Tainted Witness: Why We Doubt What Women Say About Their Lives

The past is a fixed point, the future is open-ended; for me the future must remain capable of casting a light on the past such that in my defeat lies the seed of my great victory, in my defeat lies the beginning of my great revenge.

—JAMAICA KINCAID, AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MY MOTHER

Humanitarian storytelling creates a normative scale on which testimonial narrative is weighed and valued. To understand the complex admixture of sympathy and hostility that women’s testimony about sexual violence engenders, it is helpful to recall the contradiction between the invitation to offer testimony and bear witness and the often precipitous discrediting of speech before an adequate witness can emerge. This contradiction fuels the coalescence of a forum of judgment for women’s testimony that is characterized by doubt. Here, the coordinates of time, in the form of multiple and entangled histories, and space, in the transits of those who cross boundaries by choice and force, are prevented from emerging, and testimony is judged, instead, by the prevailing biases that may stick to witnesses and their complex accounts of coercion and harm. In addition to verbal accounts, the body, too, occupies this geographical, narrative, and temporal intersection: as the locus of evidence collection in sexual assault, the scene of a crime that one inhabits, and the sign that is read for its capacity to seduce despite verbal evidence testifying to harm.

Rape culture forms a jurisdiction within which testimony about sexual violence is judged. Coined in the 1970s by feminist scholars and activists working on violence against women, rape culture designates a pervasive cultural formation that includes the real threats of sexual violence women face alongside the construction of women’s sexuality as something that men can control and, specifically, women cannot.¹ Rape culture distorts notions of women’s sexuality, violence against women, and women’s agency; it fosters hyperawareness of risk while obscuring the actual conditions in which it typically arises. Either a woman’s body is taken to offer a duplicitous witness in rape culture or her verbal and nonverbal behavior is ignored or overridden. “Her words said no, but her eyes said yes” is a less crude version of what the Yale frat boys chanted, “No means yes, yes means anal,” but it distills the right to disregard women’s autonomy; moreover, it is learned behavior tolerated by institutions and encouraged by peers.² And it is ubiquitous, which enables this extreme formation of thought and action to appear as if it were an inevitable and immutable part of everyday life.³ The demand for women’s testimony and the venues, authorities, rhetoric, and judgments that taint it are coevolving. Against the backdrop of humanitarian storytelling with its reliance on ever purer victims to elicit sympathy, and in the context of rape culture, this chapter examines two cases of women’s witness, one legal, the other literary, in order to bring together insights into how women’s testimonial agency seeks a hearing in the context of histories of colonialism.

Here two unsympathetic women witnesses of color articulate complex accounts of harm, precarity, and agency. The first case presents a crime and its search for a hearing. The crime, which occurred at the Sofitel in New York City in 2011, was the rape of a West African immigrant woman, Nafissatou Diallo, by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who, at the time, was the head of the International Monetary Fund and a French presidential hopeful. Her accusation traveled through different legal, public, and popular contexts in search of an adequate witness, and this entire transit constitutes Diallo’s testimony. My second example moves from an examination of sympathy and gendered witness in courts of law and the court of public opinion to take up a literary account of an unsympathetic woman witness in Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid, and the mode of reading it enables. While at first glance it may seem odd to pair the diverse stories together, literary witness challenges the sufficiency of sympathy as the basis of ethical engagement. Literary witness, while not free from the kinds of judgment that attach to actual women, offers an alternative, imaginative jurisdiction in which elements of doubt, sympathy, judgment, agency, harm, and vulnerability are untethered from the demands of courts and may, through its suspension of the demand to inspire sympathy, redeem harm, and emerge resilient and victorious, interrupt and reorient what we think we know about “what really happened.”

LEGAL WITNESS ON THE MOVE: NAFISSATOU DIALLO

On May 14, 2011, Nafissatou Diallo went to her job at the Sofitel in Manhattan where she worked as a housekeeper. When Diallo entered room 2806 in order to clean it, a room she understood to be vacated by its guest, she encountered Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund. He was wearing only a towel, and he attacked her violently and sexually.⁴ All physical evidence from the scene and Diallo’s body confirm this description of the attack. What happened as this event was transformed into testimony in criminal court, the court of public opinion, and, finally, civil court reveals the entanglement of testimony and life story with rape discourse and neoliberal storytelling. Moreover, it offers a concrete example of how the outcome is shaped by the rules of evidence within a jurisdiction, rules that are not shared across forums of judgment. As I have argued, in the presence of doubt as a judgment that sticks to women’s testimonial accounts, truth is hardly a neutral value or reliable measurement of what happened.

Although the Manhattan district attorney dropped charges against Strauss-Kahn in criminal court, Diallo pressed her case in civil court in the Bronx. The change in jurisdiction resulted in a different outcome; yet the verdict registered minimally in the same media outlets that had so energetically prosecuted the case as scandal. In fact, the only verdict rendered for this crime confirmed Strauss-Kahn’s guilt. However Diallo’s discrediting as a witness was not reversed. I use this case study to examine how Nafissatou Diallo’s life stories were mobilized in and crossed the frames among criminal court, civil court, and the court of public opinion. By following the movement of her testimony, we see how rape discourse was tapped to maximize doubt about Diallo’s capacity to tell the truth, to constrain her testimony within a “he said/she said” binary, and to transform her from sympathetic victim to tainted witness.

