Thick Testimonies

When we seek testimony, where do we look and what do we look for? How do we ask for it? And how do we then read it? These three questions animated Friday's session on "Lives and Archives: Giving, Taking, and Circulating Testimony."

Leigh Gilmore began the conversation by considering how literary witnessing, the imaginative, creative, or speculative response to traumatic events, can "thicken" our understanding of those events, complementing and expanding other forms of testimony (legal, documentary, archival). She paid particular attention to those texts which cross the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction, creative imaginings and personal accounts. Her case study was Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of My Mother, a text which, like much of Kincaid's work, draws heavily on her personal life while expanding those experiences through fictional devices. The result is a complex depiction of postcolonial Caribbean identity that offers a different conceptual, reflective space than the specific demands of, say, human rights discourse. Far from attempting to substitute the literary for the legal, Gilmore called for an interpretive practice similar to Kincaid's compositional strategy: reading across genres, expanding our notion of testimony to include the many texts that a traumatic history will produce.

In the second paper, William Craig Howes considered the responsibilities of researchers to their human subjects, a particularly significant question for humanists working in the field of life writing. Howes surveyed the existing protocols for such research, largely developed for the sciences, and compared them to the role of permission as it relates to biography, journalism, and ethnography. Precisely because researchers studying life narratives often maintain a personal relationship with their subjects, Howes proposed that we continue to develop a more flexible and responsive notion of "asking permission." By doing so, the humanity of those lives we are studying will emerge in a more full and cooperative way, potentially destabilizing rigid hierarchies between "researcher" and "subject." Such collaboration can enrich the stories we are trying to tell by transforming the way those tales are generated and performed.

Despite the advantages of greater collaboration, the exchanges between fractured lives can often present significant interpretive difficulties. Gillian Whitlock ended the panel by considering the tension between affective, interpersonal relationships and the larger structural forces in which those connections are situated. She took as her example a piece of embroidery gifted by a young Afghan asylum-seeker, detained by the Australian government on the Pacific island Nauru, to Elaine Smith, an Australian citizen who was advocating for and corresponding with the refugees. Whitlock pointed out that the archive of letters and photographs surrounding the piece testify to the individuality of both the giver and the receiver. Through this exchange, we can discover a narrative of compassion and mutual respect in the midst of a dehumanizing situation. And yet, the story is more complex, reflective of larger, transpersonal social and historical forces. The young man who made the embroidery piece developed his skill as a child laborer in Afghanistan, producing goods for a global consumer market. His flight to Australia was the result of international conflict and symptomatic structural inequalities on many levels. Whitlock suggested that reading the archive of exchange only for personal compassion and affective connection can cause us to lose sight of the larger histories in which those lives play out. And yet to deny the interpersonal is equally insufficient. Reading the embroidery, in this case, requires a double-vision: we must acknowledge individual, affective responses to injustice as well as a challenge the sufficiency of those exchanges.

I think it is interesting to note that Whitlock's doubled interpretive stance returns us to Gilmore's insistence that we recognize the testimonial significance of literary works and creative autobiography as well as juridical records or legal depositions. No single text, or kind of text, can give us the interpretive "thickness" that life stories, and particularly traumatic histories that cross the individual and the structural, the quotidian and the global, demand. I was reminded of Charles Reznikoff's Testimony, a work that performs those multiple interpretations at once. Could it be that the poetic is essential to maintaining complex interpretations? Or, to ask the question in a different way, to what extent might poetry thicken our narrative lives?