC offered to South Africa wasn’t speech for the first time but a new structure for speaking combined with a guaranteed audience and a nonretributive but still institutionalized way of dealing with harm. Let us mark what an awe-inspiring achievement that was. Even if some of the TRC goals were at odds with one another (nation building versus individual healing), the institution was designed for the purpose of hearing, and it opened up a space where a range of stories could be heard.

But institutions have procedures, rules, and standards, or they quickly cease to be. The form TRC testimony was to take solidified very quickly. Ross describes it as follows: “From each testimony, the Commission sought to isolate a coherent chronology, a clear relation between component parts, a climax phrased in terms of the experience of a ‘gross violation of human rights.’”³⁴ Antjie Krog and her coauthors offer a similar description: “The beginning of testimony usually consisted of some biographical detail, leading to the middle part about the circumstances and content of the violation. After clarifications, the desire and/or needs of the victim would be established, upon which the commissioner who was chairing that specific evidence would conclude the interaction.”³⁵ A perusal of any amount of testimony before the TRC will reveal that no matter how hard a speaker tried to resist that format, in the end the format won.

Sometimes the format would win by imposing a form so gently that one would be hard-pressed to call it “imposition.” Other times the presuppositions beneath the format would be revealed more forcefully, as in this exchange between a commissioner and a witness who was resistant to forgiving a perpetrator:

Q: You do read newspapers and watch TV, not so?

A: Yes I do read newspapers and I do watch television.

Q: I assume that you know about this Truth and Reconciliation Commission that is going on, of which Amnesty is part thereof?

A: Yes I heard.

Q: Do you know that this is done by the Government to foster or to promote reconciliation in the country?

A: Yes I do know that.

Q: What is your attitude about this reconciliation process?

A: I don’t have any comment on that one.

Q: Do you believe in reconciliation?

A: Yes I do believe.³⁶

It is not clear whether this exchange is meant to educate or to shame the witness, but in either case it does not succeed at listening. I’m sure the commissioners involved took seriously the nation-building goal of the TRC and hoped it would make possible a peaceful rather than a bloody transition to postapartheid South Africa. But, as others have observed, there may have been a way for the TRC to encourage forgiveness without delegitimating righteous anger.³⁷ Slight differences in institutional design might have allowed other truths to be emerge, and that course, if taken, might have allowed a wider array of persons to feel that their losses were heard, and that those losses had been recognized as unjust, perhaps even unforgivable, by institutions and the surrounding community. The just irony here would be that an institution of forgiveness may have facilitated wider forgiveness if it had allowed expressions of the refusal to forgive (which were surely justified in many cases!) to be part of the larger narrative formed by the TRC.

COLIN DE SOUZA AND SULEJMAN CRNCALO

It is not only the format of the TRC or the tendency of commissioners to encourage forgiveness and gloss over resentment that silences resistant testimony. Jan Blommaert, Mary Bock, and Kay McCormick, using sociolinguistic discourse analysis to find suffering where it is masked by forms of speech, spend a fair amount of time on the testimony of Colin de Souza before the Human Rights Violations Committee of the TRC. They worry that his testimony “does not produce his narrative of suffering in a style that flags the topic. There are few, if any, explicit expressions of emotion; de Souza doesn’t cry, but tells his story in a composed, rather flat and factual way, emphasizing more the adventurous side of his experience than the devastating effects it has had on his life.”³⁸ So they set out to interpret the story in such a way that his testimony does show how someone’s life could be destroyed by the struggle against apartheid. But there is something not quite right here. Let’s consider some pieces of De Souza’s testimony.

They were beating me at that stage. And at one incident they were throwing that was during the afternoon they throw in some teargas canisters in—inside the cell you know a wet cell you know, this wet with water and they closed the doors and all the windows were closed but at that time I was still clever of knowing the tricks and the tactics you know of laying down on the ground and that, the tear gas won’t get me, so when they came in, they saw that I was still conscious, they were expecting somebody after a half an hour to be unconscious, so what they did is they undress me and they chained me up, you know my feet, my hands to my feet and they had a special chain you know, that were used with the prisoners that is on awaiting trial you know, that chains you know and they would chain me up by my feet and my hand and put me up against this metal gate you know, this metal and chained me up to that gate, then start beating me with the batons over my head, Van Brakel would pull my hair and you know and they was beating me till I was out.³⁹

In his testimony he offers many detailed descriptions of the torture to which he was subjected. A key point for de Souza (on my reading of his testimony) is that his training prepared him for this—he knows how to react to tear gas and withstand police interrogation. On more than one occasion when a commissioner asks him a question designed to get him to talk about his suffering, he answers factually and then returns to a story of outwitting police or participating actively in the struggle against apartheid. For these and other reasons, Blommaert et al. call his testimony “a story of suffering, disguised as an event narrative.”⁴⁰ De Souza also talks about how after he was released from custody some of his comrades chased him and tried to kill him because they suspected him of being a police informer:

Jacques draw out a gun to force his way into the house like to shoot me and my father grabbed him and there was a whole twist outside and my brother-in-law he hit Jacques you know and the gun fall—fall over the balcony right down you know and they chased the group, it was a group of youths it was about sixteen of them you know…. The chase went right around the street and my father and my brother-in-law they arrived. At that time I had a firearm but it was for my own purpose. I took out the firearm, I put it underneath my jersey, I went outside because I check now it’s too dangerous to be inside the house. And I want to move now, out of the area. As we were still standing outside to move this group of comrades and there was some gangsters also with, they came shooting around the corner, before even they take the bend the shots was firing and they were shooting and throwing bricks and my mother and my father they ran into this, and with my baby brother ran into this people downstairs house, that there surname were Brooks, they ran into this house and these people locked the door, and I and my brother-in-law Kevin Arendse was still outside, locked outside. The people inside didn’t want to open the door and here these people were preparing to shoot and there was like a big fight you know and one guy he was still trying to cork [sic] the gun but the gun jammed you know and at that time as I was shouting open the door, the people inside opened the door and as my brother-in-law Kevin Arendse and I ran into the house, and the door closed the shots just went down and the bullets ran through the doors and through the windows and all that.⁴¹

Here de Souza is being attacked and shot at by people he had considered his comrades, and it is also clear that his family is in danger because of his presence. Other parts of his testimony deal with how the lives of his mother and girlfriend have been impacted by what happened to him, his difficulty finding a job, and his diagnosis by doctors, who were treating him for the long-standing effects of severe torture.⁴²