The discourses about rape that circulate within rape culture undermine women’s testimony. Rape discourse casts doubt on women as credible witnesses to their own harm, and on claims of rape in general.⁵ Through rape discourse, women who bring forward accounts of sexual violence are turned into tainted witnesses before the law and in courts of public opinion. Rape discourse is structured in such a way that it produces and holds up to public view women as tainted witnesses to crimes against them and, in the case of women who have offered accounts of their lives to other authorities, have filed requests for immigration or asylum, and have otherwise given rule-governed testimony in order to achieve specific outcomes, uses life story as part of its means to cast doubt on testimony about sexual violence. Rape discourse is about misperceiving risk, harm, and accountability. It does not educate about law and justice, it does not inform about real and perceived risk, and it does not favor fairness and due process.⁶ Instead, it produces general, default notions of women’s unreliability.

Women witnesses, especially women of color articulating complex accounts of harm and agency, represent a hard case in the neoliberal circuits of sympathy that rule public opinion. For instance, images of smiling brown girls in classrooms juxtaposed with images in which they are threatened in their homes or environment promote the idea that Western-style institutions such as schools and the law provide safe haven from gender violence. Yet this visual storytelling and the narratives of rescue that accompany it avoid hard questions about what happens when women turn to courts of law to tell stories about rape and sexual assault that occur with the iconography of women’s rightful place (either in the home or in specific occupations), stories that often include histories of immigration and asylum seeking. Invitations for women and girls of color to tell stories of survival and redemption may bolster the kinds of humanitarian projects I described in chapter 4, but they also sidestep questions of how such storytelling can backfire. In contrast, feminist analyses of the complexities of women’s stories about transnational migration, sexual harm, and justice better acknowledge the complex networks that shape the production and reception of life narrative.⁷

In the separate locations of immigration and naturalization services, police stations, and criminal and civil courts, we find that “unequal human agency, unequal human impacts, and unequal human vulnerabilities”⁸ travel with the narrative demand to tell one’s story. How, then, do we attend to the recurrent stories of sexual violence in relation to the large story of women’s and girls’ inequalities before the law without making every story seem like a reiteration of the general story? How can feminist readings recognize the force of specific stories as well as their often illuminating idiosyncrasies? How do we follow the transit of testimony in and out of the varying locations in which it will be elicited? How do we connect the very different affective and concrete responses life story generates on the move?⁹ How do we keep women witnesses in view as their testimony travels in search of an adequate witness?

In criminal court it took less than two months for the charge of rape brought by Diallo, then a thirty-two-year-old Guinean immigrant, against Strauss-Kahn to collapse. From mid-May to the end of June 2011, Diallo was transformed from an initially sympathetic victim of rape to a witness who lacked credibility, while Strauss-Kahn was exposed as an aggressive serial sexual predator, was replaced as head of the IMF by Christine Lagarde, and lost his position as presumed presidential challenger in France. No major shift in the accounts by Diallo and Strauss-Kahn emerged during this time; in fact, the legal core of the dispute remained intact: whether the acts had been consensual (Strauss-Kahn’s view) or assaultive and hence criminal (the position Diallo maintained). During the period in which the case fell apart, no new evidence from the crime scene was discovered or disputed, and no exculpatory information about Strauss-Kahn emerged. Testimony by women who had suffered Strauss-Kahn’s sexual predation poured forth. In the “he said/she said” theater of credibility, he initially appeared to be the compromised party and sympathy was hers. This reveals the power of the he said/she said binary: even in the absence of a credible “he said” testimonial account to offset what “she said,” whatever “she said” is necessarily diminished when forced into this formula. In other words, it is not the case that the credibility of what “he said” outweighs the evidence of what “she said.” The form works in the absence of compelling content.

Because the core disagreement about what happened in the hotel room between Strauss-Kahn and Diallo focused on consent, the issue became whether Diallo could testify “credibly.” It did not mean whether she had been raped, nor whether the evidence could bear the charge. Yet when the legal criterion of credibility broadened beyond Diallo’s capacity to speak to the crime itself and attached, instead, to her capacity to speak about her life as an immigrant West African woman with a specific history, the mechanisms that turn women in the public sphere into tainted witnesses were set on their course. In inexorable slow motion, the case fell apart: not because Strauss-Kahn seemed innocent but because his accuser did not seem innocent enough; not because of what happened in the hotel room but, in part, because numerous commentators asserted that she had previously “testified” about sexual violence in her application for asylum. Prosecutors feared that Diallo the immigration applicant compromised the credibility of Diallo the rape victim because both, it was reported, had testified to sexual assault. Her testimonies as an immigration applicant, an asylum seeker, and a sexual assault victim flared into conflict largely through false reporting about her immigration application. The conflicts among her life narratives rather than the evidence against Strauss-Kahn became central.

