Ethics of Witness in Global Testimonial Narratives: Responding to the Pain of Others (Reading Trauma and Memory) 1498598889, 9781498598880

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Ethics of Witness in Global Testimonial Narratives

Reading Trauma and Memory Series Editors: Aimee Pozorski, Central Connecticut State University, and Nicholas Ealy, University of Hartford Reading Trauma and Memory offers global perspectives on representations of trauma and memory while examining the tensions, limitations, and responsibilities that accompany the status of the witness. This series attempts to bridge the gap between trauma studies and new directions in the fields of memory studies, popular culture, and race theory and seeks submissions that closely read literature and culture for representations of traumatic wounding, the limits of memory, and the ethical duty to depict historical trauma and its effects. Given its breadth, this series will appeal to scholars in a number of interdisciplinary fields; given the specific angle of trauma and memory, it will capture those who see ethics and responsibility as key factors in their scholarship. Such areas include: Holocaust studies; war trauma and PTSD; illness and disability; the trauma of migration and immigration; memory studies; race studies; gender and sexuality studies (which has recently had a resurgence with the #MeToo movement); studies in popular culture that take up television and films about witness; and the study of social and historical movements. We are seeking projects that question how to honor the past through close readings of literature focused on trauma and memory—which would necessarily take on international perspectives. Examples include a consideration of literature, justice, and Rwanda through a postcolonial and trauma lens; recent thinking on the phenomenon of American Crime Story and the resurgence of interest in the O. J. Simpson trial that parallels the narrative of the Black Lives Matter movement; readings of the attempts of popular culture to address issues of historical injustice as exemplified by 12 Years a Slave and HBO’s Westworld. Recent titles in the series: Occupying Memory: Rhetoric, Trauma, Mourning, by Trevor Hoag Literary and Visual Representations of HIV/AIDS: Forty Years Later, by Aimee Pozorski, Jennifer J. Lavoie, and Christine J. Cynn Ethics of Witness in Global Testimonial Narratives: Responding to the Pain of Others, by Kimberly A. Nance

Ethics of Witness in Global Testimonial Narratives Responding to the Pain of Others Kimberly A. Nance

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 9781498598880 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 9781498598897 (electronic) TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

In memory of Keith Alan Sprouse (1965–2017)

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction 1 2 3

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Better Off Going Out on the Town?: Addressing the Witness in Elvia Alvarado’s Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo Choose Your Own Testimonial Adventure?: Witnessing Alternative Futures in Peter Dickinson’s AK Border Testimonies, Restricted Crossings: Questioning the Act of Witness in Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s “Exile: El Paso, Texas” and “Alligator Park” Hundreds of Bodies on Two Continents, Telling a Single Story: Witnessing the Testimonial Uncanny in Clea Koff’s The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo Use Beginning, Middle, and End: Witness and the Work of Reintegration in Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen & Me Survivors Tell the Stories That the Sympathizers Want: Countering the Comfort of Lost Boy Narratives in What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught: Ethics Lessons for Beginners in Uwem Akpan’s “What Language Is That?” My Life Is Based on a Real Story: Recursive Witness in Alicia Partnoy’s “Rosa, I Disowned You” and “Disclaimer Intraducible: My Life / Is Based / on a Real Story”

Conclusion: Deliberative Testimonio and the Reactivation of Human Rights Discourse Bibliography Index About the Author

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Acknowledgments

Parts of Chapter 2 have been published in Sankofa: A Journal of African Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Volume 9 (2010): 18–26. Reprinted with permission of Dr. Mary Henderson, editor-in-chief, Sankofa, and Dr. Dolan Hubbard, chair, Department of English and Language Arts, Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland. When I wrote in Can Literature Promote Justice? about the ways in which the capacities and constraints of survivors, collaborating writers, readers, editors, and critics affect the chances that literature of conscience will yield social action, I offered as case studies testimonios from Latin America. Soon after that book appeared, I began to hear from researchers and human rights workers who were employing my socioliterary theories in work with testimonial narratives from other parts of the world, and in legal, political, and clinical practices as well as literary and cultural criticism. I am indebted to everyone whose questions caused Q&As to spill over time and into corridors. This book responds to their requests for elaboration on the ethics of the genre and the strategies and tactics by which testimonialists call witnesses to work in the world. Illinois State University, its College of Arts & Sciences, Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures, and department chair Bruce Burningham supported this project with a sabbatical leave and a Summer Faculty Fellowship grant. All of my books have benefitted from countless conversations with my friend Keith Alan Sprouse. Although he did not see this one finished, it is no exception.

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The title of this volume marks a debt to Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, her meditation on the social impact and efficacy of documentary photography that serves here as a point of departure. Her conclusions regarding what she called “photography of conscience” were less than encouraging. 1 “Harrowing photographs,” she observed, “do not inevitably lose their power to shock. But they are not much help if the task is to understand.” 2 But even as Sontag acknowledged the limits of her own medium, she remained guardedly optimistic about the potential of another medium of conscience. “No photograph or portfolio of photographs can unfold, go further, and further still,” she wrote, “a narrative seems likely to be more effective than an image. Partly it is a question of the length of time one is obliged to look, to feel.” 3 In this exploration of the ethical implications of witness in testimonio, a variety of narrative that focuses precisely on the pain of others, I take to heart as well Sontag’s call for attention to nuance. “No ‘we,’” she insists, “should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.” 4 A similar degree of nuance is called for when the subject is what, if anything, happens after that look. “Prosthesis of the mind,” Bakhtin scholar Michael Holquist’s metaphor for literature, applies doubly to testimonio, a literature of conscience that starts with the pain of human rights abuse and holds out the possibility of a more just future. 5 The spread of contemporary testimonio from its roots in the mid-twentieth century—in a “documentary tidal wave of revolutionary expectations” 6 that “provided a Latin American answer to the controversial question of the role of intellectuals in politically loaded times, a question that had festered ever since it was raised in Les Temps Modernes by Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus almost twenty years before” 7—to its current scale reflects what David William Foster calls “interplay between lament and resistant promise,” 8 attesting not only to the massive scope of human rights abuse, but also to a resilient hope for the ethical potential of this form of literature. Testimonio now includes texts from across the globe, and some scholars continue to employ the Spanish term as a gesture to the genre’s origins, as evident in titles such as Laetitia Nanquette’s “Refugee Lifewriting in Australia: Testimonios by Iranians,” or Anupama Vohra’s “Kashmiri Women’s Testimonios: Lives in Limbo.” 1

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Introduction

Most testimonial criticism has focused on the production of survivors’ stories. This volume explores what happens—or fails to happen—in response. At first blush, the decision to focus attention on anyone other than those survivors might seem somehow disrespectful. In an ethical sense, however, testimonio is as much about witnesses’ responses as it is about the initial act of bearing witness. “For us,” insists testimonial writer and critic Alicia Partnoy, “to remember and to tell might be useless if it does not help to stop the violence, put an end to impunity, and protect the dignity of victims.” 9 Honduran political organizer and testimonialist Elvia Alvarado confronts her readers directly. “If you sit around thinking what to do and end up not doing anything,” she asks provocatively, “why bother even thinking about it?” In that case, she advises, “you’re better off going out on the town and having a good time.” 10 Each instance of testimonial text is a component part of a concrete social project—one that cannot be realized only by speaking out, as difficult as that step can be, or even by being heard, or read, and believed. Alvarado is far from the only testimonialist to underscore the distinction between reading about human rights abuse and acting against it, or to challenge a witness explicitly in her text. The others whose work is treated in these essays—Medea Benjamin, Peter Dickinson, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Clea Koff, Delia Jarrett-Macauley, Valentino Achak Deng, Dave Eggers, Uwem Akpan, and Partnoy herself—have all produced testimonial narratives that explore the ethical complexities of the act of witness. Some cast their witnesses within the text as primary or secondary characters; others draft them as narratees and even narrators. Several employ the uncommon and often fraught mode of second person narrative. One even offers the reader an opportunity to try out multiple modes of witness, with alternative final chapters that call to mind Bantam’s Choose Your Own Adventure series. As these testimonialists’ works illustrate, even witnesses with the best of intentions face conflicting impulses of compassion and fear, guilt and desire, solidarity and self-protection. Sometimes they succumb to the temptation to turn away, whether with an array of self-exculpatory explanations, or only with a nagging sense of guilt. In testimonial texts as in life, the boundaries between witness and survivor sometimes blur, with identifications that are sometimes productive and other times evasive. Several of these testimonialists approach the ethics of witness with outright challenges like Alvarado’s, accompanied by flashes of irony and humor. For others the challenge to the reader is subtler, carried off with performative nudges. The diverse testimonial sub-genres represented here range from the canonical collaborative life story to single-authored autobiographical testimonies, and on to more and less fictionalized testimonial novels and short stories. The settings—Argentina, Atlanta, Bosnia, Croatia, Bahminya-Ethiopia, Freetown-Sierra Leone, Honduras, Kenya, Kigali and Ki-

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buye-Rwanda, Kosovo, London, Los Angeles, Sudan, the US-Mexico borderlands of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, along with a fictional African republic—make it clear just how far the contemporary testimonial genre has spread from its Latin American birthplace. The critical essays here draw on theories of testimonial witness developed in my earlier research, alongside other interdisciplinary studies of literature’s potential in work for human rights, to consider these testimonialists’ richly nuanced explorations of the roles, responsibilities, and responses of witnesses to injustice. Their texts demonstrate the potential of fostering ethical witness, but also the many ways that witness can go awry, in the process illustrating the formidable challenges of constructing the alliances that human rights work requires. These narrative representations of the ethics of witness are significant for two reasons. One is the relative dearth of attention in testimonial criticism to the details of this genre’s demands on witnesses. The other is the unique perspectives and expertise—whether empirical, scholarly, or in some cases both—that testimonialists bring to their socioliterary projects of persuasion, standpoints and skills too often underrepresented or underplayed in the discipline of testimonial criticism. The project here is not only to apply contemporary theories of witness to the practice of these testimonialists, but also to identify and amplify their own theories of ethical witness. Despite the essential role of the witness in this genre, sustained critical attention to these participants in testimonio’s socioliterary project would arrive relatively late. One factor, certainly, was an initial fascination with the members of ethnic and economic groups previously voiceless whom testimonio enabled, critics once exulted, to talk back to power. Looking at testimonial literature now, from after the boom in creative non-fiction and the spread of social media, it can be difficult to appreciate just how novel and exciting it was to read Carolina Maria de Jesus’s account of daily life in the São Paulo favela, 11 or Miguel Barnet’s novelization of Esteban Montejo’s memories, spanning the sweep of Cuban history from his birth in the slave quarters through the nation’s wars of independence, abolition, and revolution. Even given the caveat that most of those new voices were mediated through collaboration with professional writers, their very presence in the literary space could feel like a victory. At times that sense of the genre as radically new also stood in the way of comparisons with kindred genres that might have helped to illuminate testimonio’s strategies—in particular, the discourses of the civil rights movement. Attention to the details of witness was also impeded early on by overconfidence in the raw power of this new genre. “Read a lot and hit the streets” exhorted a bright yellow button once distributed at a Modern Language Association convention with a quote from Toni Cade Bambara, and a similarly straightforward path was once foreseen for the operation

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of testimonio. As soon as readers learned what was really happening, the reasoning went, they would be bound to intervene. Lauded as a “shamanistic” instrument, 12 testimonio was expected to serve as deus ex machina for the political stage, a “militant articulation” that would “penetrate the isolationist literary arena and collapse its self-protective defenses.” 13 While most early attention to testimonio came from the Left, anxious responses from the Right eventually paid their own tribute to the genre’s perceived potential and reach, as when Dinesh D’Souza fretted that tenured radicals were jettisoning Shakespeare from reading lists in favor of Rigoberta Menchú. 14 Following the critical firestorm occasioned by David Stoll’s allegations that Menchú had falsified her story—chronicled by Arturo Arias in The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy—and in the face of continued human rights abuses in Latin America, the end of the twentieth century saw not only an abandonment of those triumphalist assumptions regarding testimonio’s power, but in some quarters an abrupt swing to the other extreme. John Beverley declared that “dealing with testimonio,” had left him with “a kind of posthumanist agnosticism about literature.” 15 Georg Gugelberger pushed the point further, asserting that “whatever literature is or might be, it hardly will be able to instigate action and effect deeply needed change.” 16 The testimonial moment was over, he pronounced, and all that was left was the “mourning.” 17 Sontag traces a similar trajectory from confidence to disappointment with regard to documentary photography. “It used to be thought,” she observes, “when the candid images were not common, that showing something that needed to be seen, bringing a painful reality closer, was bound to goad viewers to feel more,” when in fact “no effect of a photograph of a doleful scene can be taken for granted.” 18 The critics of mourning had an important point in common with those of celebration: both groups generally cast testimonialists or their texts as the agents of change. Actual readers, textual witnesses, were almost beside the point. On the rare occasions when readers were mentioned, critics’ assessments generally mirrored their expectations for the overall testimonial project. In the moment of celebration, readers were expected to fall in line; in mourning, readers were not to be relied upon. To be fair, it was not only testimonio’s critics who wrote off readers. In some cases, testimonialists themselves had left those witnesses free of any personal charge. In my research I have drawn on Aristotelian rhetorical theory to distinguish among three modes of testimonio: forensic, epideictic, and deliberative. 19 Forensic testimonio, as the name implies, employs legalistic discourse in an attempt to substitute for the local and global courts that have failed to hold to account the perpetrators of human rights abuse. Intent on establishing culpability for past events, forensic appeals call on readers to serve as members of a jury, a responsibility that can be discharged merely by hearing the case and reaching a verdict. Epideictic

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testimonio operates by shaming perpetrators or praising courageous survivors, encouraging readers to share in those assessments. For readers already active in a cause, testimonios in the epideictic and forensic modes may be effective rallying cries, but neither of those canonical forms is likely to persuade general readers to move beyond judgement, admiration, or condemnation. When it comes to testimonio’s social potential, this is a crucial omission. While readers of epideictic and forensic forms of testimonio might indeed be encouraged to “feel more,” in Sontag’s terms, they do not necessarily feel obligated to do anything. “Compassion,” Sontag warns, “is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. . . . It is passivity that dulls feeling.” 20 Sontag is emphatic on the causal direction here. It is not the sheer proliferation of images of other people’s suffering, she insists, the constant arousal, that blunts the impact of those images, but rather the arousal of those feelings without any active direction. Michael Vander Weele characterizes this state as “a never-ending loop, an aesthetics in which the engine revs but the clutch is never engaged.” 21 Over time, a continual traffic in feelings without action divorces the discourse of human rights from literal meaning, rendering it phatic. As linguists caution language learners, phatic utterances might look like literal communication—commentary, inquiry, or expressions of concern— but in fact they are merely formulae: the “how are you?” that seeks only the countersign “fine, thanks”; the “we must get together soon” that foresees nothing beyond a polite leave-taking. 22 The technical term for such utterances is “tokens”; their interchange “lubricates” social interactions that might otherwise be awkward or uncomfortable. 23 For witnesses, participation in a phatic discourse around human rights affords a sense of engagement without the burden of literal action. Meanwhile, under that regimen, the victims of human rights abuse, left holding nothing but tokens, are nonetheless expected to hand over corresponding tokens to complete the phatic exchange, to assure their interlocutors that their purely verbal manifestations of solidarity are helpful by meeting an empty “we’re with you,” with “we appreciate your support.” From time to time, recipients of human rights tokens do break the phatic script to demand more than words, as when Emma González and other survivors of the 2018 shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School denounced a reflexive outpouring of “thoughts and prayers.” 24 The flood of satirical cartoons and messages that followed underscored the emptiness of that phatic solidarity and revealed the dissatisfaction and anger of its recipients. It is not that the producers of epideictic and forensic testimonios are themselves speaking phatically, or that they set out to encourage phatic responses from readers. Rather, the conventions of those modes are bet-

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Introduction

ter suited to preaching to the choir. They assume pre-existing levels of engagement that general readers do not meet, fail to address the phenomenon of reader resistance to act, and leave open for readers that position on the sidelines. Neither are readers who evade forensic and epideictic calls for action necessarily uncaring. Psychologists working in a field called just world theory have observed that when most people witness injustice they feel pain, and their first impulse is to help. 25 In the face of a constant stream of evidence of injustice, more than they could ever hope to resolve, a combination of self-preservation and awareness of the limits of their own resources prevents them from constantly acting on that impulse. 26 In allocating their help even good people perform a sort of triage, a rough equivalent of the medical protocols for mass casualty situations in which hard choices must be made in the distribution of resources and responses. In real life they will set aside cases of injustice that they see as hopeless or beyond their own abilities, while readily responding with prevention and restitution, at times even at great personal cost and risk, to cases they find not just urgent, but possible, within their own capacity, and unlikely to succeed without them. 27 Unfortunately, the very conventions of epideictic and forensic modes can push their appeals to the far end of witnesses’ triage lines. The sight of unjust suffering still causes pain, but with nothing left to offer witnesses turn instead to psychological defenses and strategies that preserve the sense of a just world, and of themselves as just and decent individuals. 28 For instance, Melvin Lerner observes, witnesses may come to deny the pain of others, reinterpret its consequences or causes, or reinterpret the character of the victim, so that the unaddressed suffering appears less acute, impossible to address, best left to others to resolve, or likely to end naturally—as a last-ditch defense, they may even blame the victim. 29 Just world theory helps to account for the phenomenon that Sontag observed, suggesting a possible mechanism by which passivity comes to dull feeling. Phatic expressions of solidarity might be seen as one more means by which witnesses to unjust suffering preserve a sense of themselves as just and responsive while still resisting the impulse to act. In contrast with epideictic and forensic modes of testimonio, which tend to leave reader resistance intact and even invite inactive responses, testimonialists working in the deliberative mode anticipate resistance. They deploy specific strategies of persuasion to confront and weaken readers’ defenses and call them to action. Defying those pronouncements of the demise of testimonio, or that its moment has passed, the deliberative mode, as illustrated by the testimonios in this volume, continues to develop, diversify, and disseminate across the globe. Deliberative testimonio differs from its epideictic and forensic counterparts in its characterization of subjects and their allies and its expansive repertoire of narrative techniques, as well as in its call on readers to act.

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Where the other modes of testimonio comprise political calendars of saints and dockets of criminals, deliberative testimonios are peopled by characters who are complicated and imperfect. Often the subjects describe themselves as accidental and even reluctant participants in political projects. Drawn in by circumstance and necessity, they start with small, immediate, and local actions that are not always effective. Despite candidly described setbacks, they nevertheless find ways to carry on with the struggle. Operating as it does, sans forensic or epideictic certainties, deliberative testimonio is equipped to function even in the atmosphere of suspicion that has come to surround survivor accounts in the twenty-first century, in the wake of A Million Little Pieces, Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, and embarrassments for Oprah Winfrey’s book club. 30 Guardian culture critic Arielle Bernstein observes that skeptical interrogation of the survivor is now a trope so familiar as to admit of parody in popular television, as when Kimmy Schmidt testifies after rescue from her kidnapper. “‘It was horrible,’ she sobs, ‘and I missed, like, ten Olympics!’ ‘It was only nine, Ms. Schmidt!’ a detective replies, throwing a folder of various crime facts at her. ‘Now,’ he demands, ‘are you ready to be honest with us?’” 31 Where forensic and epideictic testimonies tend to coalesce and eventually stagnate around a small set of time-honored conventions, leaving them vulnerable to the passing of cultural fashion, deliberative testimonio readily adopts, adapts, and incorporates new literary and cultural forms, bending the arc of history toward justice through a process of political and practical improvisation that extends as well to its formal and stylistic characteristics. Some deliberative testimonios even employ magical-realist elements—either on their own or combined with realist narrative—to permit a glimpse of alternative futures that may lie beyond a realist time frame or else outside current political or social structures. Recognizing the degree to which the very conventions of forensic and epideictic modes can stand in the way of social action—regardless of their producers’ good intent—deliberative testimonialists confront them with counter-discourses of parody and satire. A hypothetical manifesto of deliberative testimonio’s strategies might echo Malcolm X’s maxim: “by any means necessary.” Deliberative testimonialists approach readers with a similar sense of contingency and improvisation—as ordinary people who might yet be persuaded to take on certain responsibilities. Readers, of course, are not simply waiting for an assignment. As Lerner noted, witnesses to injustice still have their own interests to look out for, 32 and this is where the deliberative tradition’s deep roots in community organizing come into play. To anyone with actual experience in organizing, the phenomenon of resistance to an ask hardly counts as news. For individuals who have honed their skills in concrete work for human rights, their own or those of others, keen attention to the particularities of their actual addressees—

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Introduction

the same nuance that Sontag calls for—comes as a matter of practical necessity. While in literary and cultural criticism much attention has been paid to the gaze as an expression of superior power, that characterization only applies to its voluntary direction. At the other end of the power dynamic is the compulsory gaze of need. Describing the morning routine of a hotel cleaner, Esmeralda Santiago offers an example of this asymmetrical gaze. She knows more about them than they know about her. She knows whether they flail in their sleep, or sleep quietly on one side of the bed or the other. Whether the tropical night is so cool they have to use blankets, or whether they sleep exposed to the foul sereno. She knows what brand of toothpaste they use, whether they have dentures. She knows if the women have their periods. She knows if the men wear jockey or boxer underwear, and what size. . . . She checks that there’s enough toilet paper, empties the trash, tidies the bedside tables. 33

As Santiago illustrates, individuals whose livelihood depends on enlisting the goodwill of others are compelled constantly to observe, analyze, and ultimately anticipate those others’ needs and desires. This attentional asymmetry, in which people with power can elect to look or look away while those without it are compelled to look, has observable neurological correlates. Psychologist Susan Fiske explains that “power lessens the need for a nuanced read of people, since it gives us command of resources we once had to cajole from others.” 34 “Control needs are basic,” report Fiske and Eric Dépret, “and predict information-seeking in social relationships; those without social power typically seek the most diagnostic information, making individuation more likely.” 35 Deliberative testimonio puts that hard-won expertise at reading witnesses—as well as cajoling them—to practical use. While not all deliberative testimonialists come from the low end of the power dynamic, nor are they all organizers, the genre’s roots still reach there, continuing to inform its narrative strategies and patterns of discourse. Needing things from other people, whether jobs or tips, as in Santiago’s example, or assistance in social projects, both requires close and intimate attention to their needs and desires and rewards it. What are they like? What might they be willing to do? Why aren’t they doing that already? What might induce them to act? Only once that nuanced read of readers has been accomplished is the stage set for the task of deliberative persuasion. A successful testimonial encounter requires more than managing readers’ impressions of perpetrators, victims, and survivors and channeling the resultant emotions. Readers must also be persuaded to live up to images of themselves as just and decent people, their alibis for inaction anticipated and foreclosed. While early psychological models for narrative persuasion posited a straightforward “text hegemony” in which writers influenced readers

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primarily by direct and forceful expressions of ideology—a strategy reflected in epideictic and forensic testimonies, recent research supports instead an indirect and circuitous mechanism termed “narrative transportation” 36 that is consonant with deliberative texts. Absorption into a narrative, observe Melanie Green and Timothy Brock, is “a distinct mental process, an integrative melding of attention, imagery, and feelings.” 37 When readers lose themselves temporarily into the flow of a narrative, they often come back changed. Reporting an experiment particularly relevant to the effectiveness of testimonial narrative, Richard Gerrig observes that individuals “transported into narratives with unhappy endings are likely to engage in ‘anomalous replotting,’ actively thinking about what could have happened to change an outcome.” 38 Green and Brock also draw attention to the potential power of narrative transportation to persuade in cases where conventional rhetorical means would fail. “Rhetoric,” they find, “is much influenced by framing: for example, the impact of arguments is affected by source credibility or perception of speaker’s intent. By contrast, our findings suggested that once a reader is rolling along with a compelling narrative, the source has diminishing influence.” 39 Considered in the context of testimonio, the transporting qualities of deliberative narratives may help to compensate for a lack of access to conventional frameworks of authority and power. “Transportation,” as Green and Brock conclude, “may be a mechanism for narrativebased belief change.” 40 Contrary, then, to some early testimonial criticism that held that the genre should be exempt from conventional literary assessments such as whether the narrative was compelling, characters well drawn, and language apt, narrative transportation theories of persuasion suggest that those literary features that make deliberative testimonios attractive to readers may not represent an ethical compromise on the part of their writers or editors. The fact that these testimonios sell—and sometimes even make best-seller lists—is not a sign that deliberative testimonialists have sold out. 41 While only a fraction of any reading audience is likely to act, larger audiences can increase the number of individuals in that reachable group. Although the deliberative testimonios treated in the chapters that follow differ radically from conventional epideictic and forensic texts, and the explanations of just how reading changes minds continue to evolve, the genre’s fundamental hope—that narrative has the potential to spark social change—persists. Testimonio’s bearers of witness have come to recognize an ethical obligation to tell. For a testimonial project to be realized, a similar sense of personal obligation must be engendered in the witnesses to their narratives—an ethical responsibility not only to listen, but also to help. Jean-François Lyotard describes a testimonial contract, a reciprocal set of requirements for bearers of witness, who must “refuse to remain silent” about an instance of injustice; and for the witnesses to