A question worth asking is, what do we learn from discourse analysis here? Blommaert et al. tell us that we learn that “affect markers are not a stable and closed category, but that any feature of talk can potentially serve an affect-marking function when it is stylistically contrastive with other features.”⁴³ Fair enough. The authors take the time to listen carefully to recordings of de Souza’s testimony so they can appropriately label his speech according to pitch, stress, intonation, pause, and other indicators, and thus we may learn something about how de Souza handles his own suffering in speech form. Anyone who has both witnessed a hearing and read its transcripts knows the very important difference between the two. In September 2012, I watched Sulejman Crncalo, a Bosnian Muslim, testify before the ICTY in the case against Ratko Mladić. In the course of his testimony, he told this story:

I’ll never forget that image. It will never leave me. The street was covered in blood. There were about 30 people there—well, that’s my assessment. But the part hit by the shell was covered in blood. There was a fence protecting pedestrians from the trams, and there were body parts or, rather, parts of clothing and footwear on the fence, in the streets. There were body parts. The entire fence was covered in blood. I observed all of this and there were people looking on from the side streets. They asked me, what are you doing? I said, I’m looking for my wife.⁴⁴

The scene appears terrible when you read it, but it may seem terrible in a straightforward, somewhat “factual” way. That may have to do with the format—you know that you are reading something that is an official document, legal testimony, and it is words on a page held separate from the embodied life of the man who authored the words. But when you hear the testimony in person, and the elderly man whose wife has now been dead for twenty years is crying and reliving the trauma of the story, the experience is visceral. In the audience gallery, sparsely populated by scholars, lawyers, journalists, and “tribunal tourists,” everyone is paralyzed at this moment. Very still, crying, not knowing what to do with the moment. A neutral setting where all know their roles and easily maintain their separateness is transformed, bland space suddenly pulsing and claustrophobic. If this is what discourse analysis could do for the written word, I suppose that would be a good thing in that it would allow people who care to listen to hear better.

But what do we fail to hear when we do not take de Souza at his word that part of what sustained him is that he was well trained, that he was—in his word—clever enough to know how to react to tear gas canisters and being chased and detained and tortured? Blommaert et al. worry that “it is precisely the existence of a public transcript that makes hidden transcripts invisible, obliterates resistance and shapes an image of ideological incorporation.”⁴⁵ Let me be sure to say that I think it is important that those who read, hear, and write about testimony keep these possibilities in mind—to look and listen for them. As Blommaert et al. state, “upon closer inspection, we can see very different versions, rooted in very different traditions of talking and thinking about topics, and very often leading us into a more ‘subcultural’ view of particular representations of reality.”⁴⁶ Institutions structured to take testimony in certain forms, settings, and languages will always make speech easier for some than others, and so those who listen may need to learn how to attend to more than a bare transcript of what is said. The tools of sociolinguistics are surely among the indispensable tools of this endeavor. But in this case, in finding de Souza’s pain in the “hidden transcript” of how he speaks, Blommaert et al. unwittingly obliterate his resistance to making the story only about his suffering. An irony. Ross calls this “excavating and revealing pain in accounts that expressly set out to disguise it or to shatter normative models.”⁴⁷ The authors worry that de Souza’s testimony says about him that “he was not one who suffered, but one who struggled.”⁴⁸ Though I doubt anyone who heard or read his testimony would miss his suffering—from torture and ostracization to his continuing mental and physical health problems and the diverse effects of all that on everyone in his life—surely it matters that he chose to tell a story of struggle rather than one only of suffering.

SILENCE

In the early 1980s in the United States, psychiatrist Stuart Grassian was ordered by a Massachusetts court to evaluate fifteen prisoners at Walpole penitentiary to determine whether their claims that solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment and thus unconstitutional could be substantiated. While being interviewed by Grassian, one prisoner observed, “I went to a standstill psychologically once—lapse of memory. I didn’t talk for 15 days. I couldn’t hear clearly. You can’t see—you’re blind—block everything out—disoriented, awareness is very bad. Did someone say he’s coming out of it? I think what I’m saying is true—not sure. I think I was drooling—a complete standstill.”⁴⁹ Grassian reported that seven of the prisoners suffered perceptual distortions or hallucinations, in part because they had no way of corroborating what they thought they heard. They had been removed from the world of human relationships, where our interactions with other people help establish that we share a world in common with others where stable meanings can be created. As such the conditions in which these prisoners found themselves resemble those that destroyed the world of Jean Améry. Another prisoner reported, “I hear sounds—guards saying,‘They’re going to cut [his nerve-damaged leg] off.’ I’m not sure. Did they say it or is it my imagination?”⁵⁰ The prisoner lacks certainty about what he has heard, but not because he wasn’t listening closely enough. Is it irony when you can listen all you want and still not hear what has happened? As Grassian observes, “If [the guards] did say [what the prisoner thought he heard], the prisoner is suffering from derealization; if they said something else, or something not directed at him, he is suffering a (paranoid) perceptual distortion; if they said nothing, he is having a hallucination.”⁵¹ But solitary confinement is structured such that no one—not even those to whom it happened—can know what happened. This is a place of utter silence. The United States has, in Colin Dayan’s words, “invented a new form of death,” and a number of Supreme Court rulings have only made that more difficult to see.⁵² As Lisa Guenther points out, “we don’t expect that our most fundamental sense of identity could come unraveled in the prolonged absence of others—but this is because we rely on the support of others at such a basic level that we can take them for granted.”⁵³

In her remark Guenther is talking about solitary confinement, but I think her observation has a wider meaning. Identity comes unraveled in the prolonged absence of others—and that isolation does not have to be solitary confinement.⁵⁴ What happens when a survivor tries to narrate a destruction of self and world, but what gets heard by those who listen is a redemptive story about resilience? What happens when a survivor resists reducing a complex story of disrespect to sexual violence, but what gets heard is a rape story, or when a survivor wants to tell a story about his strength, and it is converted into a story about his pain? These are forms of imposed isolation that may happen even in a crowd of people, even in a crowd of supportive people. Many of those supportive people may have failed to hear well because they are stuck in the other part of Guenther’s remark: they have relied on the support of others to such an extent that they have taken it for granted. It is invisible. They don’t even see that they need it or that it can be destroyed. They have taken existence for granted and so far have never allowed anything to interrupt their sense that what they experience is simply how the world is—like some kind of unchangeable essence—rather than the outcome of cooperative action that relies on others and for which they are in part responsible. That is one barrier to hearing well the testimony of those who have lost that connecting thread. Those who listen may not see that when they fail to hear, they also fail to contribute to rebuilding a world because they have failed to recognize a self who is struggling to be heard on her or his own terms.

COMMUNICATION

We might be aided here by a better, or at least a different, understanding of what communication is, what it does, how it succeeds, fails, and produces ironies, and why that matters not only to individuals seeking to convey meanings to one another but also to the politics of reconciliation, transition, and recovery.⁵⁵ I think Levinas’s work can help us here, too, to get at something that is difficult in the scenes of communication we have been discussing.