Two important issues emerge here in relation to law, shifting testimonial venues, and women’s capacity to offer credible witness about sexual violence: (1) the centrality of life narrative and the proliferating venues in which they are elicited and judged; and (2), the increasing likelihood that life accounts—including applications for political asylum, legal testimony in national courts and international tribunals, personal stories showcased in humanitarian campaigns, and memoirs and autobiography—all of which are produced in accordance with different rules and for different purposes and audiences—will come into conflict. When this happens, women’s credibility will be adjudicated on the basis of the relation of the narratives to each other rather than in relation to specific events under scrutiny, such as a claim of sexual violence.

Further, this recontextualization of life narratives in relation to each other fails to remark that such narratives are produced according to specific rules of genre and protocols of reporting, that different things “count” in these narratives, and that authorities other than the women themselves are empowered to judge women’s veracity. The de-agentic place of women within the framework of witness presents a stark challenge to claims that life narrative can provide an ethical basis for engagement in any simple way, as claimed by Kristof and WuDunn. Indeed it exposes a contradiction playing out in multiple locations in which first-person accounts by girls and young women of color are increasingly featured as a centerpiece of humanitarian and human rights campaigns directed at Western audiences, which seems to suggest an unprecedented openness to the accounts of inequalities they might bring forward at the same time as the mechanisms that discredit them are highly mobile, strident, and multiform. It is important to talk about credibility and discrediting as cultural practices that produce doubt and taint witnesses in the context of the circulation and even what we might call the popularity of witness accounts. Not only is it inadequate to call for stories as a spur to empathy, as if once a story is told, compassion spills forth automatically, it can be dangerous to the women telling the stories.¹⁰

Here is where witnesses can learn to suspend the automatic association of credibility with innocence, and empathy with justice.¹¹ These coordinates do not well serve the unsympathetic witness, whom almost any woman may become, as her testimony travels. Instead, something of Kincaid’s willingness to regard the fictional Xuela as an unsympathetic witness deserving of attention models the epistemological challenge of reading the dense textuality of harm before coming to judgment. There is more here than whether a reviewer or a reader can relate to Xuela. It is that she can be described as “inhuman” because she is “pitiless,” as many readers would agree. Yet why ought the one who does not feel pity, and fails to engender it in others, be cast outside the bounds of the human? Such judgments happen quickly, mobilize into doubt, obscure the colonial history of slavery in which such judgment is bound up, and swiftly produce the conclusion that this particular subject is a bad witness, a tainted witness, one whose account it is too difficult to read.

LEARNING TO DOUBT

The figure of the woman witness in first-person narratives is an example of superposition with respect to truth; that is, at any point in her testimony, she is present as both reliable and unreliable witness.¹² It is impossible to know whether a woman will ultimately emerge as a reliable witness because the standard of truthfulness exists not simply in relation to her experience but also within the testimonial limits circumscribing gendered speech about trauma. Formulations such as “nobody really knows what happened” in the cases of sexual assault and rape, for example, work to discredit victims before they speak. They represent a free-floating form of collective judgment that attaches to testimony in the form of doubt. Instead of applying a meaningful brake on wrongful accusations, such skepticism tends to foster underreporting of sexual assault. Moreover, it is part of a pattern of response woven through institutions and bolstered by training and habit that diminishes our capacity (and the capacity of institutions) to engage meaningfully and justly with the prevalence of gendered violence.

As soon as Nafissatou Diallo reported the alleged rape, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was detained at JFK Airport as he was boarding a flight to France and charged in Manhattan with sexual assault. He hired a cadre of attorneys and private investigators who immediately went to work attacking Diallo’s reputation. Diallo, too, had legal counsel, but immediately after the police questioned her, information regarding the contents of that deposition was leaked to the press. As it turned out, Strauss-Kahn’s team was feeding false information about her immigration application to the press and bloggers. In all these storytelling processes, stories of sexual violence were central. Yet the rules governing the elicitation and circulation of Diallo’s multiple testimonies were blurred. For example, during her interview with detectives, Diallo was asked questions that would be inadmissible in a rape trial in criminal court. Namely, she was asked if she had previously been a victim of sexual assault. Because this question sought information about “sexual history,” it is likely to have been ruled out of order and never answered in criminal court. Yet, in a surprising twist that remains unexplained, Diallo answered in the affirmative. She narrated a vivid scene in which she claimed soldiers had broken into her home in Guinea and raped her in front of her two-year-old daughter. Detectives initially believed this story, which turned out to be false. It did not happen, nor did she ever say it did in her immigration application. It was, however, widely reported she had told this story as part of her immigration application and prompted many to call for her to be deported. Whose testimony was this, or, how was this Diallo’s testimony? Why did she tell it in the police station, and why was it so easy to believe she lied in her immigration application? The distance between what happened and the narratives Diallo offered, all of which circulate in a testimonial network with incommensurable standards of evidence, further highlights the problem with tying such narratives to truth. This is a difficult point because truth has the capacity to unmake complexity and reduce judgment to the discovery of error. Testimonial narratives, as I have shown, are produced strategically, can be taken up capriciously, are sometimes persuasive but subject to doubt and discrediting, and do the work of permitting persons to pass through checkpoints of many kinds. To say that Diallo’s narrative in any of the contexts that reward persuasive speech is not true when it is placed in a different context deceptively ties truth to narrative instead of the authorities, often multiple, within a jurisdiction. To insinuate doubt about truth is to amplify the asymmetries that structure how testimonial narratives circulate and persuade.