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those accounts, who must be not only willing to listen and accept the reality of the referent, but also “worthy of being spoken to.” 42 To fulfill the provisions of this contract, witnesses must hear and credit not just the story of the unjust suffering of others, but also two propositions about themselves: “you are able” to assist and “you ought to.” 43 Absent those last two elements, any testimonial project is destined to remain incomplete, what Lyotard terms “something that might resemble a call,” one encounter among many from which the witness can emerge full of compassion and indignation, and yet still do nothing. 44 The essays that follow consider the ethical complexities of the role of the witness in that testimonial contract—under construction, in operation, and in the breach. Chapter 1, “Better Off Going Out on the Town?: Addressing the Witness in Elvia Alvarado’s Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo,” a 1987 testimonio from Honduras, follows Alvarado, a consummate organizer, as she endeavors to convert phatic solidarity to actual support—leveraging readers’ desire to see themselves as helpful to serve as a starting point toward actual engagement. Produced in collaboration with Medea Benjamin, who would go on to co-found the activist coalition Code Pink, Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo is among the few examples of the genre addressed explicitly to US readers, and employing second person discourse, a gambit recognized as uniquely risky and potentially effective. As Monika Fludernik explains, “there are some second person texts in which the desired effect is precisely to make the reader feel personally responsible, personally caught in the discourse and exposed to its political thrust.” 45 As the title suggests, Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo also redirects the rhetoric of reassurance. Here it is the well-meaning First World witness who is expressly (and accurately) portrayed as fearful and hesitant, so that by the end the text becomes a self-help book for participation in projects of human rights. A 1990 young adult novel is the focus of chapter 2, “Choose Your Own Testimonial Adventure?: Witnessing Alternative Futures in Peter Dickinson’s AK.” The initials of the title are short for AK-47, the Kalashnikov rifle that a lost and nameless twelve-year-old boy hopes will transform him into “Paul, Warrior, of the Fifth Special Commando.” 46 AK appeared almost two decades ahead of the boom in literary and cinematic narratives of boy soldiers, the point in the early 2000s that Time magazine called “a cultural sweet spot for the African child soldier.” 47 Dickinson begins his testimonial novel with a parody of colonialist British schoolbook discourse, updated with home truths about the postcolonial condition of a fictional former colony, and provisionally ends the account of civil war in the African republic of Nagala with two alternate final chapters, each with the same title, “Twenty Years On, Perhaps.” One is a story of progress and peace, the other of war without end. With its twenty-year time lag between the close of the main narrative and the dual endings, AK insists that whether it is to be A or B, progress or repetition,

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will depend on actions and events yet to unfold in the world, including the actions yet to be taken by readers. Chapter 3, “Border Testimonies, Restricted Crossings: Questioning the Act of Witness in Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s ‘Exile: El Paso, Texas’ and ‘Alligator Park,’” treats two stories from Flowers for the Broken, an early collection from a writer now famous for his young adult novels such as Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. These two stories that bear witness to acts of witness are variations on the same core narrative, in which a First World intellectual confronts a concrete and personalized instance of injustice that literally brings the matter home. Each story begins promisingly enough with the initiation of some form of local action: a protest against immigration authorities, an asylum plea on behalf of a young refugee, but the narratives of progress are abruptly aborted, calling into question the very conditions of testimonial possibility and solidarity. In contrast to the early confidence in testimonial communication and alliance across boundaries of gender, class, nationality, and ethnicity, Sáenz’s stories challenge the assumptions of such connections. Chapter 4, “Hundreds of Bodies on Two Continents, Telling a Single Story: Witnessing the Testimonial Uncanny in Clea Koff’s The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo,” bears a strong resemblance to a genre that structural theorist Tzvetan Todorov calls “the fantastic,” in which a narrative is poised between supernatural and realist. 48 Where Koff had expected her investigations of genocide on behalf of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal and Physicians for Human Rights to yield a set of forensic narratives to aid in trials for war crimes, a quite different narrative slowly takes shape. The unheimlich element, she discovers, is not the details of the genocides, but rather the very convergence of their narratives. Where initially Koff had envisioned her work as permitting the dead to speak for themselves to judges at UN tribunals, she comes to see her own reports as diversions, yet another obstacle to effective measures against genocide. The victims and their survivors, she discovers, are actually speaking directly to her, and urging her toward a different form of social action. Chapter 5, “Use Beginning, Middle, and End: Witness and the Work of Reintegration in Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen & Me,” analyzes a novel that constitutes a massive metanarrative on testimony—on storytelling’s possibilities and pitfalls not only for former child-soldiers in Sierra Leone, but also for the families and communities to which they may one day return. Every complication of the testimonial narrative process—construction, telling, hearing, understanding, and finally acting on (or resisting) the ethical implications of the identities that those narratives construct—is played out in an intimate articulation of what is often termed unspeakable, and is precisely what testimonialists must endeavor to put into words. In a Brechtian move at the end, Jarrett-Macauley calls

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readers back to reality, reminding them that reading a work of fiction is no substitute for action, and points them toward concrete possibilities for engagement. In chapter 6, “Survivors Tell the Stories That the Sympathizers Want: Countering the Comfort of Lost Boy Narratives in What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng,” the topic is a testimonial novel likened by Francine Prose to Huckleberry Finn. Dave Eggers writes this narrative in the voice of Deng, of one of the “Lost Boys,” a Sudanese refugee granted asylum in the United States and assigned to a resettlement program in Atlanta. What Is the What stands in sharp contrast to the first wave of Lost Boy literature, which reassured readers with descriptions of the young men’s wonder and gratitude at the generosity of their US hosts. Systematically confronting and then dismantling those comforting conventions, What Is the What finds Deng “resettled” in a dangerous part of Atlanta, struggling to manage school, work, and posttraumatic stress without adequate support. Weighing the generosity, motivations, and limitations of those who have previously come to his assistance, he estimates what they might yet grant, what they might want in return, and what might be too much to ask. In the process he learns his own lines in phatic scripts of gratitude and reassurance, concealing both the extent of his need and the insufficiency of their assistance. Asking too much, he knows, would jeopardize even the inadequate level of aid he now receives. In collaboration with Eggers, Deng then departs from that phatic script to draw attention to inequalities of power that can oblige a refugee to answer that things are fine when the reality is that last night he was assaulted and robbed, bound and gagged. Chapter 7, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught: Ethics Lessons for Beginners in Uwem Akpan’s ‘What Language Is That?’” considers a story set in Bahminya, Ethiopia, from his collection, Say You’re One of Them. Divorced as it is from literal realities, phatic communication does not come naturally to children. In this satirical short story, Akpan illustrates the early stages of acquisition of phatic human rights discourse, from a six-year-old’s initial frustration at her inability to decipher it, through lessons from her parents, to a budding proficiency in employing it herself. What appears at first as a testament to the power of globalism, tolerance, and the mutual acceptance of two wealthy families, one Muslim and one Christian, in the end becomes an ironic criticism of avoidance of troubling social and political issues. “What Language Is That?” is not a rehearsal of the timeworn piety that adults need to learn from children the lessons of undiscriminating friendship, but rather an exposure of a subtler lesson that many privileged children learn from their parents— how to quietly and politely abandon that ideal. Chapter 8, “My Life Is Based on a Real Story: Recursive Witness in Alicia Partnoy’s ‘Rosa, I Disowned You’ and ‘Disclaimer Intraducible: My Life / Is Based / on a Real Story,’” examines two short stories by the

Introduction

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human rights advocate, writer, producer, scholar, and professor of Latin American literature at Loyola Marymount University best known for The Little School, a testimonial short story collection detailing her disappearance, imprisonment, and torture by the Argentine junta from 1977 to 1979. Four decades after her disappearance, two of Partnoy’s recent works loop back to deal with its ongoing sequelae, as the very responses that initially allowed her to endure and survive have begun to exact a delayed price. “Rosa, I Disowned You” hinges on the present-day consequences of the denial and dissociation that rendered her a skeptical witness to her own rape. In a linked narrative, “Disclaimer Intraducible,” Partnoy returns to the Rosa narrative yet again—this time as a point of departure for analysis of the nature of testimonio and the constraints that even well-meaning witnesses, among them not only readers but translators, publishers, and critics, impose on survivors’ storytelling. A concluding section, “Deliberative Testimonio and the Reactivation of Human Rights Discourse,” addresses the broader implications of these representations of the ethics of witness, what they reveal about the evolving genre of testimonio and the potential, strategies, and challenges of putting narratives to work in the world. NOTES 1. Sontag, 78. 2. Sontag, 89. 3. Sontag, 122. 4. Sontag, 7. 5. Holquist, 83. 6. Fornet, 138. Translation mine. Testimonio has been strongly linked to the Cuban Revolution. Casa de las Américas, a Cuban publishing house and cultural organization, established in 1970 an annual prize for testimonial narrative. 7. Calvi, 66. 8. Foster, 65. 9. Partnoy, “Disclaimer Intraducible,” 16–17. 10. Alvarado, 146. 11. Although Cuban anthropologist Miguel Barnet is generally credited as having launched Latin American testimonio with Biografía de un cimarrón/Biography of a Runaway Slave, I make the case that credit should be accorded as well to Brazilian testimonialist Maria Carolina de Jesus. Nance, Can Literature Promote Justice? 168–169, and “From Quarto de Despejo to a Little House.” 12. Zimmerman points to George Yúdice’s concentration on “the sacred dimension of Rigoberta [Menchú]’s political thought,” which “confirms and deepens our contention about the communal and ceremonial nature of her testimony and enables us to see it as part of a shamanistic process whereby the group’s broken relation with a sacred space is to be restored” (117). 13. Harlow, 73. 14. D’Souza, 70. 15. Beverley, Against Literature, 99. 16. Gugelberger, 10. 17. Gugelberger, 18. 18. Sontag, 79–80.

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19. For detailed discussion of these three strains of testimonio and some of the reasons why deliberative testimonial narrative may elude critical notice see Nance, Can Literature Promote Justice? 23–31, 47, 56–62. 20. Sontag, 101–102. 21. Vander Weele, 120. 22. Padilla Cruz, 132. 23. Padilla Cruz, 139. 24. For the full text of González’s speech, see “Florida Student Emma González to Lawmakers and Gun Advocates.” 25. Lerner, Belief in a Just World, 172–173. In contrast with “rational self-interest” models of altruism, Lerner observes “it is clear that people value justice more than profit, and at times more than their own lives” (175). Just world theory has been extended and applied over the years by sociologists and legal scholars as well as social psychologists. In addition to a large body of journal articles across disciplines, development of the field can be traced through Lerner and Lerner’s The Justice Motive in Social Behavior; Montada, Fillip and Lerner’s Life Crises; Lerner and Mikula’s Entitlement and the Affectional Bond; Montada and Lerner’ Current Societal Concerns about Justice; Montada and Lerner’s Responses to Victimizations; Ross and Miller’s The Justice Motive in Everyday Life; and Lerner’s “The Justice Motive: Where Social Psychologists Found It.” 26. Lerner, Belief in a Just World, 19. For an account of what may happen to the rare individuals unbound by self-interest, see Macfarquar’s Strangers Drowning. 27. Lerner, Belief in a Just World, 19–20. In fact, Lerner found, people who most want to see justice done may employ those defensive moves even more than their less sensitive counterparts. They perceive injustice more readily and it pains them more, which leaves an even larger number of appeals in their personal triage queue (Belief in a Just World, 143). 28. Lerner, Belief in a Just World, 19–26. 29. Lerner, Belief in a Just World, 19–26. 30. For more on these and other hoaxes, see Young, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News. 31. Bernstein. 32. Lerner, Belief in a Just World, 172–173. 33. Santiago, America’s Dream, 30. 34. Fiske is quoted in Useem. 35. Fiske and Dépret, 31. 36. Green and Brock, 701–721. 37. Green and Brock, 701. 38. Gerrig, 277. 39. Green and Brock, 719. 40. Green and Brock, 721. Bakhtin defines empathy strictly as the witness’s imaginative projection of self into the text, and as merely preliminary to ethical action. Only from the position of “exotopy,” he argues, the readers’ return to their own place outside the text, where they acknowledge their unique capacity and responsibility to act, “can the other be rendered meaningful ethically, cognitively, or aesthetically.” Without exotopy, he cautions, all that results is “an infection with the other’s suffering.” Art and Answerability, 25–26. With its precise and critical distinctions, Bakhtin’s model of ethical response anticipates by almost a century Green and Brock’s theory of persuasion through transportation, and helps to clarify the case Bloom makes in Against Empathy. 41. In the development of testimonio aesthetic quality was not always held suspect. As the rules of the Casa de las Américas prize in testimonio, launched in 1970, stated: “The form is at the author’s discretion, but literary quality is also indispensable” (Beverley, Against Literature, 155n). 42. Lyotard, 14. 43. Lyotard, 121.

Introduction 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

Lyotard, 107. Fludernik, “Test Case,” 452. Dickinson, AK, 5. Luscombe, Grossman and Crumley, 62. Todorov, 44.

15

ONE Better Off Going Out on the Town? Addressing the Witness in Elvia Alvarado’s Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo

Produced in collaboration with Medea Benjamin, who would go on to cofound the activist coalition Code Pink, Elvia Alvarado’s 1987 testimonio from Honduras, Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo, offers clear evidence of deliberative testimonio’s roots in the art and craft of community organizing, a degree of transparency that may owe in part to the fact that both writer and speaker come to this project as experienced organizers. While organizers often figure as speaking subjects of collaborative testimonios, writers in those partnerships more often come from anthropology, journalism, or literature. Those writers tend to focus on their subjects’ lack of formal education, framed positively as a token of authenticity, while overlooking or downplaying occupational expertise and agenda in favor of claims that the speaker is guileless. 1 Benjamin shows no reluctance to credit either Alvarado’s professional qualifications or her political chops. On the contrary, she takes note that, beyond organizing among her fellow campesinos, Alvarado’s work has brought her into contact with politicians, lawyers, and researchers, giving her “insights into the internal workings of her society that far surpass those of a campesino who has never ventured from his or her village.” 2 Benjamin also praises her subject’s hard-won empirical skill. “Without the help of computers or even a cell phone,” she marvels, looking back at their collaboration from decades later, Alvarado “could mobilize hundreds of landless farmers to meet in the middle of the night to occupy a piece of unused or underused land.” 3

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Another signal of the relationship between speaker and collaborating writer is the formal assignment of authorship. Nearly all of the canonical collaborative testimonios produced through interviews had been copyrighted in the name of the collaborating writer. 4 For instance, authorship of Miguel Mármol’s testimonio was registered to Roque Dalton, and Rigoberta Menchú’s, at least initially, to Elisabeth Burgos. Menchú would later voice her objection to that assignment, insisting that she should be acknowledged either as author or at least as co-author. 5 From its first publication, Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo has accorded the author credit solely to Alvarado, naming Benjamin as editor. In her collaboration with Benjamin, Alvarado takes the opportunity to scale up her local organizing efforts to reach what is for her a new and distant public—the gringos. Gringos have long constituted the largest single market for testimonial texts, but rarely have they been targeted so explicitly. Throughout the book Alvarado addresses her gringo audience in second person, a discourse recognized as both risky and potentially effective. As A.L. Davis observes, second person narration “is often troublesome to read because its sustained use can be claustrophobic and considered dictatorial.” “Few readers like to be held within such a tight prism,” Davis contends, “to be led so firmly by the narration, to be told constantly what ‘you’ have done, are now doing, or will yet do.” Nevertheless, writes Monika Fludernik, “there are some second person texts in which the desired effect is precisely to make the reader feel personally responsible, personally caught in the discourse and exposed to its political thrust.” 6 As an organizer, Alvarado is of course no stranger to the use of second person appeals, but experience has also taught her that such desire is only rarely fulfilled. Even on the local level in rural Honduras, she points out, she cannot just expect the women to say “here we are, all organized and waiting for you to tell us what to do.” 7 As she makes clear in her foreword to the text, she expects gringos to be an even tougher audience. Alvarado’s foreword, nominally addressed to Benjamin, also underscores the contingency of this testimonio. As she tells it, this text was nearly not produced at all. Based on her experience gringos were not to be trusted, and at first Benjamin was no exception. When Benjamin came to her door, Alvarado had just been released from her sixth imprisonment, where for the first time she had been tortured for her political activism. Now “here comes this gringa asking me to tell our story.” 8 Thinking that anyone from the United States must have come from the local military base and that “all gringos were the same,” she explains, “I thought you had come here to do me harm.” Her first impulse is to “send this gringa back where she came from.” 9 It is only Alvarado’s sense of political responsibility, her determination to promote her cause, that leads her to reconsider and take a chance on Benjamin—and by extension on gringos in general. “The more people who know our story the better,” she decides, “even if you are a gringa.” 10 Reading as if over the shoulder

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Alvarado’s speech to Benjamin, gringo readers are warned that they are entering under forbearance. Like the preface, this entire testimonio will turn out to be as much about them as it is about her. The term “gringo” has borne a variety of cultural connotations. Esmeralda Santiago recalls her father’s response when she asked him whether “gringos” were the same as “americanos,” and if it was true that they were imperialists, as she had heard from one of her classmates. “You should never call an americano a gringo,” he admonished, “It’s a very bad insult.” 11 In 1987, the year this testimonio was published, a National Public Radio interview with Eugene Ehrlich opened with “the word ‘gringo’ is widely recognized as the not-so-flattering term for, well, a stupid American.” Other interviews in that NPR series would go on to debate whether the term was “offensive” or “just distracting.” 12 More recently, Aida Ramirez has asserted that while “most people think ‘gringo’ is only a derogatory epithet for white Americans, and they incorrectly assume that any use of the word is inherently offensive, that is not the case.” “Gringo,” Ramirez maintains, “can be used to broadly and inoffensively refer to a group of U.S. citizens. I’ve also heard it used as a term for Europeans.” Ramirez’s definition best captures the sense of “gringo” as Alvarado employs it. In this text “gringo” appears to mean “white,” but not necessarily from the United States, and not, it becomes apparent, necessarily derogatory. At the outset Alvarado does report that, like other campesinos, she had always hated gringos. Later, however, she comes to revise that judgement. A trusted friend has occasion to speak with some gringos and returns with the news that they are not in fact hostile, only ignorant. At a meeting, Alvarado also sees in the audience “gringos from other countries I’d never heard of, some countries in Europe.” 13 When she speaks, one of them even tears up, leaving her both surprised and hopeful. “Regardless of the actual origin of gringo,” Ramirez observes, “there is a common thread behind all the origin myths and theories. Namely, that it has historically been used to refer to a foreigner. Whether it is a traveler, a person whose language is unintelligible, or a person of foreign birth . . . gringo denotes the idea of otherness.” While holding out the promises of intimate access to the heart of a Honduran woman and potential admission to the side of people with “any sense of humanity,” this text also confronts its gringo readers with their own otherness—and with their implication, witting or not, in the state of Alvarado’s country. 14 Don’t Be Afraid, Gringo presents gringo readers with a crafty Burnsian “giftie” of seeing themselves as others see them, and initially the view in that mirror is profoundly unflattering. In order to disassociate themselves from those gringos, readers will be called upon to make a series of decisions, initially only rhetorical, but later insistently practical. Alvarado is an organizer, not merely an accuser. Her principle objective is not to denounce gringos—or even to educate them—but to induce them to help.

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Here her experience and expertise in cajoling come into play. Recalling sales pitches that seek a way to get the customer to an initial yes, the investment opportunity offered in Alvarado’s foreword starts with a giveaway, an initial free gift to induce readers to buy in to her social project. By the end of the preface, readers are invited to congratulate themselves for not being like the gringos from the military base, the ones Alvarado expects would only come to her house to do her harm. For the low entry price of sheer good intention, readers are free to identify instead with Benjamin, the good gringa. At this point the organizer’s baton is passed to Benjamin, whose introduction first situates the Honduran condition in global context. As she makes clear, even though US readers may have only the best of intentions, their country has played a causal role in Honduras’s poverty and civil rights abuses. Where Alvarado’s misgivings about gringos are based on local interactions and observations, Benjamin’s densely documented paratext grounds a critique of the US presence in Honduras in historical, economic, and political research. Honduras, Benjamin reports, is poorer than El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala. Nevertheless, before US intervention it had remained relatively free of the armed conflicts experienced by its Central American neighbors. Ironically, one factor in that peace appears to be the depth of its poverty. Benjamin cites a joke among Hondurans that their nation is “so poor it can’t even afford an oligarchy.” 15 With so much of the country’s wealth flowing quietly to companies in the United States, as opposed to Honduran nationals, it seems that Hondurans had fewer local opportunities to witness inequality. Moreover, Benjamin asserts, in contrast with their Central American counterparts Honduran workers had managed to organize and elect governments that enacted significant agrarian reform laws. While more de jure than de facto, the prospect of legal redistribution of farmland nonetheless changed the nation’s political dynamic, so that “rather than fighting to overthrow the government . . . the poor of Honduras were fighting to force the government to uphold its own laws.” 16 Finally, in comparison with the responses of armed forces in neighboring countries, the Honduran military’s reaction to armed uprisings had so far been relatively restrained. Atrocities were committed by government forces, but they were still regarded as “national scandals.” 17 It was only in the 1980s, Benjamin concludes, when the United States turned Honduras into an armed camp to support its allies the Contras, that incipient democratization stalled, and human rights abuses soared. Benjamin’s formal introduction, supported by no fewer than seven evidentiary appendices, unequivocally implicates the United States in Honduran human rights abuse. But here the engagement of the gringo reader gets tricky. Even though Benjamin makes a compelling case that US government intervention in Central America materially worsened conditions in Honduras, crediting that argument would not necessarily make gringo readers any more like-

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ly to do something about it. By the 1980s, US citizens, especially progressive ones, had grown alienated from their own political systems and processes. In a 1987 study, political scientist Priscilla Southwell observed in US citizens both a widely shared cynicism regarding their government and a profound sense of powerlessness to change it. 18 Many US readers, it appears, already believed that their government did not reflect their values, but since they also felt incapable of having any meaningful impact on political events or actions, they could readily endorse the culpability of the US government without taking that charge in any way personally. 19 Southwell’s study suggested that the majority of US citizens had given up on government as a force for positive change. Their reengagement, she concluded, would require more than “efforts to facilitate voting—they need[ed] a reason to believe in the political system again.” 20 The contrast between the cynicism and sense of powerlessness reported by US citizens and the resilient hope and determination of Alvarado, struggling persistently at great personal risk to reform government in Honduras, might seem paradoxical. Why should Alvarado be willing to “bet her blood,” to use Alicia Partnoy’s term, 21 on changing a repressive government that had already imprisoned her six times and even tortured her, while US gringos were disinclined even to bestir themselves to cast a ballot to influence theirs? Even Benjamin remembers being surprised by Alvarado’s persistence in the face of imprisonment and torture. Looking back on Alvarado’s organizing projects in Honduras, she recalls the responses of police and army officers, arriving to “bash heads, imprison people, and destroy [campesinos’] meager possessions.” 22 Visiting Alvarado in prison, Benjamin anticipates that she will be “totally dejected and ready to give up the fight.” “Give up?” Alvarado had responded incredulously; “No way. Giving up is a luxury that we poor people can’t afford.” 23 The juxtaposition of Benjamin’s expectations with Alvarado’s matter-of-fact response aptly illustrates the difference in perspective from the low end of the scale of wealth and power, where deliberative testimonio has its roots. Benjamin’s admiration of Alvarado and desire for solidarity, evidently sincere, lead her to proclaim that “the same applies to us, the peacemakers.” 24 Dutifully, Benjamin continues: “when our government is invading other lands, harming innocent people, propping up dictators, or stoking a never-ending cycle of violence, giving up is definitely a luxury we can’t afford.” 25 As Alvarado will make clear, however, this claim advanced by Benjamin on behalf of readers who might like to see themselves reflected in that “we” is at best aspirational. In fact, gringo readers can easily afford the luxury of giving up on Honduras. Moreover, they are likely to continue indulging in that vice even while they read about campesinos’ suffering. As Alvarado understands, giving up is not only a luxury good but a highly attractive one—out of reach for campesinos like her, but easily