For Levinas, communication is not a simple way in which I act on the world and reap the end that follows logically from its means, especially since it proceeds not only by language but also in bodily signs. We give off meanings and receive them from others all the time, whether we will it or not. A significant amount of meaning is carried and transferred in this way. In saying that, I do not mean that from viewing my outer appearance—my clothes and manners and modes of speaking—you might surmise something about my past and present. Of course you can do that (with varying levels of success). Instead I’m pointing to the ways in which communication is not knowledge.

Communication—verbal and nonverbal—may and often does contain a specific content, which the speaker intends a hearer to receive and understand. But communication has a prior phenomenology. Just as a sensation of heat, flavor, or odor is not primarily cognition of those things but an undergoing of a sensation, communication is, prior to its instrumental use for sending a message, a form of responsiveness to other human beings.⁵⁶ It exists because there are others, to whom we respond. That is the kind of being a human being is: exposed, responsive. It is why we can be harmed. And it is how we communicate. Some of our responses to others are reasoned and willed; many others—many of the primary ones—are not.

If irony is a space where a gap opens up between what is said and what is meant, you might say Levinas’s description of human communication has irony of a certain kind built into it. Levinas reminds us that “to require that a communication be sure of being heard is to confuse communication and knowledge, to efface the difference, to fail to recognize the signifyingness of the-one-for-the-other in me.”⁵⁷ What Levinas calls “signifyingness” (signifiance) points not only to the “meaning” of l’un-pourl’autre, the-one-for-the-other, but to the idea that as beings we give off signs. We don’t only “make” signs but also, perhaps, “shed” them, revealing ourselves affectively whether we wish it or not. We are for-the-other because we send and receive “messages” simply by appearing and inhabiting the world as sensing beings in proximity to other sensing beings. This may be what Kathleen Stewart intends when she writes, “Everyday life is lived on the level of surging affects, impacts suffered or barely avoided.”⁵⁸ So Levinas means, among other things, that communication is not a simple transfer of meaning from point A in me to point B in another person or a larger audience. When any one of us undertakes to communicate with others, we probably desire success, precision, and certainty. But sometimes our aim will not be precise. And even when it is, we may not succeed in communicating what we intend—even when we speak in favorable conditions and from places of power. Knowledge can, at times, be certain. But communication is not knowledge.

Remember both Levinas’s observation that research takes form as a question and Améry’s experience of an imposed existential solitude that for him was the loneliness of utter abandonment. Even the dialogue a self may have with itself needs others; intellectual solitude is still a work of thought performed by a self who resides in a shared world. When a person speaks and no one listens, or those who listen fail to hear, that may undermine the sense of inhabiting a shared world for the speaker. We depend on others not only to forbear from harming us but also to respond to us and, in doing so, confirm the reality of the shared world. Without that there is no world. That is why Levinas writes that “communication would be impossible if it should have to begin in the ego, a free subject, to whom every other would be only a limitation that invites war, domination, precaution and information.”⁵⁹ Communication begins in response and, while war and domination are indeed forms of response, they are also, like negotiated peace or social norm following, later versions, built upon a bedrock of communication not reducible to “what words mean” (which in any case is already a complicated thing). The self-sufficient subject who conceives of her autonomy as only threatened rather than also built by the presence of others would be hard-pressed to explain why communication is as fragile as it manifestly is. Affect ranges between and among us, transmitting joy, rage, indifference, and even trauma. We sense the presence of others and we respond, sometimes despite ourselves. That may interrupt even our best attempts to convey accurate messages to others, for better and for worse.

Levinas isn’t arguing that we are passive through and through, however. After all, in his description of self-formation (discussed in chapter 1), the self undergoes a conflict between egoism and its interruption by the other fairly constantly, not (or not only) as a form of a reasoned moral inner debate but as waves of affectivity beyond the power of a self to choose or refuse. We are our own selves, yes. But we do respond to others, whether we rationally will it or not. The tensions inherent in the relation between responsiveness and self-involvement correspond to what we saw in chapter 1 about taking existence for granted. It is, for some people at some times, easy enough to take the world for granted and to experience as given a self who gets to choose how to interact with the things by which and persons by whom she is affected. We might say that theorists of autonomy are right to want to describe that self and provide conditions for its flourishing. But if we take that self as a starting point rather than a fragile accomplishment relying on many authors, we miss something important not only about who we are but also about what we owe to ourselves and others. We may fail to be interrupted by the sense that there are others.

Communication (like fatigue, weariness, and indolence in chapter 1) may, if we take note of how it works, interrupt our sense of the certainty of meanings and remind us that we are responsive creatures trying to build and share worlds. It does this (if we stop to notice) by drawing our attention to what we did not get to choose and to the risks none of us can escape—of misunderstanding, abandonment, and refusal of response.

Discerning truths and transmitting facts are both important aspects of world building; they help to establish a shared world and set forth standards of judgment by which we hold ourselves and others accountable. But if we think that facts and truths fill out the vessel of communication, or that when we communicate facts and truths transparent understanding always ensues, we will not be able to explain why conflicting facts and truths always emerge—unless we content ourselves with saying that wherever truths conflict, only one of them is true. In many situations—especially those of postconflict transition and reconciliation—meaningful experience will not bear out that conclusion. Indeed, every reconciliation rests on a fragile consensus—a new definition of past, present, and future—that can be won only slowly, painfully, and cooperatively and will never succeed in erasing or redefining every resistant narrative. In every transitional situation, people make hard choices about where to compromise and where to hold fast to principles of justice or recovery. Some voices get heard and others do not. Individual victims, whether or not they feel heard, will also face the inevitable disparities between what is good for the group and what is good for the self. And it won’t only be calculations of rational self-interest governing how these changes come into being. People will be swept along by what Stewart calls “rogue intensities”: “all the lived, yet unassimilated, impacts of things, all the fragments of experience left hanging. Everything left unframed by the stories of what makes a life pulses at the edges of things. All the excesses and extra effects unwittingly propagated by plans and projects and routines of all kinds surge, experiment, meander. They pull things in their wake.”⁶⁰ Beings who communicate, as we do, through various channels, many of them neither willed nor fully controllable, will need rules, reasoned discourse, and formal equality to keep things fair. But they will need a lot more than that.