Doubt is a commonsense word for a gendered formation that is produced over time. Doubt is also a legal term entwined with burdens of proof and rules of evidence. It may be initially withheld as one hears an account of sexual harassment, for example, but creep in as evidence is presented. Although it is a public feeling that readily and demonstrably attaches to speech by women about harm, it feels personal. It is my doubt. Yet in cases of rape and sexual assault, the benefit of the doubt often migrates to the accused when the accuser is female. Doubt represents the limit of basing an ethical response on feelings. When doubting women is constructed as a commonsense and rational response, doubt feels righteous. These political feelings, including sympathy and doubt, do not offer an unproblematic ethical basis for attending to suffering, even if they can be elicited to do good. The locution “no one knows what really happened” is less a position of reasoned and reasonable skepticism than an active, reflexive, and ultimately political feeling that women cannot be trusted to say what harm has befallen them. All too often, a short-circuiting of credibility appears as the unique fault of specific women rather than a predictable product of rape discourse; that is, of many cultural mechanisms working together to produce doubt. Thus the Diallo “story” is not only one she herself told multiple times but one that we must retell in order to disentangle the canny construction of shifting credibility created by the interactions of life narrative and rape discourse.

The theme of her unreliability rapidly became “the” Diallo story. Reporters in a range of media claim that the gang rape story was one she was coached to perform by someone she paid to prepare her for her asylum hearing. Gang rape in Guinea is one of the crimes that Immigration and Naturalization Services officials recognize as grounds for asylum. Knowledge of which stories succeed circulates in immigrant communities, and there is a business in coaching applicants in how to tell these stories. Diallo had a tape of a gang rape narrative and memorized it. This is the story she told detectives. She did not, as reported, use it in her asylum application. The district attorney declined to press criminal charges against Strauss-Kahn because he found Diallo unreliable, ironically, because she had been so persuasive about something that did not happen.

Patricia Williams, the author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights, wrote in the Nation that Diallo’s allegedly conflicting accounts of past violence were not, on their own, enough to derail prosecution: “The fact that she falsely claimed to have been gang-raped in Guinea probably wasn’t enough to doom the case—she might still have presented herself quite sympathetically as a desperate refugee fleeing a war zone.”¹³ Williams recognized that the problem lay in the proliferation of speech: the more Diallo talked, the more she exposed gaps in the sequence of her account of the hotel room attack. Through exposure and repetition, Diallo was rendered an insufficiently pure victim for criminal proceedings despite the physical evidence, despite Strauss-Kahn’s lengthy history of what he preferred to call “rough sex,” which would find its way into court in another, unrelated trial.¹⁴ Narrative inconsistency stuck to Diallo in ways that made the crime of rape slide off Strauss-Kahn and into undecidability. At that moment, it appeared Diallo would not have her day in court.

Yet Diallo’s testimony continued to seek a hearing: in the court of public opinion, and in civil court. Diallo pleaded her case on television, on the steps of the courthouse, on behalf of women hotel workers, and, as she said, for her daughter so she would not learn to be afraid. Finally her moving testimony came to rest within a jurisdiction in which it could be heard: Diallo sued Strauss-Kahn in her home borough of the Bronx. This change in jurisdiction meant that the burden of proof would shift from “beyond a reasonable doubt” to “by a preponderance of the evidence.” When this case succeeded, it also exposed the extent to which the “rational doubt” embedded in the phrase “nobody knows what happened” in cases of rape is catalyzed by the standard of evidence in criminal cases. When the burden of proof is “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and doubt is the reasonable judgment for accounts of rape and sexual assault, then “nobody knows what really happened” is produced as a rhetorical gesture in relation to rationality and law. It is not, nor need it be, a response to the facts in a case, or to any specific woman’s testimony about rape as much as it is part of legal rhetoric: “nobody knows what really happened” emerges in relation to the standard of evidence required in criminal court. It represents political rhetoric masking as common sense and crystallizes in everyday language the claim that women cannot tell the truth about sexual assault. Because civil courts have a different standard of evidence, Diallo’s testimony did not automatically catalyze doubt.

Interestingly, a changed Diallo emerged in this jurisdiction. Justice Douglas McKeon of the Bronx County Supreme Court heard the case and ruled in Diallo’s favor. Strauss-Kahn did not attend the final court date. There were no tense scenes on courthouse steps with attorney and client fielding a barrage of questions from the press, few cameras, and no spectacle. Diallo, who settled for an undisclosed amount, simply left the courtroom smiling and said: “I thank everyone who supported me all over the world. I want to thank everybody, thank God. God bless you all.” Her attorney lauded his client: “Ms. Diallo is a strong and courageous woman who has never lost faith in our system of justice. With this resolution behind her she can now move on with her life.” The judge issued a statement in which he praised her courage.