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accessible to gringos, whose luxury of choice extends as well to their participation in the political process of their own country. People in Alvarado’s position need acutely whatever help that anyone, including a government they view as corrupt, might be cajoled or coerced to provide. Gringos, meanwhile, enjoy the benefits of a government that looks after their needs and interests even while they ignore their own status as beneficiaries. As a result, despite Benjamin’s demonstration that the US government bore substantial responsibility for Honduran economic and social inequalities and human rights abuse, and her framing of Alvarado’s story as an appeal for ethical exchange, readers could credit all of those arguments and still not hold themselves in any way responsible. Fortunately for the potential of this testimonial project, narrative transportation, as Melanie Green and Timothy Brock observed, still holds the potential to change attitudes even when conventional forms of argument fail. 26 In the second part of her introduction, “Why Elvia Alvarado?” Benjamin shifts away from research-based argumentation to pick up the narrative, expanding on the chronicle of testimonial production that Alvarado began in her preface. Having already conducted extensive research in Honduras, meeting with politicians and academics, in 1986 Benjamin had shifted her focus to grassroots organizers, interviewing campesinos, factory workers, rural mothers, and health workers. In those conversations Alvarado had stood out. Fleshing out the testimonio’s backstory, Benjamin notes that Alvarado met the proposal of an interview with a counteroffer of her own—a condition that their interviews take place in the field, while visiting the people she worked with. “You’ll have to go out with me,” Alvarado explained; “otherwise you’ll never know if I’m telling the truth.” 27 In contrast with Benjamin, who appears prepared to accept and endorse Alvarado’s testimony at face value, Alvarado anticipates readers’ skepticism and meets it head on with countermeasures. She converts the would-be collaborating writer who seeks only to collect her testimony to a first-hand witness who can help to corroborate it. Benjamin, in turn, recruits an award-winning photographer, Susan Meiselas, to document their journey. 28 By inviting Benjamin, Meiselas, and, by extension, the reader, to observe her as she organizes others, Alvarado continues to hold out to gringos the possibility of alliance, but also to hold them at arm’s length. As her testimonio will demonstrate, full solidarity will not come cheap. Just as the book is about to go to press, the narrative of its production takes a dramatic turn. Death threats begin to circulate against critics of the Honduran government. Fearing for Alvarado’s safety, the National Congress of Rural Workers—Alvarado’s organization, and Food First— Benjamin’s, begin to rethink their project. They consider removing information that might identify Alvarado, only to conclude that she is already so recognizable that redaction would leave no compelling story. With Alvarado already in the military’s sights, it is too late to protect her by

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halting work on the book. On the contrary, aborting the project now is likely to have the opposite effect. Making Alvarado even more visible, especially in the United States, is more likely to afford her some protection from Honduran authorities. For gringo readers, the idea of publication and publicity as forms of protection also offers another easy win. For the moment they can count their purchase of the book, augmented perhaps with a recommendation to friends, as their personal contribution to human rights in Honduras. Underscoring the risks that Alvarado is taking to get her story out, Benjamin now begins to up the ante for the well-meaning reader. Elvia, Benjamin emphasizes, is endangering her life to produce this testimonio “but she has not taken this risk for nothing; she is asking us for something in return”—“to join her in the struggle.” 29 It might seem that here the whole price of admission to the virtuous “we,” is revealed, but “joining” is still a nebulous concept. As Alvarado foresees, readers may still be expecting to trade in the fictional solidarity of sentiment by offering up a variety of imaginary substitutes for the pragmatic solidarity of action. 30 As part of her effort to install gringo readers in the testimonial pact, Alvarado systematically iterates and then rejects those ersatz alternatives. Some readers, she imagines, will respond with sympathy for the campesinos’ poverty. They might say “What a miserable life they have.” 31 Others, she anticipates, will conceive of the book as being about her: whether “Elvia sounds like a nice woman,” or “that Elvia is a foul-mouthed, uppity campesina.” 32 “But the important thing is not what you think of me,” she insists, “the important thing is for you to do something.” 33 Throughout the text, Alvarado demonstrates a nuanced understanding of the myriad cognitive defenses by which the targets of her organizing, both in person and here, textual, endeavor to resist personal implication. Moreover, the empirical strategies that she has developed to counter those defenses are consistent with findings of social psychologists. Witnesses to injustice generally find their own cognitive defenses unacceptable as soon they are openly articulated, so that the very rehearsal of those substitutions of judgement for action can help to forestall them. 34 In the course of the main narrative Alvarado elaborates further on her evolving views on the nature of gringos. Apart from the ones at the military base, the only other gringos that she and the other campesinos had met were the tourists they saw spending on one night’s hotel room the equivalent of two months of a campesino’s wages. Like her neighbors, Alvarado had held gringos responsible for the rise of sexual assault and the incidence of sexually transmitted infections. Children had been raped. There had of course been sex workers in town before the gringos, she is careful to stipulate, but never in such numbers. Gringos brought with them “flor de Vietnam,” a drug-resistant strain of syphilis, and then HIV/AIDS. 35 Corroborating Benjamin’s research report, Alvarado blames use of her country by the United States as a base of operations for their

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conflicts with the neighboring Contras for the Honduran government’s crackdown on protestors and subsequent human rights abuse. 36 As is the case in Alvarado’s foreword and Benjamin’s introduction, these portrayals of gringos do not necessarily threaten readers’ self-image—any resemblance between them and those gringos, they can be confident, is purely incidental. Once again, gringo readers can concur fully with this indictment of their bad gringo counterparts without feeling personally criticized. But soon even those other gringos, the ones who had so far served readers as convenient scapegoats, undergo a category shift. Some of the people she had previously regarded as bad gringos, Alvarado concludes, are actually not to blame. With time and broader acquaintance her attitude has softened, and now she categorizes the “poor gringos” in Honduras as “just ignorant”—people with no idea why they are in her country. 37 Still, readers might merely congratulate Alvarado on her generosity to their benighted counterparts, the gringos who, unlike them, do not know any better. Alvarado, however, goes on to expand repeatedly the category of ignorant gringos—and moreover, in ways that are likely to sweep in more and more of her readers. Peace Corps volunteers and Aid to International Development personnel are ignorant gringos, but so are people who donate money to women’s projects in Honduras. Even though they might mean well, she insists, these groups fail to address the root causes of poverty. She extends the category of ignorant gringos to religious groups, including Catholics (with some exceptions for liberation theology), and Evangelicals. Alvarado’s discourse here, especially the personal apology she offers to any readers who might be “believers,” the local term for Evangelicals, makes it clear that when she addresses ignorant gringos she is now speaking directly to actual readers. 38 The agencies that they might think are improving conditions in Honduras, she explains, even the progressive ones to which they might be contributing, are not the answer. Her country is “swamped by foreigners,” including multiple progressive NGOs, but “the gringos just don’t realize the millions of dollars [they] send don’t help the poor campesinos.” 39 Once again, the discourse gets personal. Alvarado confesses that one of her own grandchildren is supported by a gringo godparent organization, by people from “a town called Iowa.” 40 She is grateful for their help, she acknowledges, but would prefer to be self-sufficient and not need to depend on their charity. Readers—initially pleased and relieved to separate themselves from the category of guilty gringo—now find themselves back under scrutiny. Alvarado has added them to the ignorant gringo cohort, a probationary status that amounts to a sort of testimonial purgatory. Having called out readers for their sins of omission, Alvarado now comes to their rescue with an opportunity to atone. The evocation of a sense of obligation—the organizer’s craft of guilt-management—is one of the most formidable

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challenges in effective testimonial persuasion, and the timing and pace of Alvarado’s recategorization of readers attest to the skills she has developed as an organizer. There is a reason why these moves are reserved for later in the text, after the reader has been drawn in. If holding a mirror up to the readers makes them feel too guilty, too soon, they are likely to resist the representation entirely, either by closing the book or by continuing to deny any identification with the other gringos. At the other extreme lies the risk of letting readers off too easily; those who do not feel responsible can count themselves free to turn away from this appeal. There is no shortage of pleas for help, after all. Why choose this one? Alvarado expertly navigates these rhetorical shoals by offering readers who would otherwise be faced with unflattering suggestions of callousness or collusion a fresh opportunity to plead ignorance, handing them a fig leaf to cover temporarily their newly visible potential culpability. Had you known about this situation, Alvarado assures them, you would never have allowed it to happen, and now that you know you will no doubt want to join us in addressing it. The refuge of ignorance, even if only questionably true, offers witnesses a safe passage away from guilt— so long as they act now. This durable trope, a staple of organizing, is the one that would later be expressed in Biggie Smalls’s “Juicy,” and sampled in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: “so if you don’t know, now you know.” 41 As Tom Tenney explains, that statement does not merely accept a claim of lack of knowledge; rather it comes with a strong implication that the claim may have been an excuse, “and now you have no excuse to ‘not know’ that ever again.” This renewal of innocence is a limited time offer. Readers’ earlier gringo ignorance, Alvarado now reassures them, is not their fault. Even people who have had the opportunity to visit Honduras may still be under a false impression owing to purposeful deception. “The real Honduras is hidden,” she reports, well away from the areas likely to be seen by US visitors. 42 In her attempt to convey to readers those heretofore hidden realities of campesino life, Alvarado often comes up against the limits of language. Observing that generic words like “house” obscure vast inequalities, she takes care to disambiguate, contrasting the “houses” of the campesinos with the “mansions” of the rich. 43 Carolina Maria de Jesus employs this same strategy in her foundational Brazilian testimonio, Child of the Dark, correcting a reference to her dwelling from “home” to “shack.” 44 In other instances, Alvarado anticipates that the readers’ ignorance may take the form of an assumed difference between themselves and the campesinos. She suggests, for instance, that readers may believe that campesinos’ responses to infant mortality are somehow less acute than their own. “That’s not true,” she insists, “we love our children just like anyone else.” 45 The same is true when it comes to attitudes and practices regarding children’s nutrition and education. “Could it be that we Indians are idiots?” she asks, “of course we want

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those things, aren’t we human beings?” 46 Here is the time-honored argument of identity employed by Sojourner Truth at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Ohio when she demanded “Ain’t I a woman?” and by sanitation workers in the 1968 march on Memphis, memorialized in Ernest Withers’s iconic photo of marchers bearing signs declaring “I Am A Man.” Alvarado takes pains to establish the campesinos’ bona fides, their desire to be self-sufficient, to work their own land for a living so that they do not need to beg, echoing another strategy employed by Jesus in her Brazilian proto-testimonio. 47 “We Hondurans are capable of doing anything,” Alvarado proclaims, but instead of investing in education the Honduran government spends development money on consultants from other countries while the campesinos “continue to be idiots.” 48 All the campesinos want, she insists, is to be allowed to use the resources of their own country in accord with Honduras’s existing legal framework, land regulations that are “good laws on paper,” but never enforced. 49 Most of the campesinos’ claims stall in the intricacies of bureaucracy. On the rare instances in which campesinos prevail in court, wealthy landowners ignore the outcomes, send armed guards to block the recovery, and bribe the enforcement agencies. The campesinos that Alvarado describes are careful to follow all of the law’s requirements. It is only when the system fails that they stage what she terms “recoveries.” 50 Landowners and foreign investors call them invasions, but “they’re the invaders.” 51 Having divested readers of the temporary excuse of ignorance, Alvarado next moves to close off other cognitive defenses they might employ to evade her address. Witnesses who can no longer count themselves innocent or ignorant can still escape responsibility to act by declaring the struggle unwinnable. The situation is unfortunate, they may lament, but impossible to change. In order to demonstrate that change is possible, that the campesino struggle in Honduras is not a quixotic fantasy, Alvarado employs another persuasive strategy—one that Benjamin dubs “savor the little victories.” 52 She recounts with pride and even glee instances in which she and her fellow campesinos have managed to outwit officials and landowners, beating them at their own games. At one of the land recovery operations, the landowner’s son arrives to confront the campesinos. Alvarado calls attention to a suspicious bulge between his legs, which turns out to be a packet of marijuana, and the wealthy young man is reduced to begging the campesinos not to turn him over to the police, “probably afraid of what his mother might say.” 53 Another time Alvarado is at a hospital when the authorities come looking for her. Allies among the nurses quickly outfit her in a gown and mask, and when the officers come to the door, she officiously orders them out. “Who the hell is Elvia Alvarado?” she demands; “I’ve got more important things to do than worry about some stupid campesina.” 54 She even admonishes the officers to shut the door on their way out. Afterward, as she recalls, “we

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laughed and laughed.” 55 Reveling in the moment, she repeats the same phrase a few lines later when describing a nurse’s comments on the incident.” 56 Alvarado’s reiteration of that already-doubled verb underscores the satisfaction that she and her allies derive from such reversals. As sociologist Eduardo Romanos observes, laughter serves social movements in multiple ways: “defus[ing] tension in situations that threaten wellbeing,” “demonstrat[ing] that heretofore static systems of power can change,” and “strengthening the unity of the group by showing a degree of grandeur over the object that is mocked.” 57 Even at this late juncture in the narrative, however, and even if readers were to credit every proposition that Alvarado and Benjamin have advanced and become convinced that the campesinos’ struggle is both just and winnable, it is not yet by any means certain that they will be moved to help. It remains for Alvarado to persuade readers to accept yet another set of premises, this time about themselves. As Lyotard cautions, in order for witnesses to hear “you ought to” help, they must first hear “you are able.” 58 Readers can still resist her address so long as they can count themselves powerless, either by the defense of elevation—exalting Alvarado as a superior being whose acts are impossible for them to follow, or else by abjection—downplaying their own capacity. In order to convince her gringo readers to help her, Alvarado now needs to help them—both to view themselves as capable, and to see her, their potential role model, as something less than superhuman. At this point Alvarado’s appeal to readers takes on the characteristics of a popular genre of second person narrative, the self-help book—in this case a manual for would-be good gringos in search of solidarity. As Mohsin Hamid observes in his parody, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, the self-help book is “an oxymoron,” because “you read a self-help book so someone who isn’t yourself can help you, that someone being the author.” 59 The well-meaning First World witness, expressly and accurately described as sympathetic but fearful and hesitant, must now be encouraged, reassured, and empowered. Given the gringo readers’ experience, Alvarado tells them, she understands that it will not be easy for them to participate in the project of social justice. Nevertheless, she promises, even gringos can learn. “We’re used to planting seeds and waiting to see if the seeds bear fruit,” she explains to her gringo readers, but now “you must learn to persist.” 60 At one point she attempts to encourage gringos by reminding them of what they have already accomplished in other arenas—even referring to the accomplishments of the US’s much vaunted space program. On the US domestic front, civil rights workers had made similar appeals, as when Reverend Ralph Abernathy led members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to Cape Kennedy for the launch of Apollo 11, carrying signs that reminded viewers of the social programs that could be carried out for a fraction of the investment in space. 61 People who can put a man on the moon, Alvarado insists,

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ought certainly to be capable of addressing poverty and human rights abuse on earth. 62 By way of encouragement Alvarado also relates her own moments of doubt, points where she has been tempted to give up entirely, and then explains how she manages to return to work. Reminding readers of the gringo audience member’s tears in response to her speech, she responds with the tough love of a personal trainer. “Make your tears turn into strength,” she instructs; “snap out of it, get back to work.” 63 “Those of you who feel the pain of the poor,” she admonishes, “we need more than sympathy. We need you to join the struggle.” “Don’t be afraid, gringos,” she exhorts them, “keep your spirits high and remember, we’re right there with you.” 64 “People use contemporary self-help books in their own learning projects,” observes Sandra K. Dolby, “much as people have used classical philosophers and the Bible in the past; each self-help author offers readers a focused meditation on how they might best act.” 65 As a folklorist, Dolby calls attention to the function of self-help books in forging the aspirational identities of particular groups of readers, building and strengthening a sense of community. Offering both encouragement and practical advice, Alvarado instructs the would-be good gringos on how to join the struggle alongside her, not as sympathetic onlookers but as fellow organizers. “Begin educating people,” she calls on them; divide up the tasks, and make allies. 66 It is essential, she adds, to cast a broad net— to seek out “middle class people, or even rich people who want to help change things.” 67 Alvarado finally sets the clearest of terms for gringo readers, bluntly dismissing the prospect that they might fulfill the obligations of the testimonial pact through spectatorship or phatic support, no matter how sympathetic or admiring. “If you sit around thinking what to do and end up not doing anything,” she asks provocatively, “why bother even thinking about it?” In that case, she advises, “you’re better off going out on the town and having a good time.” 68 Throughout the book, and like all expert organizers, Alvarado endeavors not just to show her audience the way, but also to close off their alternate exits. By the end of the narrative, the only option that she leaves open for the gringos who would be good, the ones who aspire to be part of an “us” alongside her, is a reallife act of solidarity. NOTES 1. Burgos writes in her introduction to Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú, that Menchú’s “expression was as guileless as a child,” xiv. 2. Benjamin, “Introduction,” in Alvarado, xxii. 3. Benjamin, “Savor the Little Victories,” 49. 4. This norm of testimonio contrasts with the deference accorded to interviewees in the case of celebrities’ or politicians’ autobiographies, where the collaborating writer may be mentioned only in the acknowledgements, if at all. 5. Beverley, Subalternity and Representation, 68.

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6. Fludernik, “Test Case,” 452. 7. Alvarado, 14. 8. Alvarado, xiii. 9. Alvarado, xiii. Italics in the original. 10. Alvarado, xiii. 11. Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican, 72. Italics in the original. 12. Shepherd. 13. Alvarado, 143. 14. Alvarado, xiii. 15. Benjamin, “Introduction,” Alvarado, xvi. 16. Benjamin, “Introduction,” Alvarado, xvii. 17. Benjamin, “Introduction,” Alvarado, xvii. 18. Southwell, 663. 19. Southwell, 665. 20. Southwell, 671. 21. Partnoy, The Little School, 83. 22. Benjamin, “Savor the Little Victories,” 49. 23. Benjamin, “Savor the Little Victories,” 49. 24. Benjamin, “Savor the Little Victories,” 49. 25. Benjamin, “Savor the Little Victories,” 49. 26. Green and Brock, 719. 27. Benjamin, “Introduction,” Alvarado, xxii. 28. Benjamin, “Introduction,” Alvarado, xxii. 29. Benjamin, “Introduction,” Alvarado, xxiv. 30. The terms “fictional solidarity” and “pragmatic solidarity” come from Farmer, 230. 31. Alvarado, 146. 32. Alvarado, 146. 33. Alvarado, 146. 34. Lerner, Just World, 80. 35. Alvarado, 110. 36. Alvarado, 111–113. 37. Alvarado, 109. 38. Alvarado, 31–32. 39. Alvarado, 101–102. 40. Alvarado, 104. 41. Miranda et al., “Cabinet Battle # 2.” 42. Alvarado, 19. 43. Alvarado, 25. 44. Jesus, Child of the Dark, 18. 45. Alvarado, 36. 46. Alvarado, 27. 47. For details of Jesus’s strategy, see Nance, “From Quarto de Despejo to a Little House: Domesticity as Personal and Political Testimony in the Diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus.” 48. Alvarado, 104. 49. Alvarado, 68. 50. Alvarado, 68–69. 51. Alvarado, 69. Italics in the original. 52. Benjamin, “Savor the Little Victories,” 49. 53. Alvarado, 74–75. 54. Alvarado, 94. 55. Alvarado, 94. 56. Alvarado, 95. 57. Romanos, 119–139. 58. Lyotard, 121.

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59. Hamid, 3. 60. Alvarado, 144. 61. Smith, “‘Whitey’s on the Moon.’” On the launch’s anniversary in 2019, Guardian commentator Suzanne Moore looked back on the power of space program to inspire, and on civil rights workers’ efforts to channel some of that energy into social programs in “The Moon Landing still Offers Hope.” 62. Alvarado, 27. 63. Alvarado, 143. 64. Alvarado, 146. 65. Dolby, xiii. 66. Alvarado, 145. 67. Alvarado, 146. 68. Alvarado, 146.

TWO Choose Your Own Testimonial Adventure? Witnessing Alternative Futures in Peter Dickinson’s AK

Published in 1990, Peter Dickinson’s AK anticipated by almost two decades what was to become a boom in boy soldier narratives. By 2007, Starbucks would stock Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier next to the cash register, Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation would be featured in Vanity Fair, and Time magazine’s cultural trends editors Belinda Luscombe, Lev Grossman, and Bruce Crumley would declare that “the kid-at-arms has become a pop-cultural trope.” 1 Dickinson, a celebrated writer of young adult fiction, traced the genesis of his boy-soldier novel to a BBC World Service radio program on what was then an emerging social issue: children “recruited or kidnapped to join guerrilla groups in central Africa.” 2 One guest on that panel took note of the tactical advantage gained by deploying children as combatants. “Even a hardened government soldier,” he pointed out, “may hesitate a fatal half second before he guns down a child.” 3 “The hair on my nape stood on end,” Dickinson recalls; “I knew I had to write about that.” 4 His novel was met with considerable acclaim, garnering the Whitbread National Prize in 1990 and an American Library Association award for Best Book for Young Adults in 1991. “When young-adult novels are as riveting as AK,” observed Michael Dirda, “it’s a shame that only teenagers are likely to pick them up.” 5 Dirda need not have worried. AK would continue in print through five editions, the most recent in 2015, in a period when the audience for young adult literature would undergo an unprecedented expansion. “Readers over eighteen now constitute the majority,” reports Barbara Kitchener, and “while much of the book in31

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dustry has suffered, the genre is one of the few that remains profitable.” The popularity of young adult novels with adult audiences cannot be chalked up to escapism. On the contrary, the YA books that have been popular with adults are “dark and serious.” 6 Their appeal, suggests Fault in Our Stars author John Green, often stems precisely from their articulations of pain. Nearly thirty years on, the pain that AK articulates also continues to escalate. The United Nations Office on Children and Armed Conflict reports that in at least twenty countries tens of thousands of child soldiers are still used by armies “in tasks that can vary from combatants to cooks, spies, messengers and even sex slaves,” and that hundreds of thousands of former child soldiers, along with their communities, still struggle with the aftermath. 7 The novel’s title is short for AK-47, a beloved Kalashnikov rifle that signals the transformation of a lost child into “Paul, Warrior, of the Fifth Special Commando of the Nagala Liberation Army,” proud to be “a boy with his own gun.” 8 As Isaac Ndlovu observes, Kalashnikovs would become a leitmotif of novels about boy soldiers. 9 The rifles, which weigh about 3.6 kilograms (8 lbs.), are prized not for accuracy but for durability and ease of fire. They can be set to release various numbers of shots with each pull of the trigger, ranging from a single bullet to the spray of automatic fire known as “burst mode.” 10 When Paul acquires the weapon, he is still too small to employ that last feature. It is all he can do to brace himself against the recoil of one shot at a time. Nonetheless, possession of the powerful rifle is the one concrete and verifiable fact of his identity. All the rest—village of origin, exact age, and even his name— have been lost by the time he is found wandering alone in the bush in the midst of a war. His new details have been supplied by Michael Kagomi, the commando unit leader who found him there. Dickinson sets his child soldier novel in Nagala, a fictional nation whose exact location is pinpointed on an opening map, but at the same time obscured by that map’s purposely uninformative crop. The frame excludes the names of all adjacent countries and appears to cut through a label for the body of water on which the country sits, leaving only the generic “Sea.” Dickinson writes Nagala with Tolkienesque attention to detail. Contributing to what Margaret Bush calls its “disturbing plausibility,” the book opens with documentary-style paratexts that include a four-page précis of the nation’s geography and history, complete with footnotes describing the languages spoken in Nagala, the function of various local Englishes as lingua franca, and the frequency of code-switching. 11 This section’s description of Nagala’s natural resources: rare minerals, for instance, and a newly discovered aquifer, helps to counter any illusions that the nation’s current poverty is an inevitable function of a lack of geographical endowments. “About Nagala,” Dickinson’s account of the nation’s founding, emphasizes the arbitrary nature of its borders. For