A strict accounting of facts may help shed light on abuses that were hidden, and that may help set up new expectations that where lawlessness once reigned, the rule of law will now offer equal protection. That is good. But a strict accounting of facts may also—at the same time—fail to do justice to the deeply entrenched different truths a divided society has lived in. Even the soundest logic, bringing together facts and what justice requires, may fail to persuade people in the absence of conditions for successful hearing. It may also simply miss something not sayable within its terms. As Sedgwick points out, “some exposés, some demystifications, some bearings of witness do have great effectual force (though often of an unanticipated kind). Many that are just as true and convincing have none at all, however, and as long as that is so, we must admit that the efficacy and directionality of such acts reside somewhere else than in their relation to knowledge per se.”⁶¹

YAZIR HENRY

Mark Henry was a member of Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa during its struggles against apartheid.⁶² Yazir Henry is the name he chooses now, “because Mark was a name that I could no longer live with.”⁶³ He changed it in 1991, saying at the time that he was doing so for religious reasons, though in his testimony before South Africa’s TRC he admits “it was much more than that. Mark was a name that brought me ostracization, it brought me shame and it brought me great danger.”⁶⁴ He changed his name for reasons similar to those that led Hans Maier to become Jean Améry (or Paul Antschel to become Paul Celan). It marked a break with a past that was unlivable in the present. Changing a name may modify the self’s relation to its history, assert an agency with regard to it, become a way of making a past that should have been otherwise more manageable. It is a form of revision.

Why did the name Mark Henry bring ostracization, shame, and danger? After joining the movement at age fifteen and rising through the ranks of the MK, undergoing training in Mozambique, Zambia, Angola, and the Soviet Union, Henry infiltrated back into South Africa, where, after being apprehended, he was tortured and forced to reveal the location where a comrade, Anton Fransch, was hiding. That friend was then killed. Henry lacked the “moral luck” Améry had—that Améry never possessed the information that he admits he surely would have given up under torture. There is much information that Henry did not give up, but what he did admit caused the death of a fellow fighter.

When he was finally released after months of captivity, torture, and abuse by the South African Security Forces, his comrades suspected him of being an askari, someone recruited by the South African Security Forces to work against the ANC. Nothing he said would change their minds, so he was ostracized, his life permanently in danger. That is ethical loneliness—abuse and dehumanization followed by the surrounding world’s refusal to listen. In his testimony, describing what happened to him after he was released from captivity, Henry says,

I began to disintegrate. I lost weight, at one point I weighed 40 kgs [88 lbs], even less. My self-confidence, self-esteem and dignity was eroded even further. My ability to concentrate and remember was seriously impaired. It became impossible to sleep, I was and still am constantly haunted by nightmares. I remember looking into the mirror and seeing somebody whom I didn’t know. I could not accept that some of my comrades whom I had trusted could believe that I had become an askari and an enemy.⁶⁵

What harmed him was not only his own betrayal of his comrade or the torture and abuse by the Security Forces. Abandonment by his community and by the movement to which he had dedicated his life weighed as heavily and made it impossible for him to move forward. He could not rebuild a world without the help of others. And so he lived for years in a prison of his own guilt, too ashamed to speak of what had happened to him and unable to resume living a normal life. He wanted the TRC to give him a space where he could testify not only to the truth of his betrayal but also to his own victimization: that at the age of nineteen he was put in the impossible position of choosing between the lives of his mother and four-year-old nephew and the life of his friend. In the transcript of his testimony one can witness him doing his best to balance taking responsibility for that death with giving voice to what was invisible about his own case—that he had been treated unjustly, too.

Henry’s testimony, in some of its aspects, recalls the loss and disorientation expressed by the prisoners in solitary confinement at Walpole and by Améry in the concentration camp—isolation and dehumanization cause a disintegration of self. And it points to a wider responsibility for justice in multiple ways. The continuing challenges to Henry’s mental and physical recovery came not only from feeling threatened but also from being abandoned. In his testimony he says, “It has been hard living and not existing. I am alive but my existence continues to be ignored.”⁶⁶ One of the things he wanted the TRC to provide was a space where the lines between victim and perpetrator were less distinct.⁶⁷

Henry testified before the TRC about abuses he underwent, not about crimes he committed, though of course the betrayal of his comrade entered into his testimony, since it was an integral part of the story of what befell him. What Henry sought from the TRC was release from his guilt and support from his community—human understanding of the impossible choice forced on him. Instead his blame for a role in a political struggle well beyond his control was formalized: his name appeared in the TRC Final Report in conjunction with the case of his dead friend, making his guilt official rather than helping to lift its weight. An irony. In his words, “My testimony appears under the name of someone who has been killed and I can never be freed from this version of the past. Instead of clearing my name, it is as if I am forever written into this death. No attempt has been made in the Final Report to look carefully at the reasons I went to testify.”⁶⁸ He understands intellectually why this would happen, given the number of persons who appeared before the TRC, but knowing that doesn’t compensate him for his loss: “In the context of so many testimonies I am able to make sense of this—in the context of my own personal life it is just painful.”⁶⁹

So, despite the more capacious space for storytelling offered by the TRC, the institution’s strict delineation of victim and perpetrator as separate categories rendered something important about Yazir Henry’s condition unintelligible. Those categories are part of why his testimony, like Yvonne Khutwane’s, took on a life of its own: Antjie Krog told an edited version of it in her book Country of My Skull, naming the chapter in which it appears “The Narrative of Betrayal Has to Be Reinvented Every Time”;⁷⁰ and various newspapers took up the story and molded it to the narrative form of crime and political forgiveness.⁷¹ As a result, his testimony put him in more danger. As he reports a few years after his testimony, “In the two and a half years since occupying that space, I have survived one attempt on my life and I have been accosted and humiliated several times in public for reasons relating to my entering the space provided by the TRC.”⁷²

The TRC recognized Henry, gave him space to speak, recorded his story, and commissioners offered him supportive words. But the TRC also failed him.

However, we might ask, how far can we take the point about the risks of communication? On one level, we may want to call what happened to Yazir Henry, Colin de Souza, Yvonne Khutwane, or Hanna a simple truth, that no one is entirely in charge of her own life story, and thus when you tell your story in a public forum, it may take on meanings that you never intended because that is just how stories and public fora work.⁷³ But how this truth affects us may vary according to power positions.⁷⁴ We’re back with Horace in front of the Roman Forum, treating a man who desires our help as a nuisance rather than reading his predicament as a commentary on the fragility of communication, our responsibility to respond, and the potential differences of power and influence between us.

THE SHIELDS (SILENCE, PART 2)

The skeletal remains of Native Americans were not considered human remains until 1990—according to U.S. law. Before that, they were considered scientific specimens, and it was perfectly “legal” to rob Native American graves or to store bones, skulls, and sacred objects in drawers and boxes in archives. Then, in 1990, NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) was passed, reclassifying native remains as human and also giving Native Americans a place in the conversation about what to do with remains housed in federally funded museums.⁷⁵

As a piece of legislation, NAGPRA is both forward looking and backward looking. It requires that, for remains and cultural objects already found as of 1990, museums that receive federal funds must make lists available of the remains and associated funerary and sacred objects in their collections, and, if a tribe or lineal descendant related to the remains or cultural objects requests a return of the items, the objects must be repatriated. For remains and objects found after 1990—either intentionally or inadvertently—NAGPRA “prioritizes claims of ownership.”⁷⁶ First priority goes to a person or tribe able to demonstrate lineal descent from the remains in question. When funerary or other sacred objects are found and they are not clearly associated with any particular bodily remains (meaning that direct identification of lineal descendants is impossible), first priority for granting ownership of the objects goes to the tribe on whose land the objects are found, with second priority going to a Native American tribe “which has the closest cultural affiliation.”⁷⁷ Third priority awards the remains and objects to the tribe judged to be the aboriginal inhabitants of the land on which the objects were found, unless another tribe can show that it has a “stronger cultural relationship” with the items.⁷⁸ These rules at times have the unintended consequence of pitting tribes against one another in disputed claims.