Recalling Wai Chee Dimock’s observation that “no mileage can tell us how far authors are from each other,”¹⁵ I would observe that in a story that featured a Muslim woman from the former French colony of Guinea in West Africa currently living in New York and the former head of the International Monetary Fund Frenchman Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the greatest distance was not between his status and hers, or the geographical locations of their homes of origin, but between the criminal court in Manhattan and the civil court in the Bronx. In these two venues, Nafissatou Diallo’s testimony, which came to stand in for what had transpired between her and Strauss-Kahn, produced very different outcomes. Her story told through the Manhattan criminal court repeats the violations of the hotel room in eerie ways. Her testimony in civil court in the Bronx offers an example of justice served. In the context of a criminal charge of rape, the standard of proof animated the “no one knows what happened” judgment, mooting Diallo’s ability to present a story of enduring and rising. Neither sympathetic nor credible, freighted with stories, she sank, the transit of her testimony at an end in the jurisdiction of criminal court and the court of public opinion.

Yet testimony seeks a witness, and she found hers in civil court where she proved her claim by a preponderance of the evidence. No new story rose from this outcome. She did not lie on her asylum application, as alleged, thus calls for her to be deported were not based in facts and ceased. Nor did she ever explain why she referred to the rape story in her interview with police investigators. We step outside this moment to observe the seeming agency of rape discourse itself, its perplexing and disturbing animacy, how it was the “right story” for the moment and venue for Diallo, and yet was not her story. She spoke the story convincingly with the perverse effect that the attorney general concluded she would be unconvincing before a jury telling her own story. Stories have achieved a kind of disembodied agency. They speak through us even when they are not ours, they conjure events that happened somewhere to persons not present, they record harms in the voices of those who cannot properly witness. Patricia Williams returns to provide crucial insight. When faced with the case of Tawana Brawley, a young African American woman who emerged after a brief absence with the letters KKK scratched into her skin, smeared in feces, falsely claiming an attack by three white men, Williams refused to dismiss even this obdurate an example of unreadable testimony: Brawley “has been the victim of some unspeakable crime. No matter how she got there. No matter who did it to her and even if she did it to herself.”¹⁶ Williams holds open the possibility in the face of rape discourse and racism that we must do something other than discredit this testimony, which was never able to move to another public location for a hearing. Williams’s capacity to attend to the ruptures in testimony performs a way of transforming silence into listening and hence into meaning, even if that meaning lies in challenging the general condition of doubt that greets women who bring forward accounts of rape.

LITERARY WITNESS: JAMAICA KINCAID

Legal witnesses, humanitarian storytelling, and literary testimony travel together. Their copresence shapes how audiences respond to the ethical claims in each. As I have shown, first-person accounts are a central feature of humanitarian campaigns that seek to free political prisoners, educate about and end human rights abuses, and hold governments accountable, in an international forum of judgment, for their abusive practices. Audiences with differing degrees of distance (spatial, political, cultural, economic, and so on) are enjoined to act—to write letters or participate online, to donate money and time—in order to help the actual people offering first-person accounts as well as others who are similarly in need and whom such testimony represents. The power of the first-person witness thus rests on both the singularity and the wider representative capacity of the witness. In speaking to and for many, first-person accounts expand human rights beyond the frame of the individual. They speak to state-sponsored violence, environmental degradation, and extraordinary need. Increasingly, they also speak of resilience, optimism, and overcoming as part of the production of an autobiographical subject with whom Western readers can identify. In this context I examine how the figure of the literary witness is lodged in the testimonial archive and why this figure’s resistance to an emerging norm in humanitarian and philanthropic discourse matters in the broader project of social justice. I take Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother, an entry in her serial autobiographical fiction about her family and the decolonization in Antigua and Dominica, as an example of literary witness in order to argue that we should read across genres of witness narrative as part of the ethical project such accounts demand. When histories and contexts for understanding witnesses have been destroyed by slavery and colonialism, displaced by migration, and reshaped by the demands to shape one’s story according to bureaucratic and legal requirements, literature offers a density of affect beyond sympathy or suspicion, suspends judgment, and permits undecidability as a value.

Literary witness challenges current formations of which stories have currency, a formation crystallized in a New York Times Magazine cover story by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn discussed in chapter 4.¹⁷ In that piece, drawn from and promoting their book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Kristof and WuDunn build their case for “fighting poverty and extremism globally by educating and empowering girls through tales of suffering and overcoming.”¹⁸ How can girls be empowered by the circulation of specific kinds of stories? The claim seems to rest on the belief that stories permit an affective transaction in readers; specifically, one in which feelings substitute for other forms of knowing about history, culture, policy, and local activism. The rescue and redemption narratives teach readers how to engage with pure and worthy victims. Diallo’s testimony and Kincaid’s literary autobiographical works fail the Kristof and WuDunn litmus test for redemptive suffering. However, Kincaid’s use of autobiographical narrative helpfully contextualizes Kristof and WuDunn’s popular work in important ways that hold open the forms in which stories about experiences of gendered violence are brought forward.