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thousands of years, the preface explains, the territory that would become Nagala had been the respective provinces of three major ethnic and linguistic groups, along with countless smaller ones. Those groups had never been allies; among them there had been slave raids and massacres. Nevertheless, they would be yoked into a single colony by arbitrary strokes of a European pen, when “a hundred years ago and thousands of miles away in Paris, lines were drawn on a map. Some were crooked, following a river or a range of mountains or a coast, but where there were no such guides, the lines were drawn with a ruler. Inside them lay a brand-new country called Nagaland, which the men in Paris had agreed belonged to the British.” 12 Nagala’s fictional charter tale is based on a real-life counterpart: the Berlin Conference, an 1884 gathering in which the major European powers divvied up West Africa. Next, there is a primer on British rule, but one where each sentence of a colonialist discourse of progress is updated with home truths. The British “stopped the slave raids,” the chronicle continues, “and had forced labor instead. They stopped the massacres, and had punitive expeditions with bullets instead of spears.” 13 An account of Nagala’s independence undermines further the narrative of British benevolence and tutelage. After seventy years, it explains, the British “worked out how much it was costing them and decided to leave. They explained to people what a ballot-box was, and a cabinet, and an opposition, and so on. There was a romantic ceremony at which the Union Jack was lowered and the flag of Nagala, as the country was now called—was raised, and democracy began.” 14 Now theoretically self-governing, the people of Nagala would discover a more durable legacy of the colonial regime, the path to dictatorship. Because “the British had had a rule that no African could ever be promoted to a position where he might have to give orders to a European, any ambitious African had chosen to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a priest. No one had learnt how to run an agricultural improvements scheme, or a road maintenance department, or anything like that.” 15 The consequences of colonialization: the internal conflict caused by the arbitrary drawing of national boundaries, the failure to develop human capital, the economic calculus of independence, and the passing on of the trappings of democracy while withholding the technical expertise necessary to run a country, are briskly spelled out with pedagogical clarity. As a result, “the only place where Africans could really rise had been in the army. So it was not at all surprising, first, that the democratic government of Nagala made a real mess of their job.” 16 Deciding to “do something” about that mess, one of the Army officers arrests and executes the Cabinet on one day, “and the leaders of the Opposition parties the next day.” 17 Five years later that dictator is assassinated and new elections are held, but the parties, which had “democratic-sounding names, all with different initials,” turn out to be “all much the same.” 18 Later on, the novel’s portrayal of the Organization of African Unity, an

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actual organization founded in 1963 (disbanded in 2002 and replaced with the African Union) leaves no room for confidence that regional efforts will be sufficient to address the poverty, underdevelopment, corruption, and violence that constitute colonialism’s aftermath. While the ideal of African solutions for African problems might now sound appealing to readers from outside Africa, who could feel virtuous about remaining uninvolved, AK’s preface traces those problems’ British roots and by implication assigns responsibility for reparation. At the end of the preface, the style morphs from the expository discourse of the schoolbook British history to the short sentences and repetitive cadence of a children’s storybook, as the national chronicle gives way to the personal narrative of the young protagonist: “the army did what it liked, so the war went on. And on. And on. Until the day on which this story begins.” 19 AK’s first chapter opens at dawn, as Paul awakens from a dream of his life before the war. Images of “a hut made of grass and mud, a girl chanting at the door as she pounded mealie” are instantly erased when he touches “the night-chilled metal of his AK,” the talisman that reminds him “who he was, what he was, all he was.” 20 When Michael tells him that the war has ended, Paul disassembles the rifle, wraps it carefully, and buries it with a prayer. Just in case, however, he memorizes the spot. When the other boys begin to make plans to return to their villages and Paul is left with nowhere to go, Michael adopts him. Even after he marries and has other children, he promises, Paul will always be his eldest. He will not, however, be taking his new son into his house. As part of a postwar initiative for transitional justice and reconciliation, the new government plans to send children from each ethnic group to study in another. In this way, Michael hopes, the children will learn about each other’s language and culture, and “the people of these countries will feel that they can trust the other tribes, because the other tribes are trusting them with their children.” 21 Paul translates the plan more bluntly: “I’m going to be a kind of hostage.” 22 In the main text as in the preface, AK often features such doubled discourse, pairing bland reassurances with pointed restatements. Young protagonists’ candid articulation of facts that adults have attempted to cover over with platitudes is a hallmark of young adult literature—as it is of adolescent discourse in general. For young adult readers, such exchanges constitute gratifying proof of their newfound capacity to discover and decipher propaganda, a developmental milestone. For adult readers, on the other hand, the translations can be disquieting, confronting them with the continued existence of troubling facts as well as the failure of attempts to hide them from the young. In contrast with the documented experiences of boy soldiers, many elements of Dickinson’s depiction of Paul’s life in the Nagala Liberation Front appear either tempered or idealized. For instance, the boy’s small stature makes any use of the prized rifle more aspirational than actual.

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Paul has not been kidnapped or forced to kill members of his family or community; they are already lost before the army finds him. Michael, the commando unit leader, is presented as a reluctant participant in a role that has been forced upon him. Politically progressive, he serves as a father figure who attempts to protect Paul and the other boys in his charge. Had Dickinson opted to leave atrocities out of his novel entirely, his portrayal of child soldiers might be read as a concession to the tender age of his intended audience, but he does not simply omit those forms of pain. Instead, he assigns them to characters other than his protagonist. It is the experience of those others, not Paul’s, that Dickinson portrays as typical. Repeatedly he has Paul acknowledge this relatively good fortune, comparing himself to other former child soldiers who had “a really rough time, you know.” 23 Paul describes children with symptoms that psychologists would recognize as severe posttraumatic stress, while reporting that he himself has largely recovered. “There’s a few of them act like they were dreaming,” he observes, “bad dreams—like I used to get.” 24 Sexual abuse of child soldiers is also broached, but again obliquely, through second-hand accounts from Paul’s friend Quaab, whose “commando wasn’t like ours, more like government soldiers. If the men found women or girls in the bush they’d rape them as soon as look at them, and then just leave them. If they couldn’t get women they took the Warriors [boy soldiers] to bed with them.” “I didn’t guess how lucky I’d been,” Paul realizes, “till I talked with Quaab.” 25 The writer’s choices here, to assign the most painful experiences to secondary characters while holding his protagonist at one remove, are likely to increase this novel’s potential for social efficacy. Observations by social psychologists confirm that real-life victims of acute trauma often do class themselves as fortunate in comparison to others, as having been somehow spared. 26 Moreover, when it comes to written accounts of suffering, readers appear more likely to identify with and seek to help victims who seem plucky, lucky, and relatively cheerful, and who describe their own ordeals in understated and emotionally rather flat terms, reserving more dramatic depictions of pain for their accounts of fellow sufferers. 27 Dramatic first-hand portrayals of intense suffering do arouse strong emotions from readers, but they tend to result not in social action but rather in recoil and withdrawal. 28 When Michael becomes a government official, all goes passably well until the next military coup, when opposition forces target the school where Paul is studying. Expecting that Michael must be either dead or in prison, Paul and his friends Francis and Jilli escape by boat. When Francis contracts malaria, Paul and Jilli are forced to leave him with a photojournalist they meet on the way. Pausing only to retrieve Paul’s rifle, the two head for the capital marketplace, where they join the resistance—a coalition of gang members, paramilitary leaders, and civilians—and Jilli is injured in the fighting. Michael manages to escape from prison and surprises Paul at the hospital where Jilli lies near death. When Paul declares

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defiantly that it has all been worth it, and that he is certain that Jilli would agree, Michael reserves judgment. “It will be twenty years,” he insists, “before we know whether it was worth it.” 29 In a reversal of roles, here it is Paul who voices the hopeful platitude, while Michael calls it into question. Dickinson reports that he had first conceived a different ending for the book. He had planned to have Paul “smuggle the gun in to his leader who would then shoot his way out while the boy and his allies created a diversion.” 30 “But more and more as I wrote,” he recalls, “I realised that the nature of the African tragedy was such that I couldn’t write yet another book in which the cure for violence is yet more violence, so I was forced to find a different solution.” 31 Ultimately Dickinson would write not one but two conclusions, incorporating contingency as a structural element of his novel. Reflecting both the possibility of luck and its opposite, that exchange in the hospital between Paul and Michael is followed by two more chapters, each with the same title, “Twenty Years On, Perhaps,” and denominated A and B. The A ending takes place at the dedication of a monument to Michael at Nagala’s National Park. Paul, now married with two children of his own, is the park warden, and Francis a deputy minister. Jilli, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker based now in Bangkok, will soon be back for a visit. The rifle, no longer needed, lies buried permanently underneath the monument’s concrete base. That conclusion, Dickinson concedes, “depends on a set of lucky coincidences, but it’s time Africa had some luck.” 32 At the beginning of the B ending the war is still in progress. Paul is now the adult commando leader; all of his friends are either dead or disappeared. In an echo of the BBC program that inspired the novel, Paul encounters a ten-year-old boy on the road, hesitates, and in that half second is shot and killed by a man hiding nearby. Realizing afterward that Paul was on their side, the man and boy move quickly to hide the body. The B ending closes with anticipation of yet another generation of violence, as the boy looks forward to carrying the dead man’s AK. Although the alternate endings of AK recall Bantam’s popular young adult series, Choose Your Own Adventure, there are critical differences here when it comes to narrative pacing, continuity, and closure. In the Choose Your Own canon, the outcome of the reader’s decision is instant, yielding a near-seamless plotline that depends only on the selection of paths at each of the book’s multiple ramifications, decision points where a reader might opt, for instance, either to open a door or pass it by. The reader does not know in advance where that decision will lead. Moreover, while a reader might at some point choose to reopen the book and chart a different path, each adventure is designed to feel complete in itself. Maria Nikolajeva suggests an alternative analogy, between AK and a computer game. 33 Here again, however, the game’s plotline responds instantly to the player’s choice of options on the screen. In the digital

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game narrative as in the Choose Your Own novels, players do not know where their actions may lead, and may progress to a new level without ever seeing what might have resulted from the unchosen option. Dickinson, by contrast, does not quite permit readers to select how AK ends. The two conclusions’ shared title that ends in “Perhaps,” coupled with a notional twenty-year gap, removes the possibility of smooth passage to either end of the story. With such a substantial time lag, roughly a generation, between the end of the main narrative and the alternative endings, AK posits possible outcomes that depend on more than the simple acts of selection required by the Bantam multiverse or the digital game. No matter when the reader finishes the book, its conclusion has yet to come to pass—it remains twenty years on. Whether that ending is A or B, progress or repetition, depends not merely on reader options in the text, but rather on actions and events yet to unfold, and which must take place off-screen, during that un-narrated gap. By the terms of AK’s narrative game, then, readers are not allowed simply to choose a path and be done with it. As much as some readers might wish to see ending A, the successful conclusion for Nagala, the novel reminds them that it may not happen. At the same time, the “Perhaps” at the end of the B title forestalls a definitive conclusion for readers who might regard ending A as impossible and accept ending B as sad but inevitable. Those readers to do not reach closure either, because, the novel insists, this time could be different. As Markus Appel, Tobias Richter, Jeffrey Strange, and Cynthia Leung have found, even fictional narratives can influence readers’ beliefs about social issues. Viewed through this lens, the alternative endings may constitute instructional fieldtrips into the future, a sort of tutorial for what Richard Gerrig terms “anomalous replotting,” readers’ tendency to actively speculate on how things might be made to go differently for protagonists in whose future they have become invested through narrative transportation. 34 “Dickinson is known for placing his young protagonists into complex moral situations, which they are forced to navigate despite their youth and presumed immaturity,” and “routinely utilizes a narrative framing device that Janice Del Negro has termed ‘fairy tale anthropology,’ in which the author creates imaginative alternate universes that both reflect mankind’s past and speculate on its future.” 35 This fictional Nagala affords narrative possibilities that a real country would not. Setting the events of AK apart from actual countries and conflicts helps to free the novel from the strict bounds of realism and forestalls the possibility of an inadvertent extratextual closure, in which historical events in a real-life country overtake the fictional possibilities, supplying an ending by force majeure. As Lisa Sainsbury observes, this “‘invented country’ in a book that does not otherwise depart from the realist mode” also allows Dickinson to explore and raise issues related to child-soldiering from an ethical, rather than a political perspective. 36 Situating AK’s action in any

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actual country in Africa would weaken significantly—perhaps even fatally—the ethical potential of its speculative fiction. Although almost all of AK’s contemporary critics concurred with the Whitbread and ALA prize committees that Dickinson had achieved this progressive objective—praising the skillful and detailed construction of Nagala, the engaging and fast-moving plot, the characterization of Paul, and the device of the alternative endings—that approbation was not universal. In 1994, Yulisa Amadu Maddy and Donnarae MacCann adduced AK—alongside two other prizewinning children’s and young-adult books, Michael Williams’s Into the Valley (Sanlam prize), and Eva Bunting’s Smoky Night (Caldecott medal)—as evidence in an indictment of what they viewed as the award industry’s complicity in the misrepresentation of African and African-American culture and the perpetuation of a “neocolonialistic mindset.” 37 “Dickinson,” they argue, merely “takes us from one coup d’état to the next as he depicts the Africa of today as a place of gloom and ignominy.” 38 Evaluating the alternative conclusions, they find ending A’s “peaceful scenario lacking in plausibility,” due to the “texture of the novel that reinforces the myth of static, warring, mindless clans.” 39 Nancy Huse advanced a similar critique in 2001, arguing that Dickinson does not do enough to contest pre-existing assumptions about the future of Africa. Observing that responses to narratives of conscience are also shaped by competing cultural narratives, both outside the text and present within it, Huse concludes that “the reader can thread the ‘A’ ending with memories of complexity acquired in the main story, and perversely see the continued war of the ‘B’ ending as a return to normalcy.” 40 It is not that such readers necessarily prefer the B ending, she argues, but rather that they have been taught to expect it. In a reading shaped by cultural stereotypes of Africa as a site of inevitable violence, she anticipates, the coalition government’s attempts at reconciliation may seem destined to fail. While such negative stereotypes are indisputably present in the larger culture, Dickinson does seed his novel with a number of direct counters to them—particularly, as noted, in the preface. Moreover, that the positive conclusion of AK is even located in Africa constitutes a significant difference from the standard boy soldier narrative that would later develop. In the texts of the boy soldier boom, experiences in Africa served only as a tragic “before” from which a child would be rescued via a flight to the United States, where he would be adopted by a local family. Africa, that narrative implied, was already hopeless. Nagala, the fictional country that Dickinson creates, also differs substantially from the portrayal of African countries in the conventional boy soldier novel. In contrast with the bleak landscape, ceaseless conflict, and unrelenting abject poverty of those later narratives, AK evinces efforts to present Nagala as a site of possibility, a place in which war might indeed end, people might thrive and make use of those rich mineral deposits and newly discovered aqui-

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fer—and even establish national parks. Whether such counters to stereotype are sufficient to convince readers, of course, remains open to question. Maddy, MacCann, and Huse also disagree with Dickinson’s decision to situate AK in Africa but not in any real-life country. “The abstractness, deliberate denial of specificity to the setting of Nagala,” Huse contends, carries on the stereotype of reducing the African continent to a single undifferentiated entity. 41 Many writers have leveled the specifics of African countries to the point of abstraction, but there is a difference between constructs of the continent of Africa as monolith and construction of a highly particularized fictional country within that continent. Even Huse’s own account of detective work that leads her to posit Zambia, Dickinson’s birthplace, as Nagala’s real life analog undermines somewhat her characterization of Nagala as abstract. In the assessments of these three critics, Dickinson’s claim to a progressive ideology for AK is further undercut by the novel’s limited depiction of women and girls. As reconstructed after the war, Paul’s new family consists of an adoptive father, Michael—a character Huse views as overly idealized, shaped by “Western and urban ideology”—but only a metaphorical, and very dangerous, mother. 42 If anyone asks, Michael tells Paul, he will answer that Paul is the child of his “first wife,” the war. 43 Later on, that figurative mother attempts to beckon Paul to ending B. “Bring me alive,” she appeals, “with your beautiful gun.” 44 Huse also finds disappointing the absence of Jilli at the novel’s end. Again, much depends on the narrative alternatives to which AK might be compared. Kai Raine finds the character of Jilli, “far more dynamic than you might have expected if this had been, say, a mainstream Hollywood film.” “She goes,” Raine notes, “from being a sheltered village girl with no greater aspiration than to be a waitress in the capital, to an adventurer with aspirations of being a journalist, to finally a warrior.” Unlike Paul, whose identity as a soldier is thrust upon him when he is found in the forest, Jilli makes her own decision to give up a comfortable home to fight for the future of her country, and very nearly sacrifices her life for it when she is wounded. A twist in in Ending A distances Jilli’s plotline even further from that hypothetical Hollywood trajectory. Twenty years later, ending A finds Paul married with children, Francis arriving for the opening ceremony of the park, and Jilli, it is true, nowhere in sight. For a moment it does seem as though she might have died, or even disappeared into Paul’s household as the unidentified “wife,” but when Francis inquires about her readers learn from Paul that she is now a documentary filmmaker at work in Bangkok, and in love with someone else. She and Paul remain good friends, and his children so admire her that they want to be filmmakers themselves. Raine suggests that Dickinson’s decision not to conduct Paul and Jilli together to a standard Hollywood ending might itself be viewed as progressive. The novel’s demonstration that girls could be warriors, but also that first love might not be forever after, that

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romance could evolve to friendship, and that for women choosing a demanding career did not mean renouncing love could all be seen as empowering. Finally, AK’s critics are skeptical of the paucity of policy directives proposed in the main narrative, the ones that would chart a clear path to ending A. Even as Dickinson overtly defines the violence in Nagala as a legacy of British rule, they argue, the government’s plan to achieve peace by interchanging children among the various ethnic groups reinforces stereotypes of Africa as the site of tribal conflicts that predate European colonialization. The idea of intergroup fosterage—in which the exchange of children cements bonds of friendship or at least reduces the odds of violence due to the risk to one’s own offspring—is not original to Dickinson’s novel. The practice has historical precedents in many parts of the world, and particularly, although Dickinson does not mention them, in England, Wales, and Scotland. 45 By failing to note those antecedents, Dickinson misses an opportunity and does come to participate, even if unintentionally, in the narrative tradition that Maddy and MacCann call out, in which only conflicts in Africa, and not “longstanding European conflicts, among the Irish, Basques, or Serbs,” are subject to interpretation as evidence of inherent tribalism. 46 Maddy and MacCann conclude their critique of AK and other prizewinning texts with a provocative question: “Is this the best that we can expect from Western, self-professed liberals?” 47 Taking issue with other critics’ characterization of AK’s endings as a call to consider “how we in the ‘First World’ should react,” they assert that such critics are “oblivious to those people outside the ‘First World’ and their participation as readers.” 48 Deliberative testimonio is most commonly directed precisely toward an audience of western, self-professed progressives, not only as a practical matter—they are the ones who buy and read most of these books—but also as a targeted audience for the genre’s ethical appeals. “Every literary text,” writes Terry Eagleton, “in some sense internalizes its social relations of production . . . every text intimates by its very conventions the way it is to be consumed, by whom, and for whom it was produced. Every text posits a putative reader, defining its produceability in terms of a certain capacity for consumption.” 49 As a literature of persuasion, deliberative testimonio is even more closely tethered and tailored to its putative reader, and to the author’s estimation of how that particular type of reader might be persuaded through narrative. Persuasion depends crucially on scrutiny and analysis of specific audiences, which forms the basis for its strategic overtures. As the sharp contrasts between the assessments of AK’s proponents and detractors demonstrate, approaching deliberative testimonio against the grain, from the perspective of non-putative readers, is likely to produce very different readings. By Dickinson’s account, he was writing specifically for a young audience outside Africa, one who would recognize his ironic references to the

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grand colonial narratives of British schoolbooks and whom he was trying to engage in a project of redress for the incalculable damage done to the continent by European colonial occupation. Sainsbury argues that in the twenty-first century British children and young adults are even more in need of the ethical challenges posed by texts like AK, because they have been taught by popular culture events like Band Aid and Live Aid to respond to humanitarian crises only by “giving, rather than thinking or acting.” 50 AK seeks to convince its audience that change is possible, and further, that citizens of former colonial regimes have a particular responsibility to help redress a situation that their country helped to cause, even when the path forward is not entirely clear. In a Guardian op-ed, Neil Gaiman, another writer of young adult texts, calls this the “obligation to imagine.” “It is easy to pretend,” Gaiman writes, “that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.” AK does not supply specific prescriptions for how readers should go on to fulfill that obligation. “That isn’t fiction’s job,” Dickinson contends; “fiction is a gateway for the imagination.” 51 “The freedom of responsibility and choice,” concurs Sainsbury, “is finally handed to the implied reader of Dickinson’s novel.” 52 “The alternative endings,” insists Dickinson, “are no kind of literary trick,” but instead, “a response to what has been happening in Africa over the past thirty years.” “There is more than enough to despair about,” he acknowledges, “but there has to be room for hope.” 53 Prizing out that space for hope, persuading privileged readers to relinquish the luxury of giving up, is a central task of this literature of conscience. Deliberative testimonio seeks to reopen social possibilities by contesting assumptions and conventions that have collapsed into either complacency or despair. AK’s social potential is not as a realist roman à clef or as a set of policy prescriptions, but rather as a call for one specific and privileged audience to recognize its implication in the postcolonial condition, and from there to exercise its obligation to imagine. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Luscombe, Grossman, and Crumley, 62. Dickinson, “AK Author Comment.” Dickinson, “AK Author Comment.” Dickinson, “AK Author Comment.” Dirda, 11. Virginia Zimmerman, quoted in Kitchener. United Nations Office on Children and Armed Conflict. Dickinson, AK, 5. Ndlovu, 78.

42 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Chapter 2 Assault Rifle AK. Bush, 588. Dickinson, AK, 1. Dickinson, AK, 2. Dickinson, AK, 2. Dickinson, AK, 3. Dickinson, AK, 3. Dickinson, AK, 3. Dickinson, AK, 4. Dickinson, AK, 4. Dickinson, AK, 5. Dickinson, AK, 29. Dickinson, AK, 29. Dickinson, AK, 26. Dickinson, AK, 26. Dickinson, AK, 26. Lerner, Belief in a Just World, 162–163. Nance, Can Literature Promote Justice? 77–78. Nance, Can Literature Promote Justice? 75. Dickinson, AK, 223. Dickinson, “AK Author Comment.” Dickinson, “AK Author Comment.” Dickinson, “AK Author Comment.” Nikolajeva, 113. Gerrig, 277. Children’s Literature Review, “Peter Dickinson.” Sainsbury, 75–76. Maddy and MacCann, 15. Maddy and MacCann, 18. Maddy and MacCann, 20. Huse, 2. Huse, 3. Huse, 2–3. Dickinson, AK, 23. Dickinson, AK, 173. Italics in the original. Parkes. Maddy and MacCann, 20. Maddy and MacCann, 20. Maddy and MacCann, 20. Eagleton, 48. Sainsbury, 82. Dickinson, “AK Author Comment.” Sainsbury, 82. Dickinson, “AK Author Comment.”