An interesting thing about NAGPRA is that, when it comes to establishing lineage or “ownership” (a problematic term for many of these items, as we’ll see), oral history counts as evidence equally alongside scientific evidence such as linguistic, historical, archaeological, and genetic materials. That is one way in which NAGPRA is sensitive to the different ways in which cultural memory gets stored and transmitted.⁷⁹ The legislation lists “geographical, kinship, biological, archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, folkloric, oral traditional, historical, or other relevant information or expert opinion” as legitimate sources of evidence, and the standard of proof to be applied is that of “a preponderance of the evidence.”⁸⁰ That is a promising step forward for the U.S. government, whose representatives were, in the past, “often blunt in their rejection of oral histories as reliable sources.”⁸¹

But even a piece of legislation designed, like NAGPRA, to redress past harms in ways sensitive to the incommensurate forms of meaning making in U.S. legalism and Native American cultures may produce situations where judgments aimed at granting tribal requests fail to hear what tribal representatives say. The case of three shields found by the Pectol family in 1926 and then repatriated in the early part of the present century is such an instance.

The shields, found in a cave in Utah in the early twentieth century and then displayed in the Visitor’s Center of Capitol Reef National Park in Utah for many decades, were of Native American origin. But experts could not agree on the precise source of the shields: estimated dates of origin varied from A.D. 1 to 1650, and various stories about the linkage of the art on the shields to diverse tribal traditions emerged. Carbon dating helped narrow the range of temporal uncertainty, though those results also varied—from 1420 to 1640. Both the “uniqueness of the shields in the anthropological record” and limited knowledge about the groups living in the Four Corners region of the United States in 1500 made scientific certainty impossible.⁸² Anthropology can abide gray area wherever there is not adequate evidence to construct a full history; but law wants a decision. And so the shields—and the tribes claiming them—got caught in that site where Native American semisovereignty comes up against both the jurisdiction and the form of law imposed by U.S. legal institutions. Because anthropologists and archaeologists could not come to a consensus on which tribe(s) should “own” the shields, the tribes interested in the shields had to make arguments in support of their claims. They had to construct legal stories.

The two main groups vying for the shields were the Navajo Nation and a joint filing from the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Agency, the Paiute Tribe of Utah, and the Kaibab Band of Paiute Indians (I’ll call this the Ute/Paiute claim, after Threedy).⁸³ The Navajo tribe had a tribal storyteller, John Holiday, who was able to offer in testimony a persuasive narrative about the shields. And, because of NAGPRA’s wider standards of proof, when a respected Navajo elder offered a plausible oral history of the shields, it counted as legitimate evidence rather than being discounted as hearsay (as it likely would have been in a more traditional court setting).⁸⁴ Holiday’s basic story, as characterized by Threedy, was as follows:

The shields were made by a man called Many Goats White Hair, nine generations ago. The shields were sacred ceremonial objects. When the Navajos were being rounded up by war parties, the shields were in the care of two men, Man Called Rope and Little Bitter Water Person. Man Called Rope was John Holiday’s grandfather. Concerned for the shields’ safety, the two men decided to hide the shields in the area we call the Mountain With No Name [Henry Mountains] and Mountain With White Face [Boulder Mountain]. The location of the hidden shields was then lost.⁸⁵

As Threedy puts it, the narrative has scene, agent, act, agency, and purpose, so it feels like a story. And the connections between the elements work fairly well.

The Ute/Paiute tribes did not produce a story. Instead they composed what looks at first glance to be a more straightforward legal argument, maintaining that the shields were recovered from traditional Ute territory, that there was evidence that Utes had used buffalo-hide shields for hunting, and that the shields’ designs were “not inconsistent with Ute traditions.”⁸⁶ From what we know about NAGPRA, that is a reasonable set of claims clearly meant to satisfy some of the priority rules for deciding how to repatriate sacred objects not associated with particular remains. Navajo land is not very close to where the shields were found, whereas that territory is traditionally Ute territory. However, Holiday’s story included plausible information on why the shields would be found where they were: a site far from an invasion by U.S. Army war parties was chosen, to keep the shields safe.⁸⁷

Lee Ann Kreutzer, the archaeologist judging the case, after considering testimony from the tribes and the reports of various anthropologists and archaeologists, awarded the shields to the Navajo, writing of the Ute/ Paiute claim:⁸⁸ “The [Ute/Paiute] tribes have constructed a plausible, but not persuasive or even adequate, claim of original Ute/Paiute control of the shields…. This claim is seriously lacking in credibility. In fairness to other claimants and the general public, the National Park Service cannot simply accept a tribe’s unexplained, unelaborated, and unjustified request for repatriation.”⁸⁹ Initially that seems a good standard of judgment. Much of law does transpire as a series of well-constructed stories, and the most consistent and plausible stories tend to win cases. But there is also an irony here: the Navajo win with the “hearsay” of oral history while the Ute/ Paiute claim is found less persuasive in part because it limits its narrative to positivist legal form. That view of the two cases also hides something, however. What Kreutzer misses in the Ute/Paiute claim is not what it says or fails to say but where it chooses to remain silent. As Marianne Constable puts it, writing about a different set of Native American cases, “what is unspeakable here is not only that which cannot be spoken, but also that which in its speaking is destructive in that it cannot properly be heard.”⁹⁰

After the decision was made to award the shields to the Navajo, the Skull Valley Goshute Tribe submitted a report that shed further light on what wasn’t heard in the Ute/Paiute claim. In a report on that supplemental information, Kreutzer writes,

Mr. Brewster’s discussion of Punown religious thought clarified for me what Southern Paiute consultants tried to communicate to me earlier in the process. Most would confide no information whatsoever, except that the shields should be repatriated to the Utes and Paiutes; they responded negatively when asked for information that could be weighed against the Navajo claim. For instance, one consultant replied that her people are not Navajos and unlike them do not share any information about their religion. Another consultant, however, told me directly that the shields were not Paiute, Ute, or Navajo…, and needed to be reburied. Whereas I originally thought he was conceding that the shields are not culturally affiliated…I now understand that he was trying to tell me, without divulging confidential details of his religious belief, that objects belonging to the sacred realm cannot legitimately be claimed by any particular tribe or individual.⁹¹