In interviews, Kincaid describes her work as “very autobiographical.”¹⁹ She welds the testimonial and witnessing dimensions of autobiography to an imaginative and transformative project associated more typically with fiction than with nonfiction. She seizes on the expansive potential of autobiography, including its abilities to carry truth claims and to speak for many in the voice of one, to transform the text of history through the entry of a nonnormative speaking subject. Most specifically, she uses autobiographical fiction in a project of witnessing the impact of colonial violence and decolonization on gendered family relationships. Yet obviously Kincaid’s work does not meet the evidentiary requirements of documentary testimony or human rights discourse; nor can it function without mediation to intervene for social justice, seek reparation, or plead for sanctions. It stakes no legal claim, and it does not appeal for donor support. Its complicated female protagonists, modeled on Kincaid, do not open hearts according to any predictable plot. Her work does, however, display the layering and occlusions testimony cannot escape, and in that respect it can become part of the critical practice of attending to trauma narratives. Kincaid’s autobiographical fiction and her nonfiction highlight the overlay of histories of colonial violence on the quotidian; the legacies of postcolonial structures in education, government, commerce, and land development; and their force in intimate life. They are not narrowed to a script of suffering and overcoming, and the female protagonists do not conform to Western ideological (and, increasingly, narrative) requirements in humanitarian discourse about gender norms, including selfless mothering, heterosexual virtue, and faith in and desire for Western-style education and empowerment. She shows what structures and obstructs testimony, what prevents sympathetic victims from arising, and the ambivalences with which testimony can be met.

In many testimonial archives, how the stories are brought out involves intermediaries and their methodological differences, forensic and philanthropic others, danger, belatedness, randomness—all of which together create a matrix in which testimony and witnessing might emerge. The project of bringing out other people’s stories is an important activity in the making of a testimonial archive. If we think of a life as what a person must offer up without translation or other form of facilitation in order to testify compellingly and authentically, then we draw a sharp generic line between fact and fiction and name the management of that line, by the writer and others, in terms of ethics. But if we say that a life both equips and disables our tellings of it (our stories) and that others might tell stories and thereby carry lives with them to other audiences, might be faithful to and ethical in relation to others by telling these stories, then authenticity is still a criterion, but fidelity to others and to the stories of others needs a language different from what is currently available through a strictly individualistic notion of the “I.” Accounts like Kincaid’s use the literary to perform the work of translating, or of bringing out, life narrative as a way to ensure the expansiveness of the human instead of narrowing it through genre.

Reviewers greeted The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), Kincaid’s third work of autobiographical fiction, as “shocking” in its lyrical rendering of a pitiless world by a first-person narrator.²⁰ Xuela’s perspective, described as “inhuman,” took a determinedly bleak view not only of Dominican society but of humanity, including the narrator herself. This was an unsympathetic witness not because of what she had done but because of how she understood the world. The Autobiography of My Mother recounts Xuela’s life story: her birth and upbringing, her lovers, her refusal to have children, and, by the death of her mother, her overwhelming sense of exposure to fate: “no one between me and the black room of the world.”²¹

Kincaid’s literary oeuvre concerns the Caribbean islands of her and her family’s birth, Antigua and Dominica. In her early autobiographical fiction, Annie John (1985) and Lucy (1990), Kincaid’s first-person narrator’s subject is her larger-than-life mother. In Lucy, she asks why her mother is “not an ordinary human being but something from an ancient book.”²² I have described Kincaid’s work elsewhere as serial autobiography to account for how the mutating first-person narrators of Kincaid’s work share Kincaid’s life story, especially the relationship of mother and daughter at the center of her work. In Autobiography of My Mother, readers seem to greet this mother who, because her own mother dies in childbirth, comes into the world as if by the manifestation of her own will. “My mother died at the moment I was born,” is the first sentence of the book, “and so for my whole life there was nothing standing between myself and eternity; at my back was always a bleak, black wind” (3). This new “I” is a sojourner on earth who wanders without attachment to or comfort from kin or home. She experiences a neglect of her personhood that evolves from generations of enslavement: “brutality is the only real inheritance and cruelty is sometimes the only thing freely given” (5). She is immersed in physicality as menstrual blood, the smell of sex, and perspiration evoke a sticky cloud of sensuality, as do repeated descriptions of lush island vegetation barely this side of rot. The condition the “I” is born into entwines shame and shamelessness: she is unashamed of her embodiment, indeed, she revels in it, but shame delimits her horizon of becoming from birth and she can do no more than name it. Consistently, she names it as “black.” The recurrence of black as the color of the sea, ink, hair, and eyes also names the black wind that brings her into the world and carries her mother away, and the black room of the world she enters unprotected by a mother’s love. Blackness twins existential condition with skin color and status on Dominica where Xuela, daughter of a Carib woman and half-Scottish, half-African father, inhabits an archipelagan society saturated in colonial history, commerce, and law. For most of the text, the narrator is unnamed. When she offers it, Xuela Claudette Richardson, it is in the context of learning what names mean in school and encountering genealogies of colonial pain: “Who are these people Claudette…and Richardson? To look into it, to look at it…could only make you intoxicated with self-hatred” (79).