THREE Border Testimonies, Restricted Crossings Questioning the Act of Witness in Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s “Exile: El Paso, Texas” and “Alligator Park”

Two short stories by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, a writer who would later earn acclaim with his young adult novels, among them Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, bear witness to acts of witness. Calling into question critics’ initial confidence in testimonial communication and alliance across boundaries of class, nationality, and ethnicity, “Exile: El Paso, Texas” and “Alligator Park,” from Sáenz’s early collection Flowers for the Broken (1992), challenge those triumphalist assumptions. Anticipating the turn-of-the-century shift in testimonial criticism, from celebration to mourning, these two stories subject to critical scrutiny not only the protagonists’ responses as witnesses to border crossings and asylum seekers, but also, in the case of “Alligator Park,” the motivations of a collaborating writer in producing testimonio. “Exile” and “Alligator Park” are also meta-testimonial in another sense. Reserving their claims of lifeworld connections to the end of the story rather than leading with them, they invite still further evaluation of the role of the reader as textual witness. “Exile” focuses on a series of encounters between a US Latino graduate student in El Paso and the local Border Patrol. The story draws heavily on metaphors of witness as literal sight: selective vision, involuntary witness, shifts in perspective, and surveillance. Questions of identity likewise become literal, when the narrator is stopped and interrogated. The story develops episodically, as a series of video-clip style segments punctuated by the questions of border agents. After an initial establishing 43

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shot, the camera pans the graduate student’s neighborhood, then moves out to an aerial view of the town, the river, and the Juárez mountains. From there, the narration follows the student narrator through a typical day on campus and back to his familiar street in Sunset Heights. As he describes it, his neighborhood has a place for everyone, “turn of the century homes intact; remodeled houses painted pink and turquoise; old homes tastefully gentrified by the aspiring young; the rundown Sunset Grocery store decorated with the protest art of graffiti on one end and a plastic ‘Circle K’ on the other.” 1 Rich and poor, families who had lived there for generations and those who would stay only a few days, US citizens and Mexican citizens crossing from Juárez, all share a borderland he sees as “a perfect place with a perfect name and a perfect view of the river.” 2 By narrative convention, such a degree of initial perfection can only be prelapsarian, the fall here foreshadowed by glimpses of a damaged backpack from which “everything’s gonna come tumbling out,” of “chained dogs in the yards,” and the prospect of winds that might “upset things.” 3 For the moment, however, those threats remain at bay. The protagonist makes a mental note to mend the backpack, reminds himself that the dogs cannot hurt him, and hopes those winds will not come this year. For him, the purples of the Juárez mountains outside his window still constitute “sacraments of belonging,” but in the Catholic liturgical calendar that color also connotes Advent and Lent, seasons of anticipation and penance. 4 Against this backdrop comes the writer’s first encounter with a border agent, an element so out of place in his idealized landscape that at first, he does not even process the agent’s questions. It is only after a moment’s confusion that he responds, “I’m a US citizen.” 5 When the agent asks skeptically if he was born in the United States, he reflects that since she was “browner than I was,” “I might have asked her the same question.” 6 Smiling when she asks if he is sure he was born in Las Cruces, he tries to laugh off their brief exchange, as if “it was all very innocent, just a game we were playing.” 7 The questioning is brief, and the agents drive away, but for the narrator that momentary contact becomes an object of obsession, “a video I played over and over.” 8 In retrospect his compliance embarrasses him, but he passes it off as overreaction, takes some deep breaths, and goes for a run to put it all behind him. Despite those efforts, the experience of being stopped and questioned begins to affect his perception of the view from his window. The encounter seems to have damaged some cognitive filter that had until then kept such matters not only out of sight, but also out of mind; “It was then I realized that not a day went by when I didn’t see someone running across the freeway.” 9 In a more orthodox didactic strain of social protest literature, one with what Ariel Dorfman has termed the “Left happy ending,” 10 this encounter would dramatically strip away the narrator’s previous self-deceptions, galvanizing him to identification and alliance with

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the oppressed. But this is no such tale. Here the narrator’s thoughts turn not to revolution, but to redecoration. “What do you think happens when you peer out windows?” he scolds himself; “buy curtains.” 11 “I thought of rearranging my desk so I wouldn’t be next to the window,” he reports, but the prime view of the mountains is too good to lose. 12 He decides to leave the desk where it is, resolving instead to “look only at the mountains.” 13 The concept of custodia occulorum, custody of the eyes, is an ancient one, the Catholic self-discipline of maintaining careful control of the gaze so as not to be tempted by objects in view—see no evil, thereby avoiding the occasion of sin. Here, however, the protection sought by the protagonist is not from potential temptation, but rather from viewing the pain of others that threatens to mar his beloved El Paso landscape. Subsequent encounters with border agents continue to chip away at his sense of detachment, despite his attempts to look away. “I was not a part of this,” he protests, “I wanted no part of it.” 14 Unable now to deny his anger, he settles for keeping it under wraps. Whenever a conversation turns to La Migra he makes a joke, “and everyone would laugh.” 15 Now, after a trip to Ciudad Juárez, he cannot help but notice that on the return the agent pauses to ask him where he was born, but allows his Anglo friend Michael to pass without question. As winter comes, the view from his window deteriorates. In contrast with the voluptuous colors and shady streets of the initial scene, the sun now “burned a dull yellow.” 16 The tree-lined streets grow bare, unsheltered from the wind and the eyes of the Border Patrol. The next time he visits Ciudad Juárez, this time with Michael and another friend, the view temporarily improves. From the Olympian height of the bridge between the two cities and countries, he discovers that El Paso “actually looks pretty.” 17 “For a long time” they watch the people trying to get across, a sight one of the friends likens to the “CBS Evening News.” 18 Much depends on vantage point, as becomes clear in the next encounter with the Border Patrol. At the moment the writer and his friends reach the customs building, another van rolls up. This time, however, the narrator is not the suspect. Instead, “the officers jumped out of the van and threw a handcuffed man against one of the parked cars,” where it “looked like they were going to beat him.” Two more agents pull up to join them, when “one of the officers noticed that we were watching.” Suddenly aware of the citizen surveillance, the agents “straightened the man out and walked him inside—like gentlemen.” “They would have beat him,” the narrator realizes, “but we were watching.” 19 For the narrator/witness, this experience of watching from above in a position of privilege and power proves even more unsettling than the stops where he was the suspect. An accident of birth, he now realizes, “separated me from the country of my genesis and glued me to a country I did not love.” 20 “If I could have grasped the source of that rage and held it in my fist,” he thinks, “I would have melted that fence.” 21 “Maybe” he

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speculates, “I could tear it down; maybe I was the one,” and when the next encounter with the Border Patrol comes, his response is immediate and visceral—his heart “clenched like a fist.” 22 They are going to “drag me to the ground,” he thinks, but when the two agents reach him, they only stop and ask for his driver’s license. 23 Newly defiant, he questions them: “since when do you need a driver’s license to walk down the street?” 24 “Read me my rights,” he demands, “throw me in the can, or leave me alone.” 25 To his surprise, they back off. “No one’s charging you with anything,” they assure placatingly, but their acquiescence only makes him angrier. “Now it was war” and “I had won this battle,” he tells himself, but with diminishing conviction. 26 By the story’s last scene, the view out the window is filled not with the purple of the mountains, but rather with the green of the Border Patrol. This time when a man runs by the narrator does not look away. Instead, he puts on his glasses to watch more intently. Worried about the presumably undocumented runner, he mentally cheers him on. But in the end the agents still catch up and load the runner into a van. All the while, “the mountains watch the scene and say nothing,” while the neighborhood is looking more and more unheimlich. 27 The landscape that the narrator used to see as a sacrament of belonging is now “watching—and guarding—and keeping silent.” 28 “This is my home,” he reminds himself, but now “I am not sure that I want this to be my home anymore.” 29 He imagines one last meeting with the Border Patrol, a fantasy of walking out of his house one day without his wallet and allowing himself to be apprehended and deported. “I will be sent back to Mexico,” he resolves, “I will let them treat me like I am illegal.” 30 “But the thoughts pass. I am not brave enough,” he admits, “to let them do that to me.” 31 The view of Sunset Heights is obliterated by green dust, and the window becomes a screen for captions that play on in an endless loop, “Sure you were born. . . Identification. . . Do you live?. . .” 32 There is no closure, nor is there any further action—like the mountains, the protagonist only keeps vigil. In “Alligator Park,” another protagonist, Jaime, arrives at a similar border fantasy, and likewise backs off. “If I had any balls at all,” he declares, “I’d renounce my citizenship.” 33 This story intercalates two first-person narratives. One of them is Jaime’s; the other belongs to Franklin, a fifteen-year-old Salvadoran refugee for whom Jaime is preparing an affidavit as part of an application for political asylum. The interviews take place in Jaime’s house, where dialogues between Jaime and Franklin, Jaime and his attorney wife Joanna, and Jaime’s own reflections produce a series of juxtapositions between the calm domestic setting and Franklin’s accounts of the war in El Salvador. When the story opens, Franklin is responding to a question from Jaime with an account of watching his teacher assassinated in the classroom. It turns out to be a flashback to their first interview session, where Jaime assures Franklin that once he tells his story things will be fine. “I’ll write everything

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down,” he promises his young client, “and then I’ll put it into English, and then we’ll fix it all up and organize it so it will all make sense.” 34 Franklin already finds this plan questionable, since in his estimation “none of it makes sense,” but Jaime is insistent. 35 “We have to pretend it makes perfect sense,” he explains patiently, “we think that way in the United States.” 36 As it happens, Franklin is right. The more questions Jaime asks, the more details that emerge, the less sense his account makes—and the worse it looks for his asylum case. Franklin’s initial story is of a war he did not understand, an account in which all he and his family did was flee. In the US political climate of those times, a child victim whose only role in the war was hiding in the fields might have had some chance at asylum. Jaime’s repeated prompting for more details, however, eventually brings to light Franklin’s father’s involvement in the war, and finally Franklin’s own service in the guerrillas. This is not a narrative that will stand a chance in court. In the course of the story, it becomes apparent that Jaime’s sense of self is heavily based on fantasy, and especially on an unfounded faith in the fairness and efficacy of the asylum system, a belief that the people he interviews can win the asylum cases that he prevails on his wife to handle. Jaime’s friends and family offer varying explanations for his appetite for social engagement. “His mother,” on the one hand, “said he got involved because he was a good person—but she was his mother; his friends said he did these ‘things’ because he wasn’t working and needed to feel like he was doing something worthwhile; his brother told him he was guilt-ridden; and his sister said he had a need to keep up his leftist image.” “You’ve been building that radical image since you were twelve,” she adds. 37 Coupled with Jaime’s later urging Franklin to stay in the United States without documents, not for himself but “for me,” 38 the list serves as a reminder that the benefits of testimonial production do not flow only to the victims of human rights abuse. After the first interview with Franklin, Jaime prepares a candlelight dinner and pitches the new case to Joanna over a glass of chardonnay. The odds would be better for a domestic assault case, she tells him, coolly appraising the chances of success. “Political asylum cases,” she reminds him, “are virtually unwinnable.” 39 “Not if you’re from Cuba,” Jaime insists plaintively. “Is he or she from Cuba? I didn’t think so,” she concludes. 40 When Jaime persists, Joanna reminds him of the score. She has by now gone to court with fifteen of his cases. And “how many of those cases have we actually won?” she asks tutorially. 41 Still Jaime’s optimism is undiminished. “That’s not the point,” he argues, moving the goalposts; “I mean, some of them did get into Canada. And most of them still write to us.” 42 “So, now we have pen pals,” Joanna sighs; “you’re hopeless.” 43 Rereading his notes after dinner, Jaime reassesses the case. It is at this point that he first considers renouncing his citizenship. That, he decides, is “the only moral thing; but where would I go?” 44 “Perhaps,” he floun-

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ders further, he should “buy guns and send them to the right people,” only to laugh “at the stupidity of the thought.” 45 There is only one acceptable possibility, he resolves; “we’re not going to lose this case, damn it—not this time.” 46 At the next interview Franklin recounts the last time he saw his parents alive and explains how he went off with the guerrillas. Realizing that this new information will not help a case that Joanna has already declared impossible, Jaime offers to burn his notes, inviting Franklin just to come and visit instead. That night Jaime reads Franklin’s story to Joanna, and she recites her stock reassurance for his hopeless causes. “We’ll do everything we can, honey,” she promises. 47 “It won’t be enough,” he sulks. “So,” she asks teasingly, “we should bring down the U.S. Government?” “Yes,” he echoes, “we should bring down the U.S. Government.” “Long live the revolution,” Joanna completes what is apparently their familiar phatic exchange. 48 Even from its ironic distance, this time her response cuts too close to the bone. His self-image threatened, Jaime makes a hasty retreat. “Shh, let’s not talk about it,” he pleads, “leave the lights off and pretend the world doesn’t exist, and in the morning we’ll get up swinging.” 49 The next segment finds Jaime true to his word, reenergized and once again deep in denial. Insulated by the minutiae of preparing the affidavit, he is again ready to make it all make sense. Rehearsing the familiar procedures, he finds a comforting distraction in the routines of process, planning to correct names and dates, “turn the run-on sentences into cleaner phrases,” “take out all the personal asides,” “make Franklin’s affidavit nice and neat” and then to “type it out on nice white paper with a nice IBM typewriter.” 50 The thrice repeated “nice” has the feel of an incantation, the charm of testimonial fantasy, but even in his imagination the case still reaches the familiar conclusion: the judge will deny it. Undeterred, Jaime once again attempts to conjure a miracle. “It won’t happen this time,” he repeats, “not this time.” 51 Franklin harbors no such illusions. Returning to finish his story, he announces that he is going back to El Salvador. “I’d rather go back on my own,” he reports, “than be sent back.” 52 Panicked, Jaime looks for other solutions, anything to keep Franklin close. Finally, desperately, he offers to go back with him. “I have a car,” he pleads. 53 Franklin declines the offer of a lift back to the war. Later, when the news comes that he has disappeared in El Salvador, Jaime and Joanna sit silently in the city park. Structurally, “Exile” and “Alligator Park” are in many ways two versions of the same core narrative: a First World intellectual, vaguely Left and abstractly socially conscious, is confronted with a concrete and personalized instance of injustice that literally brings the matter home, intruding into a carefully constructed zone of domestic comfort. Each story begins promisingly enough. When the injustice is brought to the attention of the protagonists, each of them initiates some form of local action. The

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graduate student begins to resist when border agents stop him, and Jaime begins to interview Franklin for an asylum plea. But then both of the narratives of progress are aborted. The graduate student’s reluctant coming to consciousness of border politics ends only with a heightened awareness of his own inability to act, and Jaime’s assembly of the affidavit is cut short when Franklin realizes that he is going to be deported. For the protagonists, as for the migrants and for Franklin, both stories end in failure. The ethical implications of that failure depend on a set of assumptions about the First World characters’ potential for any sort of social action in response to confrontation with social injustice, a central ethical issue for testimonial witness. While a reading of these stories based on early critics’ celebratory confidence in testimonio’s capacity to engender action might class them as anomalous, Georg Gugelberger’s comments from the moment of mourning suggest that each interaction played out about as well as could have been expected. In his assessment of testimonio action is reserved to the Other. “The subaltern,” he declares, “may not write, but the subaltern undoubtedly will act.” 54 For the First World witness, on the other hand, the prescribed outcome of the testimonial encounter is decidedly more modest. “May we learn to observe more critically,” Gugelberger pronounces, “even if the institutionalized bars behind which we work make the communication very difficult, almost impossible.” 55 For Gugelberger, it is precisely this “realizing what we cannot do—namely, to identify with the subaltern in a gesture of solidarity” that constitutes a “worthy experience of learning” from testimonio. 56 If testimonio’s lesson for First World readers is not about any potential role in testimonio’s political project, but rather about their own profound inability to comprehend or to act in that project, then the protagonists of “Exile” and “Alligator Park” can both be considered well-schooled. Each comes to regard his earlier determination to act, his belief in the concrete possibility of alliance, as a naïve illusion. Although each man continues to experience occasional fantasies of direct action, by the end of their stories neither expects to act them out. The graduate student in “Exile” considers casting his lot with the undocumented workers whose abuse he has witnessed, but he soon recognizes his incapacity to carry out that plan. Jaime briefly reacts to Franklin’s account of the soldiers’ torture of his mother with involuntary thoughts of his own wife, an identification that does produce a brief impulse to act, but the spark quickly flickers out, and he too reestablishes his critical distance with an ironic acknowledgement of his impotence. “Jesus,” he tells himself, “if anyone ever tortured Joanna that way, I’d kill them.” But then he laughs. “Right, Jaime, a nice macho thought—whom do you think would kill whom?” 57 Just to reinforce that lesson, Franklin, cast in the role of subaltern wise beyond his years—a common intersectional identity assigned in First World responses to testimonio, serves up

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gnomic wisdom to comfort the troubled protagonist. “You’re a good man,” he tells Jaime, “I’ve met a lot of good people since I’ve been here, but I haven’t met too many good rich ones. Your eyes look something like my father’s. But I don’t think you’ll ever understand.” 58 Conveniently, he assures Jaime that goodness does not require taking on any risk; benevolent intentions and kind eyes will suffice. Later, when Jaime offers to help Franklin break the law in order to stay, Franklin firmly refuses his offer. “Do you understand?” pleads Jaime. 59 “No,” Franklin replies. But the lack of comprehension is not Jaime’s fault, Franklin reassures him. “It doesn’t matter,” he concludes; “You don’t understand me either.” 60 In a reading informed by the moment of mourning—one which would account neatly for Franklin’s response to Jaime, as well as for the student’s inaction in “Exile”—the main characters’ major error is a sort of ethical hubris, a misprizing of their own capacity either to comprehend what they have witnessed or to act on it. But ultimately their sins of pride are venial ones. In terms of actual political action, these characters barely even engage in visible resistance to the system, let alone struggle heroically against it. In contrast with the hypothetical musings that make them heroes in their own minds, objectively speaking the graduate student in “Exile” is slightly surly to some local INS 61 agents, and Jaime fills some of his ample spare time by collecting stories and writing up affidavits. And there are some successes, on the extremely limited scale in which such actions are possible within a reading of mourning. Both the graduate student and Jaime do become more discerning observers of subalterns. But what might constitute a deliberative reading of these stories’ depictions of the testimonial encounter, one that still holds out ethical possibilities for witnesses to act in pragmatic solidarity with the immigrants, as opposed to only watching them? That framework, a testimonial logic that includes the potential, although not the certainty, that awareness of injustice might be followed by effective social action, would again call for some explanation of why that does not happen in either of these stories. One possibility is suggested by each protagonist’s self-description. By their own assessments, both men are cowards. The writer is not “brave enough” to allow himself to be deported. Jaime does not have “the balls” to renounce his citizenship. Such a straightforward explanation for the stories’ outcome, however, is undercut by Jaime’s next question: “Where would I go?” If the two men were brave enough, then by their own declaration each of them would have left the country. The problem here is that neither seems to have much notion of what he might realistically do elsewhere, thus even a hypothetical acquisition of courage seems unlikely to result in any increase in social justice. Lack of valor does not appear to be the only obstacle here. Any why is renunciation of their own US citizenship the action both men envision as the only moral response, the one they would make if only they were capable? If statelessness is the solution, what is the problem?

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Further examination of the alternative solutions proposed by each character only to be dismissed suggests a possible answer. Each man appears to have framed the objective not as the amelioration of social injustice, but instead as decreasing the distance between himself and the oppressed people of whom he has become personally aware. While the challenge identified in each story is social, and can only be addressed by effective action to assist individuals, accompanied by work to change US policy regarding the people who cross the border without documents and the conditions that impel them to cross, both protagonists reduce matters to the hyper personal. The primary issue becomes not so much the abuse of those others’ human rights, but rather a troubling awareness of the difference between their secure and relatively privileged position and the vulnerability of those others. It is not that the stories present the men as uncaring. On the contrary, the pain they feel is portrayed as entirely sincere. It hurts them to imagine what the others are feeling, but, as Susan Sontag observed of the social potential of graphic photographs, there is no automatic link between emotional arousal and effective action. Witnesses who regard the pain of others may work to address the actual injustice—or to avoid the discomfort of viewing it: through custodia occulorum, for instance, or a stubborn belief in the unseen results of the asylum process. When the difference in power between protagonist and victim becomes too obvious, an alternate remedy is to declare oneself innocent by asserting status as a fellow victim, the defensive stance that Paula Moya calls out as “we are all marginal now.” 62 For these men, avoidance of guilt can also be accomplished through an imagined disaffiliation from the country of their citizenship. Jaime speaks of “Americans” in the third person—as a group including, for instance, Joanna’s mother, but not himself. The graduate student reacts more angrily to the Border Patrol’s backing down when he challenges them than to the encounters where he complies. A similar threat to fictional solidarity arises in “Alligator Park,” when for a moment the roles of questioner and questioned are inverted. Franklin asks Jaime about his life, what it is like to be a US citizen and to be rich—forcing him to acknowledge those privileges out loud. Yes, Jaime admits, being a US citizen is “very nice” and “Yes, I’m rich. Not rich like people who own banks, but rich enough.” 63 These are not terms in which he is accustomed to seeing himself, nor ones he would have admitted to had the questioner not been Franklin. In fact, “if anyone else had asked that, he would have laughed.” 64 Like the graduate student with his initial vision of an all-inclusive Sunset Heights, Jaime struggles to preserve the illusion of an idealized home where everyone finds a place. In the course of his efforts to dissuade Franklin from leaving, to take him into the fold, Jaime tries to reassure the boy that it will all work out eventually. “My parents,” he offers as his example, “came from Mexico with their parents when they were small. And now they belong

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here.” 65 Franklin, presented as the realist, is not buying the analogy—he knows that his case is hopeless. Franklin’s summary response to having told his story, “I’m glad I got to talk to you. . . . It was good for me to talk,” 66 suggests another reading for “Alligator Park,” this one based on the therapeutic model—where telling the story is understood as a talking cure for the speaker. While Franklin’s narrative begins as an instrumental discourse, a means of securing asylum, it is in the course of the story systematically stripped of all extrinsic motivations. Franklin keeps telling the story even after he no longer expects asylum, and moreover, after he has conceded that Jaime will never understand. By the end, Franklin’s story unfolds on what appears to be sheer narrative momentum, motivated solely by his professed reluctance to leave a tale unfinished, a preference he traces to his own impatience when he was a child and his aging grandmother forgot to finish a story. When he reaches the end, Franklin insists that the mere experience of talking has been good for him. Not only has the hitherto collaborating writer ceased to transcribe, he is explicitly disabused of any illusions of having been an understanding listener. 67 This therapeutic reading of Franklin’s testimonio, of the production of the tale as narrative therapy for the survivor, is ultimately compatible with the model of mourning. Only Franklin, the subaltern, goes off to act, even though he seems certain that his return to El Salvador will result in his death. Jaime, the First World listener, cannot hope to understand the subaltern’s testimonio, much less act upon it. His function, like that of the El Paso graduate student, has been reduced to spectatorship. From a deliberative perspective, by contrast, a First World witness’s capacity is not limited to watching, nor is the ultimate goal of testimonio the production of the story. Viewed through this lens, both stories describe testimonial contracts that remain incomplete or unconsummated. As “Exile” illustrates, it is possible for an individual to avoid seeing injustice that lies well within his field of vision, and even after that obstacle is overcome, his acceptance of the premise that something ought to be done about it may not lead him to the conclusion that he is able to participate. In “Alligator Park” the would-be witness is eager to help, but his fantasy relationship with an ineffective legal system leaves him in an ineffectual loop, ritualistically preparing and polishing affidavits that Joanna, his attorney-wife, has already told him will go nowhere. Preparing those narratives comforts Jaime, the collaborating writer, but does not serve as an effective intervention on behalf of the subjects whose stories they tell. The treatment of testimonio and speculation on Jaime’s motivation here recall Neil Larsen’s observations regarding the reception of the genre. One source of testimonio’s popularity with the US academic Left, Larsen asserted, was as a distraction from that group’s own contemporary inefficacy in domestic politics. 68

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These readings all address the stories’ thematizations of the act of witness, but an unusual placement of claims to lifeworld connections also makes them meta-testimonial in another sense—one that recalls the metaliterary turn of Julio Cortázar’s “Continuity of Parks.” Typically, testimonialists advance their truth claims at the outset of their narratives, in paratexts that precede the main story. In these two stories, Sáenz elects to reserve those claims to epitext. The truth claims of “Exile,” “This is a true story” 69 and “Alligator Park,” “In memory of those who died” 70 do not appear until after each story. In Cortázar’s short story, a man sits in a green velvet armchair, reading a novel. It becomes apparent only at the end that the protagonist of that narrative is the reader himself. Such turns are typical of Cortázar’s stories, an erasure of the boundary between a narrative’s inside and outside in the manner of a Möbius strip. “Exile” and “Alligator Park” begin by illustrating responses to witnessing, but finally they can be read as dramatizing them, in similar slips where the reader becomes the subject. What, if anything, is changed by those final statements? Explicit lifeworld connections in the text have been seen as a means of inducing the reader to meet testimonialists’ crossing from the world to the page to communicate violations of human rights with a reciprocal crossing from the page to the world in order to redress them. Knowing that the events narrated are real is expected to heighten somehow the reader’s response. In some models of testimonio, as noted, that response is expected to be social action, in others at least some sort of heightened emotional reaction or ethical judgment. If truth claims do make a difference in reading, then reserving them to the end as Sáenz does in these stories should bring the reader up short, producing if not a literal rereading, at least a re-evaluation of one’s own response. In this way, “Exile” and “Alligator Park” become an exploration not only of the protagonists’ responses as witnesses, but also of the responses of readers. Dorfman once denounced readers who consume social protest without acting upon it as “lectores de sillón,” “armchair readers.” 71 As demonstrations of responses to violations of human rights at the border, “Exile” and “Alligator Park” offer an opportunity to consider to whether those armchair readers, like the reader in Cortázar’s tale, might also be us. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Sáenz, xi. Sáenz, xi. Sáenz, xii. Italics in the original. Sáenz, xi. Sáenz, xii. Sáenz, xii. Sáenz, xiii. Sáenz, xiii. Sáenz, xiv.

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10. Ariel Dorfman, “Political Code and Literary Code,” 193. 11. Sáenz, xiv. Italics in the original. 12. Sáenz, xiv. 13. Sáenz, xiv. 14. Sáenz, xv. 15. Sáenz, xv. 16. Sáenz, xvi–xvii. 17. Sáenz, xvii. 18. Sáenz, xvii. 19. Sáenz, xvii. 20. Sáenz, xviii. 21. Sáenz, xviii. 22. Sáenz, xviii. 23. Sáenz, xviii. 24. Sáenz, xviii. 25. Sáenz, xix. 26. Sáenz, xix. Italics in the original. 27. Sáenz, xix. 28. Sáenz, xix. 29. Sáenz, xix. 30. Sáenz, xix. 31. Sáenz, xix. 32. Sáenz, xix. Italics in the original. 33. Sáenz, 92. 34. Sáenz, 82. 35. Sáenz, 82. 36. Sáenz, 82. 37. Sáenz, 84. 38. Sáenz, 98. 39. Sáenz, 85. 40. Sáenz, 85. 41. Sáenz, 85. 42. Sáenz, 85–86. 43. Sáenz, 86. 44. Sáenz, 92. 45. Sáenz, 92. 46. Sáenz, 92. 47. Sáenz, 97. 48. Sáenz, 97. 49. Sáenz, 97. 50. Sáenz, 97. 51. Sáenz, 97. 52. Sáenz, 98. 53. Sáenz, 102. 54. Gugelberger, 18. 55. Gugelberger, 18. 56. Gugelberger, 18. 57. Sáenz, 91. 58. Sáenz, 95. 59. Sáenz, 93. 60. Sáenz, 98. 61. INS stands for Immigration and Naturalization Services, precursor of ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 62. Moya, 68. 63. Sáenz, 83. 64. Sáenz, 83.

