Linguistic Bearings and Testimonial Practices

Abstract

The paper considers women's testimonies before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, tracing the complexities of speaking about suffering. A growing literature suggests that violence and horror corrupt language and interrupt its flow. Testimonial practices focused on violence's recall then occupy unstable grounds. Arguing that testimony is mediated by the subject positions from which women speak and that these are shaped by cultural convention, the paper traces the effects of 'modes of discomfort' , drawing attention to the faultlines between words and experience when violence is recalled.

The role of the internet in testimony: the case of the ‘Forgotten Australians’

“…Here, authorship is only made possible through processes involving an ‘effort to reconstruct a comprehensible mnemonic chain, acceptable to him or to her’ (Ricoeur, 2006: 129). Further, even where one can successfully produce a narrative regarding pain or harm, the memory can wound in its recall (Ross, 2007: 109). Surrounding and interacting with efforts to produce a narrative following trauma in these circumstances are other key features of context.…”

“…In addition to the personal experiences, struggles and investments involved in memory work, testimony is also crucially framed by public discourses. Occasions of testimony are attended by pre-constructed assumptions and constraints, where the subject positions from which testifiers speak may be shaped by conventions that anticipate certain linguistic bearings (Ross, 2007). For Eyal, the production of testimony can also entail engagement with pre-constructed wills to memory: ‘discourses and practices within which memory is entrusted with a certain goal and function, and is invested, routinely, as an institutional matter, with certain hopes and fears as to what it can do’ (Eyal, 2004: 6–7).The potential teller can confront a setting in which certain discourses surrounding the injunction to remember are available or prioritized – for example, to redress ‘forgetting’ at a social level, and/or internal repression at the level of the individual.…”