Kincaid has the narrator of The Autobiography of My Mother, Xuela, contemplate the perverse circuits of desire and damage that characterize life for the powerless under colonial rule and the perplexity of her own suffering and survival. In a retrospective passage near the end of the text and her narrated life, she asks, “What was I?” (225). As with many narratives of trauma as well as human rights testimonials, her account hovers around a traumatic moment embedded in a history of trauma it labors to comprehend. From her position in the aftermath of slavery and colonialism in the Caribbean, Xuela offers a singular account of power and injury that is neither fully present nor fully past; it is partially shared and partially hers alone. Evidence of historical injury is everywhere. From kinship structures, governance, and formal education to architecture and the economy, the legacies of colonialism are reproduced across decolonization as corrupt local governments supplant colonial ones (a topic about which Kincaid wrote memorably in A Small Place). Of the affective remnants of colonialism, harm persists in the painful silence of those whose lives are unmemorialized. Near the end of a life haunted by her effort to speak out of this silence, Xuela says, “I can hear the sound of much emptiness now…. I hear it, a soft rushing sound, waiting to grow bigger, waiting to envelop me…. I only wish to know it so that I may one day tell myself the story of my existence within it” (226). By articulating how the silence is shaped, Kincaid contributes to the story of historical trauma literary characters, like Xuela, who memorialize harm without providing a ready language of response.

Kincaid’s autobiographical fiction draws on history and the genealogy of her family to offset the demand for sympathetic sufferers in humanitarian discourse. Its location at the limits of this discourse reveals compelling insights into the production of the human and thereby contributes to the ongoing reclamation of lives from histories of violence. Benefits arise from reading testimonial genres in relation to each other. Literary witness broadens the testimonial archive beyond norms of storytelling and the messages the genres carry about which lives and stories count. In so doing, it holds open the possibility that we can become more engaged readers not only of fiction but also, and indissolubly, of testimony. Xuela is guided in her project of witnessing by a grudging credo: “all that is impersonal I have made personal” (228). Her statement may be read as a definition of the work of testimony: to particularize violence, to give it not only a human face and form but also a voice, a record made for those who cannot offer an account. But, as Kincaid shows further, the testimonial contact zone (to use Mary Louise Pratt’s helpful term), in which one struggles to inhabit a livable position, is always structured through the limitations imposed by violence. Given that the consequence of violence is to destroy the person who might otherwise render an account, we need an expanded sense of how history speaks that acknowledges and makes room for extrajudicial testimony. Certainly not all documents in a testimonial network have the same truth-value or facticity. They are not interchangeable across contexts. Nor can literary accounts supplant documentary records. But I would not want national and international courts, and the documents that circulate in them, to delimit the scope of what can be considered adequate speech about trauma when what is needed is a more acute sense of how trauma speaks.

Literary witness also offers readers an important role in elucidating how the testimonial imperative arises in many different kinds of texts. A wide variety of readers, including but not restricted to scholars of trauma and postcolonial studies, or the numerous and diverse efforts through which they address forms of power and politics, can and must offer not only specialized and specialists’ analysis, but also a critical sense of genre’s limitations, a sense that has actually been important in expanding the requirements for legal testimony. In the development of human rights discourse and over a range of juridical settings, testimony has played a crucial role in various efforts to redress crimes against humanity. Juridical settings accord a pivotal role to the testimony of those who have been wronged: they implicitly and explicitly conceive of the witness to and sufferer of injury as one who must speak, whose speaking is capable of shaping a just outcome, and on whose speech depends the project of asserting the category of the human in the face of its radical disavowal by genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and rape.

Traumatized persons called on to provide testimony endure the hardship of facing their abusers in court; they must repeat the tale of what happened to them. The protocols of some national and international courts permit witnesses to be vigorously questioned and to have their testimony subjected to unsympathetic scrutiny, even as they offer the possibility of redress. Legal testimony’s aspirational horizon for those who have experienced injury is that this exposure repeats the founding injury (by retelling it) with a crucial transformation: in the telling, the injury will conclude differently and historical violence will be countered (through either trial or reparation or something that can be claimed as a just response). Legal testimony in this sense seeks to elaborate the notion of the human in locations of harm. In my literary example, Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother details the intimate impact of colonial economy and kinship structures, but by choosing fiction and a close (even claustrophobic) focus on a particular character, as she did in her critique of tourism, A Small Place, Kincaid crafts a postcolonial particularity, suffused in melancholy and piteous and unpitiable in its wounding. She does not seek redress from any court. Instead, she probes the wound of historical trauma, represents the temporalities of this violence, and crafts a testimonial account unbounded by the strictures of testimonial protocols. Her literary texts alongside literal texts of testimony promise a fuller archive from which to draw understandings of the human, even when that account means refusing the category itself, as Xuela ultimately does.