Border Testimonies, Restricted Crossings 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Sáenz, 102. Sáenz, 102. Sáenz, 95. Larsen, 15–17. Sáenz, xix. Sáenz, 103. Dorfman, Imaginación y violencia, 215.

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FOUR Hundreds of Bodies on Two Continents, Telling a Single Story Witnessing the Testimonial Uncanny in Clea Koff’s The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist’s Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo

In The Bone Woman (2004), Koff chronicles her investigation of sites of genocide on behalf of the United Nations and Physicians for Human Rights, as she assembles evidence for international criminal tribunals— the first to be slated since Nuremberg. She expected her documentation and identification of human remains to yield a set of forensic narratives to serve in those trials for war crimes, to help bring perpetrators to account. Over the course of the book, however, it becomes apparent that the bones are trying to tell her more. The victims’ collective testimony accumulates bit by bit, at first in fragments so scattered that even the exceptionally observant Koff fails to identify and assemble them. Only in retrospect does she come to recognize the common story that those hundreds of bodies are telling. The pattern of narrative development here— construction of a seemingly firm realist foundation only to undermine it with the gradual introduction of an uncanny narrative—initially only ambiguously signaled and quickly dismissed but then inexorably accumulating support—is characteristic of the genre that structural theorist Tzvetan Todorov termed the “fantastic,” its delayed development owing to “that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.” 1 The unheimlich element here, as Koff discovers only later, is not the sheer number of 57

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bodies or their physical condition, the details of the individual genocides, but rather the eerie convergence of their narratives. Where before she had believed that her responsibility to the victims of genocide could be fulfilled by enabling them to testify at the tribunals, she discovers that the dead now want more from her. Supplemented by documentation and context in the form of maps, brief historical reports on each site, and a central insert of black-andwhite photos of Koff and her colleagues at work, The Bone Woman is composed of six parts, one named for each worksite, framed by a prologue and epilogue, “Before” and “After.” “Before” opens with Koff already hard at work on a hillside in Rwanda, excavating a mass grave behind a church in Kibuye, then drops back in time to describe the influences and events that led her there. That path started early. Her parents, Msindo Mwinyipembe and David Koff, were documentarians whose filmography includes Blacks Britannica, on racism in the UK; Occupied Palestine; and a trilogy on the aftermath of colonialism in Africa—White Man’s Country, Mau Mau, and Kenyatta. 2 Koff would find her calling when she read in Christopher Joyce and Eric Stover’s Witnesses from the Grave about forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow’s identification of victims of disappearance, torture, and murder by the Argentina military junta. Especially compelling, she recalls, was the case of Liliana Pereyra, whose remains in Snow’s hands had yielded crucial evidence against “state-sanctioned murderers who doubtless thought they’d heard the last of her.” 3 The UN job offer arrives while Koff is still at university in Arizona, completing her fieldwork in the local coroner’s office. Admittedly, that experience has left her “spooked.” 4 After arriving home one day and catching a local news broadcast of the 911 call of a victim of assault, she realizes that she has just witnessed that woman’s autopsy. The dead woman’s voice on the phone recording sounds eerily familiar, and after that afternoon Koff finds herself constantly aware of her own vulnerability—checking the locks on her balcony doors and purchasing a transparent shower curtain, the better to see any potential intruder. Nevertheless, the opportunity to help exhume and identify bodies from the Rwandan genocide strikes her as the realization of a lifelong dream. Rwanda, she trusts, will be different, especially now that she is no longer a student intern, but a fully fledged scientist. Koff’s faith in forensic science is matched by her expectations for the efficacy of the upcoming tribunals. Recalling Snow’s work in Argentina, she relishes the thought of following his lead and “kicking bad-guy ass.” 5 Naïvely, as she later comes to realize, she also expects that the threat of future exposure will deter would-be genocidaires. On her way to work the first morning, she feels almost overwhelmed by a happy sense of anticipation. Six missions in, the memory of that morning still sustains her. Even amid “festering death and abandoned hope,” she was confident that this was a role in which she could make a personal contribution

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to the cause of human rights. 6 When unexpectedly Rwanda leaves her again spooked, Koff attributes her uneasiness to that site’s still being too close to home. The team’s work on the bodies is taking place within sight of victims’ family members, and she and the other UN workers are housed in rooms that still bear bloodstains on the ceiling. For Koff, moreover, Rwanda is literally close to home. Her mother is from nearby Tanzania, and she has family in three of the adjacent countries. Bosnia, Koff expects, will be different. The Bone Woman’s publication came at a prime moment for popular interest in forensic sciences, signaled by the increasing visibility of medical examiners and coroners in the ensemble casts of series such as CSI and the Law & Order franchise, and nearly coinciding with the launch of the pathology procedural Bones. Koff’s self-portrait is in many ways consonant with those fictional characters, emphasizing her professional confidence and self-possession in situations that audiences are likely to find at once repulsive and morbidly fascinating. She describes in vivid detail—visual, tactile, and olfactory—what it is like to work with human remains that range from saponified body parts teeming with maggots to the skeleton of a baby, “off by itself with a miniature pink pacifier near its body.” 7 She even shares some practical tips, as when the pervasive smell that penetrates her work clothes, persistent even after thorough washing, leads her to segregate a “grave bra” from those suitable for time off. 8 All the while, she reports feeling calm and even happy. A long afternoon spent exhuming that baby’s remains is described as an opportunity for extended bonding with one of her colleagues. Images in Koff’s work often tick the generic boxes of those screen series, of the consummate professional tackling with unflappable aplomb cases that civilians can hardly bring themselves to imagine. Methodically cleaning, measuring, and examining bones and teeth to determine each individual’s age, sex, height, ancestry, and manner of death, she takes professional satisfaction in restoring scattered and fragmented remains to anatomical order. More satisfying still are the moments when the team accomplishes an identification, when a complete set of remains can be placed in a casket and returned to a family. The waiting coffins, “each with a white body bag and a blue clothing bag,” remind Koff of “packed lunches at a children’s camp, where someone has made sure every lunch box has one sandwich and one cookie, all the same so no one complains.” 9 What first sets The Bone Woman apart from the individualist narratives of the crime procedural is the nature of its bad guys and the cases to be built against them. In contrast with the circumscribed challenge of a single homicide to be solved by the end of the episode, Koff faces the massive injustice and countless perpetrators of genocide. As her six UN missions take her to multiple sites in Africa and Eastern Europe, the text assumes the generic features of documentary. Koff is a skilled observer,

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charting the details of each site, taking note of the culturally specific contexts and circumstances of the killings, and collaborating in the composition of documentary photographs. Demonstrating her faith in the power of images, Koff reports holding back the team’s assigned photographers, who are frequently in a hurry to complete their work, until each body is properly displayed. Reminding her colleagues that to outsiders not familiar with a scene “dirty bodies just look like dirt,” she takes pains to prepare selected corpses for effective in situ viewing by influential visitors to the sites, and for photographs to be introduced at trial. 10 Meticulous effort, Koff believes, is the only way to assure the appropriate effect on viewers. Exhuming the body of a boy, she works over his teeth until “their whiteness contrasted well with the bones and clothing.” 11 Koff is also aware of the effects that her own narrative may have on her readers. Lest the satisfaction she takes in her profession and focus on technical detail leave the impression that she is somehow immune to the grief that surrounds her, she is careful to describe the intensity of her personal responses. In fact, she insists, she is unusually sensitive to the pain of others. Reading the witness accounts on her first mission was like “having the survivors whisper directly in my ear.” 12 She also explains why it is essential for her to control and compartmentalize those responses. Emotional remove is not only a professional practice but an ethical obligation. Without that distance, her emotions and identification will stand in the way of her efforts to “do the bodies justice.” 13 Lesson learned. When Koff arrives in Bosnia she swiftly rebuffs the conversational overtures of a soldier who, upon discovering that they both have Jewish parents, wants to talk about the “privilege” of her work.” 14 So long as she keeps her technical work separate from personal reflection, she finds, life at the camps is good. What does frighten Koff is the onset of what she calls “double vision.” 15 She begins to experience vivid images of the living individuals whose remains she is now handling. The first of those episodes, in Rwanda, is only fleeting, and it occurs after an actual shooting that happens while she and her colleagues are in the camp. Although temporarily unsettled, she chalks the reaction up to incident-related stress. This is a documented hazard of her occupation, and as a professional she knows exactly what to do. She talks the episode through with colleagues, takes time off, and books a flight back to the United States. Aboard the plane for her first flight, her self-possession begins to return. By the second leg of the journey, when the plane approaches US airspace, she feels more composed. But she has spoken too soon, she discovers while watching the inflight movie, when the sight of a shooting in Get Shorty triggers a flashback. She scans the other passengers, expecting them to react to the on-screen violence. When they remain engrossed in their reading or focused on the drinks service, “these innocent people were aggravating me, and I didn’t know why exactly.” 16

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Once again Koff takes herself in hand. Unusual irritability, she knows, is yet another common sign of professional stress. Those responses to the other passengers’ “complacent insularity,” she assures herself and the readers, “were just side effects of the mission.” 17 Back home in the United States, she recognizes other lingering symptoms. At one point she imagines what would happen if genocidaires were to attack her apartment. “What about my cat?” she wonders. 18 Returning to Kigali after the break, Koff’s confidence remains frayed, a “knitted garment that is being unpicked.” 19 At the next posting, in Bosnia, the visions grow stronger. She finds herself briefly overwhelmed by a sudden image of the death of a sixteenyear-old victim; spending this time documenting his body while his family longs to have him back no longer feels like a service, but rather a betrayal, either of him or perhaps of his family. In Cerska, while examining another corpse, Koff suddenly perceives the pain of the entry wound as if the bullet were entering her own body. “I felt sick,” she reports. 20 Given those circumstances, readers are likely to find that reaction more than understandable. After all, as Freud observed “many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts; there is scarcely any other matter upon which our thoughts and feelings have changed so little since the very earliest times, and in which discarded forms have been so completely preserved under a thin disguise, as our relation to death.” 21 But this is not a civilian’s reaction to the presence of death and dead bodies. Instead, Koff is shocked that “something slipped through” her hard-won and carefully guarded professional distance, reminding her not only of the victims’ pain, but also of the suffering of their families. 22 Such a lapse is “dangerous,” putting in jeopardy her “stamina for the work we had to do.” 23 Again she seeks to re-establish her professional detachment by drawing on her training. As with the first vision, she finds a practical explanation for the incidents. She is, she self-diagnoses, overworked and overtired. As Koff knows, forensic anthropologists are advised to avoid simultaneous engagement in the fieldwork of exhumation and its casework, which entails not only documenting the body and the scene but reading witness accounts. The urgency of the mission has led her to neglect her self-care, she believes, explaining why, all of a sudden, “the bones were almost shouting.” 24 That night she spikes a fever. A doctor diagnoses the cause as either flu or malaria, but whatever it is Koff is grateful. Fever dream, check. The known effects of hyperthermia on the brain offer a satisfyingly clinical explanation for the temporary loss of perspective. Over time, however, Koff’s visions begin to push the boundaries of rational explanation. At this point the narrative reaches the state that Todorov identified as defining the genre of the fantastic, poised on the

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border between strange but true events that turn out to have a perfectly logical explanation, and the frankly supernatural, phenomena that run counter to rational accounting. 25 Common tropes of the fantastic permit narratives to maintain that ambiguous balance. Potentially supernatural episodes are framed with hedge phrases such as “it was almost as if” or “one might have thought,” or surrounded by evidence that they might be dream sequences or hallucinations. They occur to impaired or unreliable narrators, operating in isolated settings. 26 The supernatural may insinuate itself by means of imagery that at first appears to be only figurative, but over time morphs into the literal. 27 The dead, it appears, may now be speaking to Koff beyond her metaphorical efforts to let bones talk. True to the generic tradition of fantastic narratives, however, those initial intrusions of the supernatural have been equivocal, shocking but still explicable by the laws of the physical world—workplace stress, fatigue, fever—as well as the sheer presence of all those dead bodies. It remains for the next mission, in Croatia, to “swiftly tip the pendulum.” 28 This new site differs significantly from the earlier ones. In contrast with the families at those other sites, who have all been anxious to learn the precise fate of their loved ones and thus relatively supportive of the UN team’s work, the mothers of Vukovar resist the exhumation. Confronting the UN team, the women declare that before they permit any bodies to be removed, they first need to be sure that this is really the grave of their relatives. Even though Koff recognizes the mothers’ conditions as impossible to meet, born of their denial that the sons who were alive when they last saw them could now be dead, their demands nevertheless challenge her sense of efficacy and purpose as a forensic anthropologist. “What does someone like me do,” Koff wonders, “whose goal is to give something of the dead back to their relatives,” when mothers refuse their offerings because to accept them is to accept the finality of their sons’ fate? 29 Again, a tight focus on the task at hand helps to tamp down that unease. By concentrating on the physical details of her work as well as the special significance of the next site, Koff manages a “resurgence of purpose.” 30 Near Vukovar, she and her colleagues have discovered yet another mass grave, but unlike the others this one is filled with what were clearly hospital patients. Many of the bodies are wearing institutional pajamas. One of them still clutches his own x-ray. For the UN investigation, this site is a forensic coup. Evidence that killers murdered defenseless hospital patients counts as an emphatic indication of genocide. These bodies, she exults, will disprove perpetrators’ denial of the massacres—including their suggestion that “the missing men were probably larking about in Italy.” 31 Despite Koff’s anticipation that the discovery will “enable the victims to incriminate their killers and write history as accurately as possible,” 32 her satisfaction remains marred by her encounter with the mothers of Vukovar, people for whom, she concedes,

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“we were at the wrong end of science, criminal justice, and law enforcement.” 33 The expectations of success on the pages of history books and in the courts coincide neatly with the aims of epideictic and forensic modes of testimonio, corresponding to the rhetorical modes that Aristotle categorized as speaking respectively to the past and the present: 34 how should people be remembered? what punishment should now be meted out to criminals? What is missing from Koff’s horizon so far is Aristotle’s third rhetorical mode, the deliberative, the one that calls on people in power to act to change the future. 35 That omission is about to be addressed. “Finding the bodies in the pit and then observing the subsequent accumulation of medical material,” she observes, “was like watching several raindrops on a window merge into one large droplet whose weight drags it down the glass, leaving a trail you can trace with your finger.” 36 At the same time that one narrative of genocide is coming together, however, another, the one that Koff counts as her personal charter, is disintegrating. As proof of the efficacy of her mission, she has long carried with her a cherished relic—a carefully preserved newspaper article about a group of Kosovar refugees who, when offered assistance, had asked for an inquest into the massacres even before requesting humanitarian aid. She recalls proudly holding that article in the air in front of a hundred students. In the midst of crisis, “what are they asking for?” she declares triumphantly: “Not peacekeepers. Not military observers. Forensic scientists.” 37 But two years later comes a new article, this one on troops exhuming and burning bodies in advance of a UN investigation in Congo, and Koff realizes that her faith in the power of forensic science to deter genocide, the “dogma” that she had absorbed with her eighteen-year-old self’s reading of Witnesses from the Grave, has been hopelessly ingenuous. Where once she had trusted that the forensic exposure of genocide would itself be enough to change the future, that “despots of the world would stop using murder as the shortcut to the success of their political agendas,” the only difference she sees now is that they take more care to dispose of evidence. 38 Between missions Koff returns to graduate school, but now she is angry and tense. In a cultural anthropology class, she finds herself wanting to shout out loud the question she is grappling with herself, what they are doing in a classroom discussing matrilocality and gender identity “when there are people dying all over the world RIGHT NOW?” 39 Once again, however, a potential crisis of faith is narrowly averted. Time away from the mission allows her to recover her self-possession, professional pride, and even a bit of swagger. In an airport line on the way to her next posting in Kosovo, Koff hears Madelon, her colleague, ask the man behind him whether he is with ICTY, the acronym of the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia. Madelon’s response to

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his evident confusion, turning away from him with a crisp and dismissive “never mind,” reminds Koff gratifyingly of James Bond. 40 When they arrive in Kosovo, Koff is pleased to learn that for the first time a counseling psychologist has been assigned to the UN team. At the site orientation, he describes the symptoms of critical incident stress, and she derives a welcome sense of confirmation from the consonance between his generic list and her own earlier lapses. Grateful for the welfare officer’s presence, Koff defends him when other team members treat his lectures dismissively. She looks forward to a promised redeployment briefing at the end of mission that she hopes will ease the next transition between work and home. In the plot of a fantastic narrative, however, the accumulation of yet another plausible logical explanation for Koff’s recurrent symptoms is a classic red herring. Readers familiar with the structure of the genre know that the proliferation of rational explanations—along with the subject’s protesting too much—often precedes a more definitive supernatural intrusion. True to that convention, in Kosovo Koff experiences the most disquieting vision yet. She is in the morgue and takes from the refrigerator the next body to be autopsied. Just as she is about to remove the corpse’s clothing, he blinks and thanks her for her help. Remembering that his family is just outside the lab, awaiting the results of the autopsy, Koff picks him up in her arms and carries him out to them. At first, they only look at her, confused. Wanting to say his name but unable to pronounce it, she tells them “He’s alive!” 41 In contrast with the previous visions of victims’ death and pain, this one, in which one of them comes back to life, troubles her even more. This is the outcome that the mothers back in Vukovar had so devoutly wished, and the service that she would never be able to offer them. Valiantly, she tries again to reestablish her critical distance and compartmentalization. She struggles to attribute her emotional reaction to the new fieldwork setting, the unfamiliar lab, and even to taking on too much management work, which has deprived her of her calming routines at the gravesites and in the morgue. Overdeterminations notwithstanding, this longer vision leaves her even more spooked. The work’s overarching narrative, along with what has really kept spooking the otherwise preternaturally intrepid young Koff, first becomes apparent to her only in hindsight. Feeling pride at the impeccable preparation of a body bag, she realizes that while she had located the origin of such satisfaction in her UN postings in Kibuye or Cerska, in fact it had begun back home in Arizona. At each site Koff has carried out her UN charge, meticulously recording the particularities of the killing, the physical acts and their cultural and political contexts. At the same time, in letters and a journal, she has been recording the details of her personal experiences and reflections. In many ways the worksites are indeed quite different. The technology has grown more and more sophisticated. Labs have been equipped with enclosures to protect the bodies and the work-

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ers from public gaze, and the public from the sight. Security has been professionalized. At the later sites, the team’s lodging is clean, comfortable, and far away from the sites of exhumation. Local communities show more awareness of the UN missions. Koff has acquired still more experience and responsibility. Despite all of those changes, however, she now finds every new site disturbingly familiar. Even when the worksite is situated far from her temporary home and no one in the community resembles her family, she continues to feel spooked. Worse yet, her looming sense of something uncanny is only increasing with time, experience, and distance. At this point the trajectories of personal experience tale and documentary reconnect, even as each of their respective narratives of progress unravels. Until now, Koff has taken a positive pleasure in restoring the identified bodies. Now she is confronted by the fact that those meticulously performed exhumations and autopsies, perfectly assembled body bags, neat rows of coffins, painstaking accounts of atrocities, and even the prospect of convictions at trials, are not at all satisfactory conclusions. Where before she had been convinced that her professional training and psychological distance from the mass crime scenes she investigated for the UN would prevent that eerie sense of proximity she had felt when working on individual cases in a coroner’s office in Arizona, now that protective barrier just keeps failing. It starts to happen out of mission, while she is home, well rested, and physically healthy. The epilogue, “After,” finds Koff back in the United States, describing her work to a lecture hall full of students and suddenly recognizing a new and different charge from the dead. Invited to present her work on Kosovo to a class on crime scene investigation, it dawns on her as she is speaking that Kosovo, Rwanda, the dead, the living, she and the people in that room are all elements of the same narrative. “The connections and similarities—and what was revealed by their differences,” she recalls, “almost overwhelmed me.” 42 This, she finally recognizes, is the story that the bodies have been trying to tell her, the narrative curve “so steady and natural I had barely been aware of it.” 43 In the fantastic, explains Todorov, “most authors try to achieve a certain gradation in their ascent to this culmination, first speaking vaguely, then more and more directly,” consonant with Penzoldt’s theory that “the structure of the ideal ghost story may be represented as a rising line which leads to the culminating point, which is obviously the appearance of the ghost.” 44 The truly uncanny element of her work, Koff finally realizes, was not the details of the individual incidents of genocide revealed by the bodies, but rather the convergence of their narratives. Bodies that once seemed to be whispering or shouting to her one-by-one are now speaking in unison. In the genre of the fantastic, the uncanny intruder is not always an ambiguously perceived supernatural figure. What Todorov terms “themes of the self” center on apparent violations of physical reality;

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events which if true would break the spatial and temporal bounds of the known world—time travel, for instance, or, as in Koff’s visions, the dead who come back to life. 45 There is also, however, another set of intruders, the ones whose violations constitute the “themes of the other.” 46 Here the intrusive narrative is a matter of a real event, but one that has been rendered “unimaginable” by its breaking of a different set of bounds, the ones that might be termed the limits of humanity. The themes of the other are the realms of cruelty, torture, and murder. As Todorov observes, even though these “figures representing the relations between human beings generally do not surpass the limits of the possible,” they are nonetheless regarded as “unthinkable,” and thus constitute “what we might call the socially uncanny.” 47 “There also exists,” he observes, “the uncanny in the pure state. In works that belong to this genre, events are related which may be readily accounted for by the laws of reason, but which are, in one way or another, incredible, extraordinary, shocking, singular, disturbing or unexpected, and which thereby provoke in the character and in the reader a reaction similar to that which works of the fantastic have made familiar.” 48 The bounds of the thinkable have been demonstrated earlier in The Bone Woman, when a government functionary Koff calls “Clipboard Man” is inspecting one of the newly excavated mass graves. 49 He cannot see any bodies, however, only a field of freshly uncovered used clothing. At first, she thinks that perhaps she has not done an adequate job of cleaning the remains. She points out a corpse that is lying just a few feet away. Clipboard Man stares intently, trying to follow her direction, but still cannot quite make out the body. It was not a matter of physical visibility, Koff finally realizes; distance and dirt were not the issues. Rather it was the man’s inability to “conceive” of killing on that scale. 50 At the time, that man—unable to see the bodies because for him the genocidal massacre was literally unthinkable—had served Koff as a point of contrast between civilians and herself, the professional. Now she comes to understand that her vision has so far been similarly circumscribed; she too has failed to grasp the scope of genocide. Only now has the shouting of the dead broken through to her, finally rendering thinkable their socially uncanny single story. In the final section of the book, Koff shifts from her case-by-case studies of mass killings to reflect on their common etiology, the causal factors for what she comes to recognize as a public health challenge. This is not the first time a set of killings has been analyzed in epidemiological terms. Patterns of gun violence, for instance, are already a staple of public health journals. Now Koff frames for herself a new research question, a search for the origins of genocide’s single story, in which victims of conflicts that had appeared to be unconnected to one another all told a narrative “in which internally displaced people gather or are directed to distinct locations before being murdered there.” 51 Having first assembled the re-

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mains of the dead to bear witness to individual incidents in their own countries, she continues to draw on her anthropological training and personal experience in an effort to uncover and assemble their collective testimony. Unlike the earlier episodes, in which she describes the production of a local narrative at each of the genocide sites, Koff now proposes a broader forensic project: a comparative examination of the role of national institutions in all of those different genocide narratives. The physical evidence of premeditation—stationing personnel and marshalling scarce resources, “countrywide roadblocks to check civilians’ identity cards, supplies of wire and cloth sufficient to blindfold and tie up thousands of people, bodies buried in holes created by heavy earth-moving machinery during times when fuel alone is hard to come by”—is not, she now recognizes, consistent with either “spontaneous violence” or war, the two explanations commonly put forth by internal or international investigators. 52 Examining genocide under this new lens, she comes to regard the differences among those local narratives that she worked so diligently to assemble, all of those meticulously constructed explanations for each individual genocide, as at best superficial, and at worst a collaboration in intentional camouflage. She recalls her return to the United States from Rwanda in 1996, when people had asked her “Wasn’t that about the Hutsis and Tutus or something? All killing each other over some tribal thing?” 53 Her questioners always concluded their slightly confused recitations of news reports by expressing gratitude for the safety of their own country, a modern and civilized place where such things were impossible. All of those case histories that the UN investigators had reported, Koff concludes, even the ones that she had helped compose, had served only to keep genocide at a comfortable remove from readers with sufficient wealth and power to stop it. While the unique circumstances surrounding each instance of genocide no doubt “influenc[ed] the way ordinary people behaved toward one another,” she concedes, she does not believe that “government officials were materially concerned with ancient battles or religious or ethnic takeovers. Rather, they were focused on real issues of sustainability and power.” 54 Seeking the “common denominator that produced a common story,” 55 she comes to believe that the details that she and her UN team painstakingly investigated and documented, including their reported “reasons” for each genocide, have only served to “muddy the waters,” or worse, as “rhetoric-packed justifications designed to dilute popular resistance to committing crimes against humanity.” 56 Like the debris at the sites of mass graves, those local explanations must also be peeled back, she resolves, layer by layer, to arrive at the relevant detail. The real story in all of these cases, she discovers, is nothing more than governments employing “elemental but well-thought-out grabs for power and wealth.” 57 In fact, insists Koff, all genocides are in essence the same sto-

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ry—government actors seeking access to power and wealth controlled by one segment of the population manage to weaponize another segment of that population by persuading them that their counterparts are sufficiently alien and dangerous as to require killing. The result echoes Todorov’s description of the themes of the other, “the chain which start[s] with desire and le[ads] to death.” 58 “These same elements,” Koff finds, “occur again and again, recognizable behind the headlines and the players’ attempts to strip those events of their context.” 59 This, she concludes, is the etiology of genocide, the single story that all of those bodies had been struggling to tell her. Even as she had seen herself as giving voice to the victims, enabling them to speak at the trials, she had missed what they were saying to her. “It has been an honor,” she acknowledges, to help victims of genocide speak “in the courtroom and the history books,” but is has not been enough. 60 Neither trials nor memorializations are adequate responses when the task is to change the future. In the face of ongoing genocide, the bodies demand more of her. The charge now, Koff challenges herself and her readers, is to move on from the forensic pathology of genocide to its epidemiology and prevention, to identify before the fact sites at risk for that unthinkable intersection of desire and death, and to intervene before the killing begins. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Todorov, 25. Campbell. Koff, 10. The victim’s name is misspelled in Koff’s text. Koff, 14. Koff, 9. Koff, 34. Koff, 40. Koff, 54. Koff, 254. Koff, 185. Koff, 227. Koff, 24. Koff, 32. Koff, 133. Koff, 151. Koff, 77. Koff, 77. Koff, 79. Koff, 101. Koff, 154. Freud, 241. Koff, 154. Italics in the original. Koff, 155. Koff, 155. Italics in the original. Todorov, 44. Todorov 83–84. Todorov, 79.