Part of what the archaeologist could not hear is that there are things that cannot be said. She also did not seem to hear that there are things that cannot be owned. Though she is supportive of the validity of oral history as a source, she is also invested (perhaps without knowing this) in the discourse of Western legalism, where silence cannot be its own phenomenon but always rather stands for something that simply has not yet been spoken.⁹² Kreutzer (who surely cared deeply about her responsibility to judge well) thought she heard consultants making ownership claims without offering proof, when what those consultants were trying to say was that sacred objects cannot be owned, and that the reasons for this cannot be spoken. Is that irony? Constable argues that Native American silences are acts that raise the possibility “of ‘ways’ that cannot be spoken in the terminology of U.S. law and the social study of language. Native silences…remind us that not all law need tell its addressees what to do through utterances.”⁹³ There are forms of law and ways of human being-together that cannot be produced as the content of propositional speech. It is almost impossible for a U.S. court (or, perhaps, a Western ear) to hear that.

The ear of Western legalism is going to want to hear evidence here, proof that there can be a form of law that does not and cannot take the form of a proposition or a rule and explanation of how something like that could offer a fair standard for judgment. That demand is going to place on the person who wants to make a claim that falls outside propositional law an unfair demand to articulate her claims in an alien form for an institution incapable of comprehending the world in which her claim makes sense. But if the person from that “other world” lacks power to evade Western legalism’s jurisdiction, she’s going to have to make some sort of argument in legalism’s terms. There may be no proof to offer here if those are the conditions—and that is part of what lost the case for the Ute/Paiute tribes.⁹⁴

Kreutzer thought she heard a claim unsupported by evidence. A Ute/ Paiute representative simply asserted that “the shields were not Paiute, Ute, or Navajo…, and needed to be reburied” without offering reasons. For legalism a good argument is a claim supported by reasons, and law judges claims based on the making of such arguments. But, as the later report from the Goshute tribe revealed, when the Utes and Paiutes said that the shields “were not Paiute, Ute, or Navajo,” they meant that they were sacred objects that cannot be owned. That is a reason. The Goshute report also revealed that the shields were “a permanent, on-going prayer offering, and that disinterment interrupted that on-going ceremony.”⁹⁵ That is why the Utes and Paiutes wanted the shields returned and reburied rather than displayed. As Kreutzer puts it in her later report, “Even though the consultants might be convinced that the shields and offering were created by a direct ancestor, they refuse to objectify or diminish the shields’ spiritual significance by claiming them on that basis.”⁹⁶ The two tribe groups made different decisions about what could be said. The Navajos told a story about hiding and forgetting; the Utes and Paiutes interpreted the case to involve religious practices that cannot be told as a story.

As of August 2005, the shields are “owned” by the Navajo Nation, “stored in a vault in the tribal museum at Window Rock and are available for traditional healers’ use.”⁹⁷ My analysis of this case makes no judgment—because it is not qualified to do so—on whether that outcome is the right one. I do not think that a respected Navajo storyteller and elder is wrong or dishonest in the construction of his narrative—I am in agreement with Threedy here. But there is also no reason to doubt the case constructed by the Ute/Paiute tribes. And we should remember that archaeologists were unable to determine the origin in time or space of the shields with any scientific certainty. That is why some commenters on the case—other tribes, scientists interested in the shields’ provenance—find it troubling to think that the shields are now locked away, accessible only to Navajo traditional healers.⁹⁸ This may be a case that could not have had a happy ending for all involved—indeed, that is a weakness of law, that it tends to impose a yes/no judgment even where a “preponderance of evidence” might have gone either way. NAGPRA surely made bold steps forward when it both addressed a history of injustice and put some of the power to right that history in the hands of those on whom the harms have been imposed. But the case of the Pectol shields leaves me wondering whether other traditions of judgment—for instance, the slow-paced consensus processes favored by many tribes—might have offered a better final result.⁹⁹ In other words, there are other forms of judgment. Indeed, from the widest angle, the loss in this case is that of the opportunity to recognize that there are other forms of judgment and meaning making.

In saying that I don’t want to pass over too lightly that it was oral history that won this case. That is a different standard of judgment. Kreutzer, reflecting on the case in 2008, points out that “many critics accept writings as stand-alone evidence, but regard oral tradition as a hypothesis to be tested against documentation, as mere rumor, or even as entirely irrelevant. These critics, in fact, are advocating the very thing they think they protest: elevating the practices, beliefs, and world view of one culture above those of another.”¹⁰⁰ So this is a step forward in the relationship between U.S. law and Native American tribes. Shields that the Navajo believe are tied to protection of their people were returned to the Navajo on the basis of oral history. Robert McPherson and John Fahey describe how John Holiday “sang and prayed over the shields” as they were driven to their new home in the Navajo Nation, saying that “the songs were to revive [the shields] and tell them ‘You’re home.’…It felt like a good thing to bring them back.”¹⁰¹ That sounds like a just and happy outcome if we look only at the Navajo case. But it is hard to feel certain that the best decision was made when only one side of the argument was truly heard.

Bradley Bryan points out that, when we subject North American aboriginal traditions to the standards of Western history and legality, it isn’t only that we fail to understand something vital about the traditions we subject to that form of judgment. We also “invite indigenous litigants to understand their own testimony in a straightforward utilitarian manner…. Such an invitation not only alters the indigenous understanding of the relation of Aboriginal peoples to their lands—but also invites a reconceptualization of what ‘their own’ history is.”¹⁰² We see in the strategies employed by the Navajo and the Ute/Paiutes two different ways of taking up that unfair invitation.

But why does Western legality so consistently fail to listen for its own failures? What if, in some broader way, instead of labeling oral history a kind of history practiced by other peoples, we tried to understand what it means to store tradition in that way, to “grant the possibility of a way of life that is grounded in a completely other way of grasping the passage of time and the renewal of discrete possibilities, and to recognize its power to manifest.”¹⁰³ For tribes whose traditions rely at least in part on such forms, oral history isn’t an account of past events. It is itself the event.¹⁰⁴ Western legality is not able to see that, and even the most creative Western mind may only be able to begin to imagine what it would mean to order a world according to a history that is “not simply a reporting of events.”¹⁰⁵ However, even if we think history is just a reporting of events, we are also constantly living the way the meaning of those events transforms over time and does not always stay in the past. Could we not—perhaps with help from other traditions—learn to tell and to hear different stories? I submit that we could. We should do that, because it is what justice demands. But even if we want to limit ourselves to thinking in legalistic terms of instrumental value, given the manifest difficulty peoples governed by Western legalism have coming to terms with their own unjust pasts, we may stand to learn something from considering other ways of relating to the past.