When we yoke the legal and extralegal in a testimonial archive broadened beyond a single genre to an interdisciplinary critique, the category of legitimate testimony includes subjects rendered “inhuman.” To probe the intimate wounds that have been transmitted over generations of kinship bonds violated by slavery and colonialism, Xuela must become human in order to be able to answer her question “What was I?” Her sense of futility, her belief that her life was cut off at its beginning when her mother died giving birth to her, prompts a series of agentic negotiations around her sexuality and includes her decision not to have children, a decision that has troubled many reviewers. It is seen as a hopeless capitulation, a refusal of the future. Xuela fails to overcome her suffering. The expectation that she overcome her suffering or, in failing to, elude compassion obscures the context of her choice.

During the slave trade in the Caribbean, many women who were enslaved refused, as far as they were able, to bear children. Unable to resist rape and impregnation, they relied on knowledge passed among women to induce miscarriage. They refused to bear children for a slave economy that depended for its reproduction on their extreme coercion—that is, they refused, as Xuela does, to reproduce the category of the human without any hope of access to it. This knowledge, transmitted generationally and used by Xuela, carries the burden of history and is not simply the personal choice that reviewers and readers found difficult to open their hearts to. When Xuela uses the trope of reproduction to represent the labor of bringing forth the human in herself, the accounting is not for one person only: “In me is the voice I never heard, the face I never saw, the being I came from. In me are the voices that should have come from out of me, the faces I never allowed to form, the eyes I never allowed to see me. This account is an account of the person who was never allowed to be and an account of the person I did not allow myself to become” (227–28).

Xuela describes the conquerors, colonizers, and (mostly male) beneficiaries of colonialism as not quite human. Yet in the summarizing of her life, in which she poses and answers her own questions in a quasi-legal confession, she concludes that the category of the human has been so thoroughly violated by slavery and its aftermath that she cannot redeem it. All she can do is refuse its reproduction. In her representation of the persistence of colonialism, Kincaid articulates what colonialism consigns to silence: the effects of being rendered inhuman, of being stripped of the right of self-possession in its basic forms. She chooses to stage her argument with history in the form of autobiographical fiction and to attribute to the fictional character of Xuela the project of testimony. In her mobilization of autobiography in the service of a literary representation of the psychic and material contents of colonial history, Kincaid brings to the arena of human rights a thickened discursive context. She draws on the practices and philosophical underpinnings of autobiography, fiction, and history in order to explore the limits of articulating the human that arise from empire. She also insists on exploring the psychic effects and legacies of this history and in so doing illuminates the generational transmission of trauma. Thus a benefit—in addition to the expanded archive—is an understanding of the historical circumscription of the human. These benefits, taken together, mean that stories of hardship and overcoming sought and promoted in worthy campaigns will not mark the limits of the stories that can be told.

Through her use of autobiographical material, Kincaid amplifies the testimonial abilities of life narrative to bear witness. Notably, she does so in extrajudicial ways: in autobiographical novels, memoirs, and essays. Literary witness belongs to the complicated terrain of truth telling, justice, injury, and resistant agency. It can escape the narrower protocols of testimony yet, like the practice of testimonio, still assert its authority in the messy world where truth is often violently contested. Some might say that if testimony is Kincaid’s end, autobiographical fiction is a less than adequate means. But if one adopts the view that autobiographical and literary texts can and do constitute public mourning, expand the limits of what it means to acknowledge and grieve the losses of history, and offer a traumatic witness capable not only of injury but also of speech, then it is possible to see in them the articulation of what is always on the verge of disappearing: the human subject of historical and intimate trauma. The key is to track the itinerary of the ethical across genres to bring out those selves and stories that might otherwise seem impossible to hear because they remain difficult, insufficiently transparent, and untranslated.

In moving beyond a single literary figure as witness, Kincaid offers the entire book as an example of literary witness. Autobiography of My Mother becomes a meditation on the shape of life that follows for women who have lost their mothers, for Xuela’s mother died in childbirth and there is neither story nor body from which to weave a sense of life-in-time-and-space. The ethics of engaging with witnesses bereft of an uplifting story does not mean that others should supply them with one, but, instead, consists in the formation of publics that do not require it. Kincaid’s work shows the undercurrents of empathy that structure testimony through characters who invite disidentification, and Kincaid tasks readers with bearing witness to narrated lives they cannot fully understand and about which they can do nothing. The figure of the literary witness, in this critical practice, denotes more than a character, a writer, or a reader. Instead it names a dynamic that conjoins the one whose experience propels the telling and the one who brings the story out by receiving it, within the mode of carrying the narrative to other witnesses.

Testimony seeks a witness. Testimony moves as multiple life narratives produced for different audiences circulate outside the locales in which they were elicited and absent the rules that shaped them. These narratives have a life of their own, an agentic force we associate with the power of discourse to mediate the translation of lived events into witness accounts. This chapter focuses on the transits of testimony as they engage with rape discourse; carry literary, legal, humanitarian, and neoliberal life narratives to diverse audiences; and influence and limit ethical witnessing. Diallo v. Strauss-Kahn provides a case study of how her testimony traveled, how it was heard and not heard in different legal, public, and popular contexts, and how it achieved its surprising conclusion after its currency as scandal had expired. The entire transit—often through contexts that place heavy demands of sympathy and purity on women who testify and those who bear witness—constitutes Diallo’s testimony, which otherwise fragments into the judgment of others.