Hundreds of Bodies on Two Continents, Telling a Single Story 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

Koff, 157. Koff, 168. Koff, 172. Koff, 181. Koff, 181. Koff, 181. Murphy, 5. Murphy, 5. Koff, 180. Koff, 199–200. Koff, 200. Koff, 201. Upper case in the original. Koff, 202. Koff, 211. Koff, 259. Koff, 259. Todorov, 87. Todorov, 107–123. Todorov, 124–139. Todorov, 139. Todorov, 46. Koff, 177. Koff, 177. Italics in the original. Koff, 261. Koff, 262. Koff, 264. Koff, 262. Italics in the original. Koff, 262. Koff, 262. Koff, 263. Todorov, 135. Koff, 263. Koff, 266.

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FIVE Use Beginning, Middle, and End Witness and the Work of Reintegration in Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen & Me

This chapter’s title comes from a scene toward the end of Jarrett-Macauley’s 2005 novel, in a therapeutic camp where, in the interest of recovery and reintegration into the community, Sierra Leone’s former child soldiers are encouraged to take a collective approach to coming to terms with their past. Early attempts to have the children tell their life stories have not ended well, eliciting instead media-inspired epics of heroic combat alongside John Rambo or attempts at one-upmanship regarding who killed the most people, and ultimately sparking actual fights in the camp. Now, after labelling those earlier narrative inventions as fictions and coaching the boys in the basics of personal storytelling, the adults encourage them to try again. Agreeing now to tell what actually happened, the children take turns. Coherent accounts are applauded, incoherent ones called out. There is Victor, for instance, whose narrative is garbled by “the hurdy-gurdy of his mind,” so that “babble poured from his lips.” 1 “Embarrassed by these strange dark nuggets of a meaningless tale, some moved away” and in the face of this metaphorical talking shit, the boys who remain attempt to coach and correct the speaker. 2 “Beginning, middle and end!” they chant. 3 Although Jarrett-Macauley’s image of children urging on the narration of trauma as if from the sidelines of a soccer match is jarring, the scene nonetheless reflects a standard practice in the field of trauma recovery and reintegration—narrative exposure therapy, the attempt to reassemble through storytelling an identity that experience has shattered. 4 While the production of any story at all under such circumstances re71

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quires Herculean efforts, work by narrative and cognitive psychologists also points to a further need—even in purely personal tales of trauma not destined for forensic use or for publication—to shape and structure that story into a familiar narrative form, one with a beginning, a middle, and an end. 5 Eight-year-old Citizen is one of the boys in the camp, but his ability to tell his own story is blocked by posttraumatic mutism, one of a number of gross or subtle inhibitions of narrative production, coherence, and fluency that Kay Young and Jeffrey Saver term the “dysnarrativias.” 6 Trauma-induced inability to speak appears in many novelistic treatments of child soldiers, as it does in their real-world counterparts. In Beasts of No Nation, for instance, Uzodinma Iweala addresses the narrative challenge it poses by assigning mutism not to the protagonist, but instead to his best friend. Here, however, the silent child occupies the center of the novel, the same place he occupies in the title. Sierra Leone, the setting of Moses, Citizen & Me, is the site of one of the highest per capita concentrations of former child soldiers. In the years after the 2001 peace agreement, the national Commission for Demobilisation, Demilitarisation and Reintegration registered almost seven thousand, and “many more bypassed formal DDR processes.” 7 The aftermath of war and the process of reintegration form the backdrop of Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s novel. This novel constitutes a massive metanarrative on the topic of testimony—a story of storytelling’s possibilities and pitfalls for former child soldiers and for the families and communities to which they may one day return. Every complication of the testimonial narrative process—construction, telling, hearing, understanding, and finally either acting on the ethical implications of the identities that those narratives build or resisting them—is played out in an intimate articulation of events that the novel itself terms unspeakable, precisely what the former child soldiers must endeavor to communicate. The word “unspeakable” has at least two distinct senses. Like Citizen, some individuals face a literal inability to put their experience into words, reflecting what Elaine Scarry terms the inexpressibility of pain. 8 When it comes to describing the suffering of others, however, classifying events as unspeakable can also be a matter of euphemism. In “Problems of Factual Testimony,” Paul Fussell observes that much of what is termed unspeakable is in fact quite sayable. “Logically there is no reason,” he writes, “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, pain, 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.” 9 That problem, Fussell insists, is “less one of language than of gentility and optimism,” “less a problem of linguistics than of rhetoric.” “What listener,” he asks, “wants to be torn and shaken when he doesn’t have to be? We have made unspeakable mean indescribable: it really means nasty.” 10

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Moses, Citizen & Me begins with a two-page prologue in which an omniscient narrator sets forth a series of endings that culminate in the really, really nasty. There is the end of an era for Freetown—transformed from a place with a long history of ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity to one of constant anxiety, distrust, and violence—as well as for “the hapless niece of an old man.” 11 Soon to be identified as Julia, she serves as the narrator of the body of the novel. And finally, the prologue presents an ending that no one wants to say out loud, one that the people who first discovered it, Moses’s friends, could not bring themselves to tell. Eventually, the prologue reveals, the friends “whispered” what they had found when Citizen, Moses’s grandson, had led them to the thing “‘the big soldier man’ had made him do”—the body of a woman, hands and legs bound, who had been shot in the back; “it was Adele, his own grandmother.” 12 Prologues are a conventional component of narrative, but Jarrett-Macauley’s deployment of this one serves an unconventional function. Vouchsafing to the reader at the outset those unspeakable conclusions shifts the locus of narrative suspense away from those highly dramatic and excruciatingly painful events, both national and personal to the characters. For the novel’s readers, those conditions become what they are for the people of Sierra Leone: givens. In the first few pages of Chapter 1, this knowledge of endings also becomes a matter of dramatic irony. At the start of the novel proper, it is apparent that the reader knows what Julia, the personalized protagonist/narrator, the niece who has lived in London since childhood, does not. Jarrett-Macauley meticulously layers detail to emphasize that Julia has no idea what she is about to learn. The action begins in London, in the way to Heathrow. Moses’s neighbor Anita has told Julia only that her aunt is dead, and her uncle needs her. Although it has been years since they last spoke, and longer still since she last visited, as the sole remaining relative she dutifully prepares to travel. Despite having been born in Sierra Leone, Julia is aware of its conditions only in the most distanced and abstract terms. She knows that there has been a period of “internecine bitterness” in which the nation’s prospects rose and fell, and from which it is now recovering. 13 Concerned that someone might mistake her family connection to Sierra Leone for some sort of expertise, Julia takes pains to set the record straight. She “has never,” she cautions anyone who might look to her for authority, “been good at West African politics.” 14 Her disclaimer is also a form of self-protection. “If the goal is having some space in which to live one’s own life,” Susan Sontag observes, “then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another.” 15 Anticipating only a traditional funeral for an elderly aunt, Julia packs the items that family and friends ask her to bring—scarce essentials such as medicine, rice, sardines, and tinned meat, and also some small luxuries

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for friends and family, shampoos, hair oil, and multiple pairs of patentleather shoes in a range of styles and sizes—an inventory that attests to her loyalty and generosity. 16 The details of Julia’s impeccable self-care for the trip serve to heighten readers’ awareness of the knowledge that awaits her. Despite the November chill of London, she selects a linen jacket and sandals “to avoid discomfort on the flight.” 17 Even a small contretemps, when she mistakenly joins the queue for vacationers bound for Ghana, underscores her serene sense of security and privilege as she muses that “one flex of the credit card” she could join them. 18 With the flight to Sierra Leone sorted, she takes her window seat and contemplates her drink orders: “chardonnay, lukewarm tea and water.” 19 Upon landing in Freetown, the holiday mood evaporates. En route to her uncle’s neighborhood, passengers tense as the jeep passes through armed checkpoints, and see lines of young men missing limbs. As she approaches the house she recognizes Citizen, even though the eight-yearold now looks to her like “a Cuban plantation worker more than twice his age,” whose “cheekbones stood out prominently and suggested poise.” 20 Julia’s take on Citizen illustrates a cognitive defense that allows witnesses to avoid some of the pain of seeing children as victims by promoting them to the status of adults. Niall Nance-Carroll writes that “aetonormative and childist norms may still be rhetorically preserved” by defining the “children who face situations that adults find disturbing” as “somehow ‘not really children’”—“having ‘lost their innocence,’ or had their childhood or innocence ‘stolen’ from them, ‘old for their years’ from having been forced to ‘grow up fast.’” “All of these metaphors,” NanceCarroll points out, “serve to protect the sensibilities of adults.” When Julia grows closer, she finds the child terrifying. Before she can bring herself to speak to him, he moves away. The remainder of the novel consists of fleshing out those plot lines that concluded in the prologue, adding beginnings and middles to the stories already ended—and then reshaping those now-intertwined narratives so as to find some way forward. Throughout it, Jarrett-Macauley’s descriptions of the labor of speaking and listening illustrate the almost impossible demands of testimonial storytelling, as well as the crucial role played by the addressee. Neither Moses nor Julia wants to go near the story of Adele’s death, and the narrative process repeatedly stalls out. It takes days before Moses can even bring himself to begin an account that Julia already dreads hearing. When Moses does manage to initiate the narrative, the story comes up missing its central facts: the circumstances of Adele’s death and the identity of the killer. Moses and Julia collaborate to avoid that conclusion, filling in the gaps with a stream of abstractions about governments, Third Worldism, and the international community. Their avoidance of the story’s conclusion is described in spatial metaphor. Steering well clear of Adele, Moses and Julia keep to “the margins of truth.” 21

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As the novel progresses, completion of that short-circuited tale of Citizen’s killing his grandmother, the fulfillment of the testimonial obligation, will require labor that is as much physical as emotional, a shattering task for listener as well as speaker. Eventually it falls to Julia to break the impasse, to help elicit what Moses is compelled to tell yet impotent to say. Embracing him, she envisions and articulates the opening words: “She was a good woman.” 22 Bit by effortful bit, Adele’s story—and with it the history of Sierra Leone—is drawn out, the joint project of Moses and Julia supported by Anita and her daughter Elizabeth, who come to the house and then stay up to listen even after an eighteen hour day of work. Their collective narrative labor embodies Jean-François Lyotard’s contention that testimony demands not only an individual willing to speak of injustice, but also an engaged witness. 23 The tale of the final character of the novel’s title—Julia, the “me” of the novel’s first-person narrative—first hangs on the stories of Moses and Citizen and then furthers them. Julia’s immediate response to Moses’s conclusion of Adele’s narrative is a sort of shame, a variation on survivor guilt accompanied by a determination that “No one is going to get me.” 24 That last assertion appears at first to be a matter of self-reassurance. Newly arrived from London and soon to return there, she will not become a victim in Sierra Leone. As the novel progresses, however, the valence of this phrase changes. Julia is resisting being “gotten” in another sense, by potential implication in another narrative still under construction—this one about the future and addressing who will care for young Citizen. Only this time, rather than assisting the narrative development, Julia works hard to thwart it. Despite her willingness to listen to the painful accounts of Sierra Leone’s, Moses’s, Adele’s, and Citizen’s past, to believe and even help to assemble them, when it comes to this new narrative she ceases to cooperate. “People are often unable to take in the sufferings of those close to them,” writes Sontag, “for all the voyeuristic lure—and the possible satisfaction of knowing. This is not happening to me, I’m not ill, I’m not dying, I’m not trapped in a war—it seems normal for people to fend off thinking about the ordeals of others, even others with whom it would be easy to identify.” 25 From the time Moses first introduces the idea of Julia’s taking Citizen, she strenuously resists. In contrast with the deep and affectionate bond evident in their earlier conversation, now the dialog disintegrates as Julia purposely misses his point. Moses broaches the topic cautiously, reminding her that the child still needs “someone who would care; someone like you.” 26 “Oh, does he?” she deflects deftly; “I thought he’d need people here, who understand what’s happened to boys like him.” 27 Even as her responses make it clear that she expects to leave the whole painful situation behind when she returns to her life in England, she cloaks that detachment in a positive discourse of compassion, practicality, and respect for difference. Citizen is a local problem,

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Julia’s replies indicate, and one that can only be resolved by those with esoteric expertise—not, by implication, a naïve Londoner like herself. Moses’s next answer responds not to Julia’s cover story, but instead to the unspoken truth that underlies it. “Of course, it would be hard to like him,” he reassures her, “I don’t blame you for feeling like that.” 28 Eyes averted, she again attempts to retreat behind ignorance and unpreparedness, protesting that she cannot “see what I would do with a child like that,” but the truth suddenly spills out: “I have a horror of. . . .” 29 Although her sentence goes unfinished, the point is clear—the very idea of caring for a boy like Citizen repels her. For the moment Moses seems to relent. Her visit, he says, is already “a blessing,” and she does not “need to be held back.” 30 Julia understands the subtext, but nonetheless eagerly accepts the proffered exit line. Upon learning, days later, that Citizen was the one who killed Adele, Julia cannot immediately process the information. Water from the glass that Anita holds to Julia’s mouth spills on her clothes; she is unable even to move her lips to drink. Her loss of speech, dissociation, and somaticized paralysis vividly depict “secondary traumatization,” also known as “vicarious trauma,” in which the knowledge of another person’s suffering elicits a corresponding physical reaction in the witness. 31 Only with great effort does Julia regain her self-control; it is all she can do to cover her eyes with her hands as she weeps. She finds her own tears comforting; “at least sorrow could be managed.” 32 It is no wonder that sorrow should come as a relief. “So far as we feel sympathy,” Sontag observes, “we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.” 33 In the face of Julia’s extreme response, and worried that she may fault her uncle for drawing her into such circumstances, Anita hastens to take responsibility. She demands that Julia hold her responsible for the summons to Sierra Leone, and Julia appears to concur that Anita is somehow culpable. In parallel with the vicarious response to testimony in which Julia becomes a victim, those responsible for telling her the tale take on something of the perpetrator; their words cause her pain. Taking over the task from Moses, Anita attempts to engage Julia in Citizen’s care, but Julia continues to resist. Watching Anita tend to the child, Julia sees only more evidence that he is someone else’s responsibility, someone more qualified, more at home with children—Anita, in fact. In the face of something that resembles a call, Julia employs the mutually reinforcing cognitive defenses of elevation, abjection, and forwarding. Magnifying Anita’s capabilities and minimizing her own would permit a smooth transfer of the burden. Anita, however, is not having it. Pouring brandy, she gets down to the matter at hand. Dismantling Julia’s vaguely imagined solution in which understanding local people will foster the returned child, Anita confronts her with the reality: “most people will not even let a child like Citizen near their house.” 34 Julia doggedly parries.

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Maybe his staying with Moses will work out after all, she ventures, as long as they avoid each other. “Citizen is always running away,” she notes hopefully. 35 Ignoring the evasion, Anita presses on. “You could help them,” she insists, “did you know that?” 36 “I had been trying not to know,” admits Julia, “but it was there as a fact.” 37 Close again to being caught, Julia temporizes, pleading for more time to research the situation. In the morning Julia watches Sara, Anita’s talkative younger daughter, riding her bicycle. Here is a child she can imagine staying with her in London. She has already invited Elizabeth, Sara’s older sister, to come for an extended visit, and the idea of opening her home to the two girls holds out an attractive substitute for the fostering of Citizen. Realizing that she should probably invite the girls’ mother as well, she quickly pushes that impulse aside. Unspoken but still apparent is her assumption: Anita must remain in Sierra Leone in order to care for Citizen. The next day Julia and Anita visit the treatment camp where Citizen was found. Anita brings the children food she has carefully prepared at home: beans, akara, fish, and plantain. Opening the basket, Julia is struck by how little there is. By focusing on the magnitude of the need, she can convince herself that anything she might do could not possibly be significant. Catching sight of a boy with “a bluish purple gash festered in the heat,” Julia covers her mouth in horror. 38 Anita, meanwhile, catches up with him and feeds him plantain. Noticing the boy’s dry skin, she reaches in her bag for lotion and rubs it on his face. The contrast that Jarrett-Macauley creates here is both extreme and instructive. As Anita’s modest and reflexive efforts comfort this one child, he ceases to be merely a cipher in a larger figure. That encounter at the camp appears to open a chink in Julia’s cognitive armor. Seeing a boy they call “Corporal Kalashnikov,” who had lived in an oil drum protecting the guns and continues to march with a military bearing, she finds herself imagining him in a parade at the Notting Hill Carnival, but the image of proximity is short-lived. 39 Hearing about the camp’s process of weaning the children off of the drugs to which the army had addicted them, Julia again feels herself losing consciousness. This time, however, she does not surrender to the status of secondary victim. In contrast to the earlier focus on her own pain, now she forces herself to “concentrate hard” on what she sees. 40 In contrast with witnesses’ focus on their own distress at seeing the pain of others, “restraining one’s own physical and emotional reactions to permit a conscious focus on the other” is one of the responses that psychologist Nancy Eisenberg and her colleagues identified as presaging eventual action to help. 41 Now, despite her own trepidation, Julia’s thoughts turn to who will care for Citizen. “Finally,” readers might think, but Jarrett-Macauley continues to withhold narrative relief. Julia is not suddenly and definitively woke. Even as she wonders “who is safeguarding the future for the children?” when she returns to the house, that notion that someone needs to offer Citizen a future is still too abstract, and not yet enough to bind her. 42

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Confronted by the concrete reality of this child, Julia’s poetic resolve disappears. By the time she returns to the house, she is “already forgoing [her] intention of talking to him.” 43 Citizen, meanwhile, begins to come around Anita’s house in the daytime, playing silently alongside Sara. Seeing his flashback to the war when the little girl makes up a story about snappers who gang up to fight whales, Julia works up the courage to ask him what is the matter. Although he remains silent, another advance follows. At the end of a day of muddy play, Anita calls Sara in for a bath. Once Sara has been scrubbed clean, shampooed and conditioned with the products that Julia has brought from London, Anita declares it Citizen’s turn. This time Julia runs the water, stirs in some bath oil, and calls to the boy, who “step[s] into the tub . . . reache[s] for a nailbrush in the shape of a pink hippopotamus,” and begins “paddl[ing] the water with the exuberance of a duckling.” 44 As Julia bends down to wash him, she sees that his back is a mass of scar tissue, slashed by beatings, wounded with a knife, and bearing the number 439K carved into the skin. The horror of his injuries and the numbering of the flesh of a human being is only intensified by juxtaposition with the domestic intimacy of the bath scene, but this time Julia neither recoils nor dwells on her own discomfort. Even though she is “filled with misery,” she encourages him to play in the water. 45 Watching Julia put the child to bed, Moses grows cautiously hopeful. That night Julia sees Citizen’s room engulfed in flames, but this is no ordinary fire. He continues to sleep, and “the fire made no impact on the room.” 46 It occurs to her that “a child’s bedroom is adapted to his life, his imaginings, his dreams,” and she improvises a sort of exorcism. 47 “Oh God, forgive him and give him peace,” she repeats, and when the flames die down she sees only “a small terrified boy, not one who terrifies.” 48 Here Jarrett-Macauley draws on magical realism as a supplement to the realist narrative, to express the interior life of a child unable to tell it for himself. Magical realism and conventional realism have often been characterized as competing strains in literary history, their competition a zero-sum game, and aesthetic concerns as somehow antithetical to the aims of testimonio. Sontag observes similar assumptions in the scholarship of photography—and rejects them. “Transforming,” she observes, “is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems ‘aesthetic’; that is, too much like art. The dual powers of photography—to generate documents and to create works of visual art—have produced some remarkable exaggerations about what photographers ought or ought not to do. Lately, the most common exaggeration is one that regards these powers as opposites.” 49 In the bricolage of this deliberative testimonio, realism and magical realism come together in joint service to the genre’s prosthetic function. Throughout this novel, magical elements first substitute for parts of the

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narrative that are not available conventionally, and then supplement them, permitting movement toward a possible future. The incorporation of supernatural elements in a politically engaged genre such as testimonio requires careful management, lest fiction become an escapist substitute for social action. When skillfully deployed, however, non-realist episodes can help to motivate work for change. Permitting a glimpse of potential outcomes of a struggle that remains incomplete and uncertain in a realist time frame, these elements of the narrative constitute an augmented form of the reader transportation that Melanie Green and Timothy Brock identify as the psychological mechanism of narrative persuasion. 50 The next morning, when Anita reports that Citizen and Sara had been helping her shape gari, but “you know pickin, they’d had enough after two or three,” Julia no longer pleads ignorance, but her plan to return to the camp to learn still more tries Anita’s patience. 51 Albeit still temporizing, this time Julia promises more. “It does involve me,” she admits, asking “help me to see.” 52 Rebraiding Julia’s hair as they converse, Anita also rearranges the Londoner’s perspective. In another magical realist sequence Julia is thrust into the world of the child soldiers, Citizen’s past. The figures are small and vulnerable. Newly separated from their families, the boys are crying, missing their mothers. A little one pees his pants. This time Julia manages to observe carefully, without turning away. “Rallentando,” she orders herself, employing the technical term for cinematic slow motion, consciously attempting to slow her own heartbeat.” 53 She sees the origin of the scars on Citizen’s back, the fifty lashes he receives when he cannot bring himself to carry out orders to beat another child for not taking part in the killing. A soldier shoots Citizen’s best friend’s brother for being too weak to keep up. “Dance,” the soldier commands the other children, fingering his gun and passing around syringes of amphetamines to steel them for the next mission. 54 The events Julia witnesses are consonant with documented Revolutionary United Front practice with child soldiers in Sierra Leone. “When committing a violent act,” report Marilyn Denov et al., “children were forbidden to show any remorse, sadness or shame; instead, following brutal acts of torture and violence, they were encouraged and coerced into participating in acts of celebration.” 55 After the magical episode Julia is returned to the house. Even as she realizes now that the child soldiers are “not trigger-happy snipers but half-naked kids, shrieking with fear,” alone, with no home, “no comfort blanket,” she still cannot quite relinquish her own escapist fantasies. 56 “No question,” she affirms, “those pictures were shouting for big headlines or some magnificent bird with gigantic downy wings to swoop down and say ‘jump here little Citizen, let me carry you to safety.’” 57 Julia’s expectation that press coverage will bring on world indignation and assistance is a classic form of forwarding responsibility to others, but