And what if we also learned to listen for silence? Unspeakability functions in multiple ways. It is how people who believe that all knowledge is propositional name what doesn’t fit in that view; it protects secret or sacred truths known only to members or initiates of a group from damage by the outside world; and, after a long history of expropriation and betrayal, it helps safeguard valuable sites and beliefs from further destruction by colonizing violence (and so also expresses a lack of trust in the possibility that even well-meaning white people will make just decisions).

This has been a story about a dispute over some shields, and so it might strike us as less urgent than some of the other stories I’ve related. But let’s not forget that this all happens against a backdrop of a long history of genocide and unjust treatment, originating in a past and extending into the present moment. It bears repeating that Native American skeletal remains were not classified as human until 1990. It does matter how these cases get judged.

At the beginning of this chapter I mentioned the distinction Eve Sedgwick makes between reparative and paranoid reading. Reparative readers acknowledge that they may not have already at hand the tools to understand what they will encounter. Paranoid readers expect to find a world full of oppression and injustice, and so nothing ever takes these readers by surprise—they are fully certain that they know how to read what they find. But paranoid readers also tend to think their job is done when they uncover oppression or injustice. I suggested that mere revelation of past or present harm is insufficient; further, that in some cases it may not even help. As we near the end of this chapter, we should note that even when uncovering injustice or abuse does help, it is only a weak beginning. Stories will be crafted out of what gets revealed, and it will matter who gets to tell those stories, where they are told, who decides what ought to be done about what happened, and whether those who listen assume that hearing and understanding stories about what happened is an uncomplicated task. It is too easy to say, of a story that seems to make no sense, that it is the fault of the teller and accordingly the responsibility of the teller to do a better job at telling. The case of the Pectol shields demonstrates one way in which that assumption meets its limit. Imagine a judgment that takes seriously the Ute/Paiute claim about unspeakability and thus crafts a story about the limits to its own knowledge. What kind of justice might that moment of reparative reading make possible?

HEARING AS RESPONSIBILITY

Primo Levi writes that “our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of a man.”¹⁰⁶ Susan Brison, reading Levi, adds, “It is debatable, however, whether that is the case, or whether the problem is simply others’ refusal to hear survivors’ stories, which makes it difficult for survivors to tell them even to themselves.”¹⁰⁷ Once we try earnestly to look into the gulf that separates the fortunate from the harmed in terms of ability to take existence for granted, it is easier to take Levi at his word: harm’s impact on a body and mind goes beyond the neat certainties of knowledge, as Améry and Brison also have shown us. When we add to that the problem of the unspeakable—ways of being that cannot be spoken without being destroyed—we may take Brison’s point but think it is made too quickly.

Still, Brison’s point is about intersubjectivity, that we are formed not as windowless monads—unproblematically autonomous—but in connection, in our relations with others: “This aspect of remaking a self in the aftermath of trauma highlights the dependency of the self on others and helps to explain why it is so difficult for survivors to recover when others are unwilling to listen to what they endured.”¹⁰⁸ If we have stories to tell and no one listens, we may be robbed of those stories. Throughout this chapter we have seen multiple sites of resistance to such loss. Hanna changes the subject whenever she doesn’t want to discuss what interviewers want to hear and thus she tells the story she wishes to tell rather than the one she is being asked for; Colin de Souza chooses to narrate a story about his bravery rather than one about his suffering even though the format of the TRC dictated a focus on his losses; Yvonne Khutwane insists that her story is about wide-scale disrespect rather than the narrower crime of rape; and Yazir Henry writes and publishes his own history of his TRC testimony once he realizes that he has lost control over what the official record would produce.¹⁰⁹ Trauma is involved here, of course, but if we reduce what doesn’t get said in these stories to the remnants of trauma, we also fail to hear something of what is said. In turn, Native American traditions of unspeakability seem to stand for (among other things) a refusal of further loss rather than loss itself and so point us to other ways of thinking about silence and cultural meaning. It isn’t that the stories are being denied, but that only certain conditions render them knowable. That point may not be entirely at odds with Brison’s. She quotes Paul Fussell, a combatant in World War I:

One of the cruxes of war…is the collision between events and the language available—or thought appropriate—to describe them…. Logically, there is no reason why the English language could not perfectly well render the actuality of…warfare: it is rich in terms like blood, terror, agony, madness, shit, cruelty, murder, sell-out and hoax, as well as phrases like legs blown off, intestines gushing out over his hands, screaming all night, bleeding to death from the rectum, and the like…. The problem was less one of “language” than of gentility and optimism…. What listener wants to be torn and shaken when he doesn’t have to be? We have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty.¹¹⁰

That observation is still situated squarely in the Western tradition where silence doesn’t speak and language can expand to fill every gap. Other traditions, as well as knowledge of what trauma can do, ought to leaven the hopefulness of that belief with a sense of what cannot be said. Brison’s point is that, as resistant to language as violent abuse is, there is also much that can be communicated. But communication is interpersonal. A narrative can be successfully communicated only if it is also heard—by an audience willing to be interrupted. Fussell describes one kind of lack of audience. Brison argues that “as a society, we live with the unbearable by pressuring those who have been traumatized to forget and by rejecting the testimonies of those who are forced by fate to remember.”¹¹¹ That pressure and rejection might be overt, or might be hidden. Those who exert them may not even recognize that they are doing so. In his testimony for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Stanley M. describes his experience of trying to tell his story. Interviewers ask whether he has discussed his experiences with his daughter, and he lists all the things he underwent that she would not believe: people who have not been abused do not believe that people survive being starved, frozen, and beaten for years. He talks about trying to share his story with young people who ask him about it:

What can I say? Sit with a young person, woman or man, and explain her what it is to be hungry, hated and hunted and not having hope? It is very difficult. Their reaction is very, very, you know, curious one. Curious for my part. Because…if you start to build up the climate of brutality what men can do to men, how prejudice can lead to disaster and hatred, at one point they inject argument and say we are better generation and things like that will not happen because we are better. This puts you in a very difficult position because you cannot argue with that and try to prove, no, you are just as bad as me, because that would be immoral from my point of view. So the dialogue ends and I say yes, you are better and I hope you stay that way.¹¹²

What Stanley describes here is a complex failure of hearing made up of his own understandable cynicism, the difficulty of conveying true horror to people who have lived safe lives, and the failure of those people to listen, truly, to what narratives of horror try to convey.¹¹³

POSTMEMORY

Though we need to be careful in how we approach educating people about violence and the wider responsibility for it that all of us bear—because sometimes even hearing about the evils human beings commit upon one another inflicts a kind of trauma on a listener—we do need to find ways of learning to hear. We need to do this not only because we cannot rebuild destroyed worlds or help survivors recover if we do not listen but also because trauma can be passed down through generations in the form of stories and behaviors. Susan Brison records this account:

Yael Tamir, an Israeli philosopher, told me a story illustrating cultural memory, in which she and her husband, neither of whom had been victims of the Holocaust, literally jumped at the sound of a German voice shouting instructions at a train station in Switzerland. The experience triggered such vivid “memories” of the deportation that they grabbed their suitcases and fled the station.¹¹⁴

Trauma doesn’t stay in the past, and it doesn’t always reside only in the body of the initial victim. If selves are formed in a cooperative if unchosen feedback loop between self and other, self and world, then in any society recovering from widespread infliction of trauma, it won’t be only the survivors who are contending with the aftereffects of violence. Even people who aren’t listening may be absorbing the negative effects (and affects) of a violent legacy. Adults may “teach” children and other adults how to inhabit trauma because of how affect is transmitted between persons. “Postmemory” is a term used by Marianne Hirsch to describe “the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.”¹¹⁵ Postmemory doesn’t affect only those whose parents were subjected to genocidal regimes or long-standing abuse and oppression. Brison points out that “girls in our society are raised with so many cautionary tales about rape that, even if we are not assaulted in childhood, we enter womanhood freighted with postmemories of sexual violence…. Post-memories of rape are not primarily inherited from one’s parents, but, rather, absorbed from the culture.”¹¹⁶ Statistics make this point well: an adult American woman has a one in eight chance of being raped and a 50 percent chance of being assaulted by an intimate partner.¹¹⁷ Adolescent girls have a one in five chance of being raped or battered by someone they date.¹¹⁸ Postmemory points backward toward a harm already undergone. But it also sets up a present moment wherein the future is unsteady. Anyone who watches television or film will have seen so many depictions of rape or its aftermath that they can’t fail to have made an impression even on those whose lives have felt safe. Even where rape is successfully depicted as an inexcusable crime and a harm, it is also shown to be an ever-present threat. In other words, even when nothing has happened, present-day social conditions are far from offering a reasonable guarantee of female safety. Sometimes it seems as if no one is listening to that truth. And yet it also seems that too many of us have heard it, for better and for worse. Kathleen Stewart, writing about how affect colors everyday life, puts her finger on how affect’s transmission may be ignored or experienced as “how the world is” rather than as a series of forces ranging between persons:

The notion of a totalized system, of which everything is always already somehow a part, is not helpful (to say the least) in the effort to approach a weighted and reeling present. This is not to say that the forces these systems try to name are not real and literally pressing. On the contrary, I am trying to bring them into view as a scene of immanent forces, rather than leave them looking like dead effects imposed on an innocent world.¹¹⁹

The omnipresence of rape has intersubjective cultural force. But its force is inevitable only if we do nothing about it.

THE USES OF IRONY

Human resilience makes a more satisfying story than does a permanently damaged self. Gross human rights abuses are easier to punish than are the diffuse practices of disrespect that also dismantle a person’s sense of safety in the world. It may feel safer and more productive to embrace forgiveness rather than resentment. It is usually easier to support a narrative that rewards set expectations about how stories and evidence work than it is to find oneself made uncertain by unfamiliar ways of thinking. And tales of suffering may compel sympathy or create nation-building narratives more successfully than do stories about continuing anger or pride in one’s violent resistance. Add to all of that the differing cultures, languages, levels of education and familiarity with testimonial forms, and we simply cannot avoid the fact that some stories will always be easier to hear than others. How might those of us who care to listen learn to hear better?

One could hear my earlier assertion that some of us could use a bit of destruction of our sense of the self’s own sovereignty as provocative. But it doesn’t have to be. Anyone hoping to understand what justice or recovery is in the wake of world-destroying violence will also have to get a sense of what it means that worlds and selves can be destroyed. She will have to listen, to be responsive. She’ll have to experience herself as responsive rather than or in addition to autonomously self-sufficient. In listening, she should be ready to hear things that don’t accord with her expectations, things she doesn’t want to hear, even things that threaten to destroy her idea of how the world works. She will have to be disarmed.

As I mentioned earlier, when those who can listen choose not to, and when those who do listen fail to hear well, it imposes a loneliness on a survivor, a second harm in addition to the original violation.¹²⁰ Of course, one could take a very practical stance and say that one simply can’t listen to everyone, and that missing a resistant narrative here or there isn’t going to stop a nation from transitioning to democracy or keep communities from learning to live alongside one another. That’s not entirely untrue. But approaching testimony with a preconceived idea of what it should accomplish might make the breadth or depth of resistance to that settled idea of what should be achieved illegible. When you encourage forgiveness and gloss over resentment, when you want only the facts of the case, when you want to hear only about gross human rights violations, when you think that healing comes from emphasizing resilience rather than destruction, or that only propositional claims backed by reasons can testify to what builds or breaks worlds, you will have determined in advance that certain stories may not be heard. And then, even if you listen, you will not have a sense of a whole universe of harms that will be there whether or not they are heard, forming a backdrop to all efforts to move forward. This matters—not only for those who don’t get heard. And it gives us a sense of just how broadly responsibility for recovery, transition, and reconciliation must fall. In order for any large and complex recovery to succeed, a wide array of persons must contribute actively to building a world where it is actually reasonable for a survivor to trust that, though she was once abandoned by humanity, that will not happen again. That will involve building institutions, yes, but more is needed than that. A large number and broad range of persons will have to learn to tell themselves different stories about who they are and how they come to owe things to others. Brison writes that forming narratives “facilitates the ability to go on by opening up possibilities for the future through retelling stories of the past. It does this not by reestablishing the illusions of coherence of the past, control over the present, and predictability of the future, but by making it possible to carry on without these illusions.”¹²¹ More of us should be more aware of the fragility of human safety—that we are all always at risk of misunderstanding, abandonment, and refusal of response—and be willing to work with others to build a world with a more equitable distribution of safety from within that vulnerable site.

We’ve seen that institutions aimed at facilitating transition, recovery, or reconciliation often have, despite their best intentions, outcomes that may redound upon those least able to survive them, who are also the same persons the institutions are meant to help. An irony. What made the satire by Horace funny? The answer knowledge gives us is the discordance between what the butt of the joke wanted and what he got. The same joke might not look so funny if we often found ourselves inhabiting the position of the butt of jokes that tend to express relations of unequally distributed power and knowledge. As such, we should attend to sites of irony, figure out how they work, and remedy the source of their disjunction wherever that disjunction stands for an injustice we’d rather not laugh about.

Of course, I’ve said the risks are unavoidable—built into the kind of communication human beings must undertake. We’re all butts part of the time, for better and for worse. And some ironies are not harmful. It is ironic when an institution designed for hearing fails to listen. But it is also ironic that an institution aimed at forgiveness that also allows refusal of forgiveness might make forgiveness or reconciliation more likely for some. The first irony is unjust. The second opens up new possibilities of just hearing.