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the obvious absurdity of the giant rescue bird suggests that she is at last beginning to see that the cavalry is not coming. Spotting her opening, Anita tells Julia about the night Elizabeth discovered Citizen in the camp. Aware of the probability of familial rejection, camp authorities had instructed the girl to return in the morning. Instead, Anita recounts proudly, Elizabeth picked up Citizen and ran all the way home with him. Elizabeth was not naïve, Anita emphasizes; she was well aware that “people said better throw these devils into a crypt where skeletons go to live.” 58 Moses tries hard to follow Elizabeth’s lead and treat the boy as “antebellum Citizen,” but when he initiates a game of hide and seek, being found only makes his grandson scream. 59 Even in the face of this information, Julia still tries to assign herself a less demanding project, proposing again to help Anita with Sara. With Julia’s next visit to the supernatural jungle, the time frame has shifted. Julia sees a future Citizen in a rehabilitation camp, learning to speak, to play, and even to take a small part in an impromptu Creole production of Julius Caesar. Back at the house, she learns from Moses that Citizen is a nickname, short for “First Citizen of the Farm.” At two, he “thought he was in charge of the place,” Moses declares with grandfatherly pride. 60 But Moses is old, Anita reminds Julia, and losing his eyesight besides; the boy is too much for him. When Julia persists in playing for time, Anita asks her sharply “in England you don’t take family just like that?” 61 Like that, Julia “felt [her]self accused of being meanspirited.” 62 At long last, Anita has managed to persuade Julia to accept the addressee position of Jean-François Lyotard’s testimonial contract. Only now has the call become personal. Julia has finally come round to what ethicist Thomas Haskell identifies as the “preconditions to the emergence of humanitarianism”; not only does she recognize that she is now, in the present, in a position to help, she also sees the actions required of her as “sufficiently ordinary, familiar, effectual, and executable so that failing to implement them would constitute a suspension of routine or even an intentional act.” 63 Haskell’s account of those preconditions calls attention to the need for effective testimonio to bring its call for humanitarian intervention home—presenting it not only as the right thing to do, but also as the ordinary and normal one. 64 In Julia’s final visit to the supernatural forest, Adele magically appears in a photo, standing alive and well between Citizen and Julia. Now Citizen’s narrative can be assembled, in retrospect as well as in prospect, with a metaphorical rebirth that begins to reverse Julia’s earlier ascription of premature adulthood. Olu, Elizabeth’s friend who had worked in the care camp, supplies details of the night Citizen arrived. He was so small and malnourished that they thought he would die, but as they fed him fortified milk, his “tiny, tiny” hand found the strength to grasp an aid worker’s finger. 65 “You told us,” Olu recounts to him, “that after you pulled the trigger on your grandmother your hands became small. They

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told you to raise a stick and beat a boy, but you could not lift a stick.” 66 With the help of the adults around him, Citizen’s painful life story is slowly transformed into a usable past, a new beginning on which a life might still be built. That night Julia has one more vision, this one set back home in London, in a future where she cheers on Citizen at a swim meet. Afterwards there is apple pie, filled with an old English variety called Cox’s Orange Pippins—a name that for Julia conjures up “an up-andcoming couple in a Dickens novel.” 67 Sierra Leone apples, she recalls, are “soft fruits, no biting required—surrender to the light juices trickling down your throat. Surrender.” 68 The novel’s last word, “surrender,” is both a command and an agreement. Relinquishing the fantasies of her own innocence—lack of responsibility and lack of knowledge—Julia bites the apple. Julia’s plotline is a moral bildungsroman, the surrender of her innocence signaling an ethical coming of age. By Sontag’s standards, it is high time. “Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans,” Sontag argues, “has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, or superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.” 69 In terms of narrative pace, Jarrett-Macauley has spooled out Julia’s passage to a belated moral adulthood exceedingly slowly, and at many points readers are likely to have grown impatient with the narrator’s stream of evasions. In terms of testimonial narrative’s socioliterary project, that pace serves a purpose. Testimonio appears to promote action more effectively when writers manage to push readers out ahead of the characters, leaving readers waiting impatiently for the plot to catch up, and for the characters to perform the ethical tasks that readers have already mapped out for them. 70 The coming together of the three plotlines—Moses’s, Citizen’s, and Julia’s, now supplied with beginnings, middles, and hopeful ends—constitutes the conclusion of the body of the novel, but not the end of this testimonial narrative. Jarrett-Macauley still has more to say to the reader, now in her own voice as writer. In a paratextual acknowledgement at the close of Moses, Citizen and Me, she tells readers that “it is important to stress that this story is a work of fiction.” 71 She goes on to describe the extensive research that she undertook in preparation for writing, detailing her historical sources on the context of Sierra Leone, the presence and influence of documentary photographers and filmmakers, and the efforts of NGOs in the reintegration of child soldiers. Situating this material at the end of the novel as opposed to the conventional prologue position allows it to serve as a Brechtian interruption of readers’ immersion in the text. By reminding readers that this is a work of fiction, Jarrett-Macauley prevents them from simply basking in the warm glow of the conclusion,

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where Citizen is now safe in a cozy London space of swim lessons and apple pies. With this gesture Jarrett-Macauley completes readers’ round trip—into the world of the novel and back again—seeking to prevent their mental transportation from devolving into escapism. Interrupted, the novel-induced pleasure in the fiction that all is well with the child now serves as preliminary to an actual ask. The epitext’s documentary information on Sierra Leone returns the reader to the real world, supplied now with directions for concrete action that might offer a future to Citizen’s real-life counterparts. In a subtle suggestion that Jarrett-Macauley embeds in her explanation of the choice of Julius Caesar as the play performed in the magical-realist reintegration camp, she calls to readers’ attention “the link between private flaws and public actions.” 72 The same novel that began with a series of endings now seeks to end with a beginning. Having witnessed and grown impatient with Julia’s myriad attempts at evasion before finally accepting responsibility, readers are invited to turn their ethical assessments back on themselves. NOTES 1. Jarrett-Macauley, 149–150. 2. Jarrett-Macauley, 150. 3. Jarrett-Macauley, 150. 4. Hecker, Hermenau, Crombach, and Elbert. 5. As Mar asserts, “the structured narration of experience is not to be taken lightly,” because “the more coherent and organized an account that one creates for a past trauma, the greater the likelihood of salutary gains as a result of such narration,” 1414. 6. Young and Saver, 75. 7. Bennett, 10. 8. Scarry, Elaine, 3–4. 9. Fussell, 169–170. 10. Fussell, 170. Italics in the original. 11. Jarrett-Macauley, 1. 12. Jarrett-Macauley, 2. Italics in the original. 13. Jarrett-Macauley, 5. 14. Jarrett-Macauley, 5. 15. Sontag, 115–116. 16. Jarrett-Macauley, 6. 17. Jarrett-Macauley, 3. 18. Jarrett-Macauley, 4. 19. Jarrett-Macauley, 5. 20. Jarrett-Macauley, 7. 21. Jarrett-Macauley, 13. 22. Jarrett-Macauley, 14. 23. Lyotard, 121. 24. Jarrett-Macauley, 13. Italics in the original. 25. Sontag, 99. 26. Jarrett-Macauley, 16. 27. Jarrett-Macauley, 16–17. 28. Jarrett-Macauley, 17. 29. Jarrett-Macauley, 17. 30. Jarrett-Macauley, 17–18.

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31. Nelson and Wampler, 171. 32. Jarrett-Macauley, 8. 33. Sontag, 102. 34. Jarrett-Macauley, 19. 35. Jarrett-Macauley, 20. 36. Jarrett-Macauley, 20. 37. Jarrett-Macauley, 20. 38. Jarrett-Macauley, 32. 39. Jarrett-Macauley, 37. 40. Jarrett-Macauley, 37. 41. Eisenberg et al., 55–66. 42. Jarrett-Macauley, 38. Italics in the original. 43. Jarrett-Macauley, 38. 44. Jarrett-Macauley, 46. 45. Jarrett-Macauley, 46. 46. Jarrett-Macauley, 49. 47. Jarrett-Macauley, 49. Italics in the original. 48. Jarrett-Macauley, 49. Italics in the original. 49. Sontag, 76. 50. Green and Brock, 721. 51. Jarrett-Macauley, 50. 52. Jarrett-Macauley, 50. 53. Jarrett-Macauley, 53. Italics in the original. 54. Jarrett-Macauley, 59, 65. 55. Denov, Kemokai, Maclure, Turay, and Zombo, 5. 56. Jarrett-Macauley, 67. 57. Jarrett-Macauley, 67. 58. Jarrett-Macauley, 76–78. 59. Jarrett-Macauley, 78. 60. Jarrett-Macauley, 195. 61. Jarrett-Macauley, 108. 62. Jarrett-Macauley, 108. 63. Haskell, 357–358. Haskell attributes the term “recipes,” which he prefers for its “homely” quality and “practical formula for getting things done” to Gasking’s “Causation and Recipes.” 64. Haskell’s observations on the need to persuade witnesses to accept the premise that what they are being asked to do is ordinary and normal as opposed to exceptional or heroic converges with Lerner, Belief in a Just World, 27, 186. 65. Jarrett-Macauley, 219. 66. Jarrett-Macauley, 220. 67. Jarrett-Macauley, 226. 68. Jarrett-Macauley, 226. 69. Sontag, 114. 70. A similar dynamic appears to govern readers’ responses to use of violence or civil disobedience. Nance, Can Literature Promote Justice? 78–79. Readers’ impatience and desire for acceleration of the plot might be seen as a variant on “anomalous replotting” described by Gerrig, 277. 71. Jarrett-Macauley, 227. 72. Jarrett-Macauley, 228.

SIX Survivors Tell the Stories That the Sympathizers Want Countering the Comfort of Lost Boy Narratives in What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng

Likened by Francine Prose to Huckleberry Finn, this 2006 testimonial novel is written in the voice of one of the “Lost Boys,” a refugee from Sudan granted asylum in the United States and assigned to a resettlement program in Atlanta. Eggers was already widely known for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and it comes as no surprise that this “collaborative product of a Sudanese immigrant and a Bostonian literary wunderkind” 1 posted runaway sales, or that it attracted correspondingly high levels of scholarly attention. What Is the What stands in sharp contrast to the first wave of Lost Boy literature, books and films that served less to afflict comfortable readers than to add to their comfort with descriptions of the young men’s wonder at the material comforts of the United States and gratitude for the generosity of their hosts. Popular accounts of young refugees’ path from suffering to safety not only helped to assure US readers that individual boys were all right now, they also offered gratifying reassurance on larger and more troublesome domestic issues of race and justice. Celebrating the Lost Boys as model minority, that first round of narratives had offered a “safe adventure,” chronicling an “opportunity to nurture and, at the same time, become acquainted with someone with dark skin, a real person from Africa.” 2 It helped that the Lost Boys spoke an archaic, stilted version of English,” writes Mark Bixler, “this somehow had the effect of charming Americans.” 3 “It also helped,” he notes, “that 85

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most of the young men were polite and eager to learn, qualities that Americans in their late teens and early twenties often were perceived to lack.” 4 “Valoriz[ing] consumer culture and an enduring belief in rugged individualism,” 5 and reinforcing the idea of the United States as a sought-after land of opportunity, those texts could also be read as tacit criticism of the boys’ African-American counterparts. Systematically dismantling the Lost Boy genre’s fantasies, What Is the What finds Deng “resettled” not in the bosom of an upper-middle-class family in the suburbs, but instead on his own in a low-income housing complex on the periphery of a city with an inadequate transit system, struggling to attend community college while holding down a series of menial jobs, and finally robbed and beaten in his own apartment. Bleeding from the head and bound with electrical cords and duct tape, he reflects on his journey from Sudan to Atlanta while waiting for someone to rescue him yet again. Among those reflections is a careful weighing of the generosity, motivations, and limitations of those who have previously come to his assistance, what they might yet grant, what they might want in return, and what might be too much to ask. What Is the What opens with two of the conventional paratexts of testimonial narrative. A map of Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya traces Deng’s journey. A preface signed with his initials spells out the text’s double connection to the world, promising readers information about human rights abuses in Sudan and inviting them to participate in his and Eggers’s project of social justice. Their express intent to prevent the repetition of those events echoes the testimonial genre’s resolute hope: never again. 6 Deng goes on to delineate his and Eggers’s respective roles. “I told my story,” he explains, and Eggers “concocted this novel.” 7 The trajectory here sounds more straightforward than the writing process that Eggers chronicled in an essay for the Guardian. In 2002, he reported, Deng, who was “already well known as a captivating public speaker,” had told Mary Williams, founder of the Lost Boys Foundation, of his hopes to turn his story into a book for general readers. 8 Williams, “whose own story—born the daughter of Black Panthers and eventually adopted by Jane Fonda—would make a fine book” enlists the writer’s help. 9 Despite Eggers’s experience in collecting oral histories, his first attempt to assemble Deng’s fails. Deng, who was only six when his journey began, cannot recall enough detail to supply a compelling narrative. While still “clunky, spare, and full of holes,” the work in progress is scooped by another oral history of the Sudanese refugees, They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky. 10 Still committed to getting Deng’s story out, Eggers tries to awaken more detailed memories by arranging travel to Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya. That effort also fails: “Valentino couldn’t remember who said what at almost any point in his life.” 11 “Without sensory detail or dialogue,” Eggers knows, the project of reaching general readers is doomed; “the book would be parched, and likely to reach only those

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already interested in the issues of Sudan.” 12 Retreating to a cabin north of San Francisco, Eggers spends a second year struggling with how to “do justice to [Deng’s] life and everything he wanted from the project,” only to arrive at an impasse. 13 “I was cornered,” he recalls; “I couldn’t make an interesting non-fiction account of his life, and a simple oral history wouldn’t add anything significant to the material out there.” 14 Contemplating how to break this news to Deng, Eggers suddenly sees a way forward. Doing justice to Deng’s life and their shared social project, he realizes, can only be accomplished through fiction. I remembered that, at the refugee camp in Kakuma, in northern Kenya, Valentino had been part of a theatre group whose mandate was to write and perform one-act plays to educate the residents of the camp in various issues—HIV/Aids, gender equality, conflict resolution. So he knew that one usually needed to adapt the facts of life and shape them in such a way that they came alive in the minds of an audience. By the same token, I realized that so many of the books I’d brought with me for inspiration . . . the books about war and upheaval that I’d turned to again and again, and that best (in my opinion) communicated the realities of war, were in fact novels: The Naked and the Dead, The Things They Carried, The Painted Bird, Catch-22—War and Peace, for Christ’s sake. 15

“Only in a novel,” he thinks, “could I imagine the look on the face of the man who rescued Valentino when he became entangled in barbed wire one black night in the middle of his journey to Ethiopia.” 16 Eggers hesitates to put this proposal to Deng, fearing that “he might think this step too extreme,” but when he finally does ask, Deng agrees immediately: “you have to be a writer; do it the way you think it will best reach people.” 17 Eggers’s hesitation is understandable, but so is Deng’s ready assent. His matter-of-fact response to the writer underscores the instrumental role of text in the project he envisions, and, for that matter, the subordinate role of both individuals—himself and Eggers. For Deng, Eggers’s utility lies not only in his dedication to their common cause, but specifically in his capacity to further it in ways that Deng himself cannot. Although Eggers’s writerly turn from oral history to novelized testimony would be widely heralded as innovative, it was also in some sense a throwback. The text generally credited with launching contemporary testimonio, Esteban Montejo and Miguel Barnet’s 1966 Biografía de un cimarrón, is precisely such a “testimonial novel,” built upon a series of interviews with Montejo and then novelized by Barnet in first person. The titles of two distinct English versions, the first by Jocasta Innes as Autobiography of a Runaway Slave and the second by Nick Hill as Biography of a Runaway Slave, still bear traces of the translators’ struggle to represent the work’s authorship. In his theoretical essays, Barnet advocated passionately for novelization of testimony, for reasons that he insisted were at once literary and political. Although mindful of the risk of “over aes-

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theticizing,” of turning testimonio into “only literature,” he had no patience for collaborating writers who declined to exercise their literary skills in favor of pure transcription of their subjects’ words. 18 In a declaration prefiguring Eggers’s rejection of the “parched” narrative that would serve only specialists, Barnet declared that a “pure-compilation” version of testimonio “goes nowhere.” 19 The balance between testimony and storytelling, the role of the writer as intermediary between the testimonial subject and the reader, Barnet argued, is not an esthetic compromise, but rather a matter of keeping faith with the social goals that constitute the “sine qua non” of testimonio’s existence. 20 In fact, he argued, political interests and literary ones had long been intertwined in fruitful “underground” relationships, “seeking each other out and nourishing each other in joyful reciprocity.” 21 “It’s time,” he wrote at mid-century, “that they join hands without denying each other” in the form of the testimonial novel. 22 Barnet’s description of the potential of this hybrid form likewise closely prefigures a set of claims that would later be advanced for What Is the What. “Testimonial novel,” Barnet wrote in 1966, implies a conjunction of styles, a coming together of approaches and a fusion of objectives, a confrontation with problems within the American context: violence, dependency, neocolonialism, the falsification of history by means of schematisms, applied and reapplied. The testimonial novel critically examines not only ethnic, cultural, and social stereotypes, it also reworks several traditional concepts of literature: realism, autobiography, the relationship between fiction and history. 23

Half a century on, Michelle Peek would write, “the complex play with genre in What Is the What—from recreating Valentino’s voice to embedding an anti-humanitarian narrative of failure and disappointment within a larger humanitarian frame—not only allows Eggers to rewrite the terms of testimonial writing (who speaks, with whom, how, about what, and to what effect) but also enables him to retain what is local and unique about Valentino’s story in the universalizing genre of Lost Boys testimonial.” 24 In the light of Barnet’s earlier theory and practice of testimonial novelization, Eggers was “rewriting” testimonial narrative not only in the sense of contesting a circumscribed form of the genre, but also in the sense of performing that same act of contestation for a second time. Despite Barnet’s example and advocacy for an open and engaged relationship between aesthetics and politics, and his call for collaborating writers to actively exercise their storytelling skills, that “pure compilation” version of testimonio that he had criticized had gone on to reassert itself, and a number of collaborating writers and critics of testimonial literature had rejected the marriage of political intent with literary technique. The reassertion of testimonial narrative’s epideictic and forensic strains in the

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universalizing genre of first-wave Lost Boys testimonials demonstrates the persistent attractions of texts that invite praise, blame, or judgement, while allowing readers to remain comfortably in their position outside the action. By the time Deng and Eggers begin work on his story, not only is there an established canon of Lost Boy literature, but interest in the refugees themselves is already beginning to wane. “By many,” Deng realizes “we have been written off as a failed experiment. We were the model Africans. But now the enthusiasm has dampened.” 25 The combination of elevated expectations and limited resources makes it almost impossible for the refugees to meet donors’ standards, and now they are also subject to a second constraint. While the term “Lost Boys,” has been rightly characterized as infantilizing, on a practical level that very combination of precarity and neoteny had served to attract aid. Deng was already experiencing firsthand the consequences of a ticking biological clock. When seven colleges that had enthusiastically encouraged him to apply receive his applications, they begin to return his calls only at hours when they know he is not available. In a moment of candor, a staff member explains the reasons for their abrupt withdrawal of interest. First, he tells Deng, “you just might be too old.” 26 The application forms reveal his year of birth, and Deng now fails to fulfill the colleges’ expectation that a Lost Boy will be literally a boy. Deng’s age also poses a further complication, this one intersectional and concerning the recruitment issues that might arise if Deng were admitted. The staff member asks him to imagine how a “white family” choosing a college for “their young blond daughter,” a school where they will be paying tens of thousands of dollars, might react at the sight of “a guy like you roaming the dorms.” 27 Only juvenile Lost Boys, it becomes apparent, are perceived as attractive candidates for their scholarships—an adult black man is a threat. As Lost Boys grow up, they are aging out of donors’ attention. Such circumstances make Deng’s and Eggers’s project with this book even more urgent. In addition to reawakening interest in the refugees, they also need to make a case for further assistance, this time to recipients who may not have met the model minority standard—and are no longer boys. However well intentioned, the conventions of the Lost Boy canon have now become obstacles to the effective solicitation of aid. By means of literary techniques that specifically contest the fantasies of the canonical Lost Boy narratives, Eggers now frames Deng’s tale to call into question the efficacy and sufficiency of the refugee resettlement program. In this contest of narrative against narrative, Eggers’s weapon of choice is parody. As quickly as the novel’s paratexts evoke expectations of a typical Lost Boy tale, the principal narrative sets out to subvert them. The story here begins not with the move from risk to relief, the subject’s secure arrival in a US home, but instead with a violent assault there. A woman knocks on Deng’s apartment door. Her car has broken down, she says,

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and she needs to use his phone to call the police. Even though he does not understand why one would call the police in that situation, Deng politely opens his door. Readers can predict what happens next, and even the robbers mock him. “Because we’re brothers and all, I’ll teach you a lesson,” one of them offers. 28 “I never know the things I am supposed to know,” Deng laments to himself; “I am tired of the promises. I came here, four thousand of us came here,” anticipating a safe haven. 29 The promised cultural orientation, a remedial lesson not to open the door to strangers, comes with a pistol whipping. Deng has been subjected to violence many times before, and he sets forth a history of blows in curatorial detail, but this one stands out. “I have been struck in many different ways,” he explains, “but never with the barrel of a gun.” 30 It is only now, he observes, in Atlanta, that “for the first time in my life I am struck in a way that I think might kill me.” 31 The saving of life and promise of a new beginning had been mainstays of Lost Boy literature. Here, Deng’s “head hits something hard and unbreakable, and that is the end, for now.” 32 When Deng regains consciousness there are still more new experiences, for instance “I have never been restrained like this.” 33 This opening scene iterates in inverted form the celebratory series of firsts that make up the Lost Boys canon, descriptions of the warm welcomes they receive from the community and their discoveries of suburban peace and plenty, supermarkets, flush toilets, and microwaves. Members of the community here derisively dub Deng “Africa,” accuse him of ancestral responsibility for slavery, assault him, and steal what few belongings he has managed to acquire. As the attack sparks another flashback, he recalls an Ethiopian soldier who attacked him and his friends, one who “first posed as our savior.” 34 Seeing the robber with the gun, he wishes he were back in the refugee camp, “Kakuma, where I lived in a hut of plastic sandbags and owned one pair of pants.” 35 For all its privation, at this moment that camp seems to him more secure than his Atlanta apartment. Far from feeling welcome, Deng is “beginning to think someone is trying desperately to send me a message, and that message is ‘Leave this place.’” 36 The remainder of the novel, which takes place in the course of one long day, is concerned with the aftermath of the assault. Most of that time is spent waiting—for the robbers to leave, for someone to discover him, for the police to arrive, to see a doctor in the emergency room. Deng’s longer story, one that begins with the journey from Sudan to the United States that he shares with his four thousand fellow refugees, is developed in a series of conversations that take place during these periods of waiting, and almost entirely within his own head. The television, it turns out, does not fit into the robbers’ car. They leave a boy to stand guard over Deng until they can return. After the robbers finally leave, Deng struggles to free himself, or at least to make enough noise to alert his neighbors, in each case unsuccessfully. Finally, his roommate arrives, and after

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speaking to the police they drive to the emergency room. From the waiting area Deng plies his tenuous social network for support, seeking advice from a sympathetic member of the hospital staff, his former sponsors, and fellow refugees. As the night stretches on he leaves before seeing the doctor, so that he can be on time for his job at the gym. The next morning finds him back at the reception desk, waiting for the members to arrive and resolved to find a way to leave Atlanta, where things are “too tense, too political.” 37 Atlanta, it turns out, is only the latest in a series of places where people promise him a safety that turns out to be illusory. A case in point is the advice he received about answering the door. Although the aid agency’s two-day cultural orientation failed to mention the high crime rate of many of the areas where refugees were likely to be placed, Sudanese elders had warned them to be careful, and in any event Deng’s life experience had long since taught him to be cautious. He had specifically asked Mary, his sponsor, about what to do in case of a knock at the door. In Sudan, he told her, only women answer the door; men do not open it because someone is probably coming for them. In Atlanta it is different, she informs him. In the United States, men are supposed to answer the door, and moreover, men are supposed to take care of women. Mindful of those instructions, Deng not only lets the unknown woman into his apartment that day—against his own better judgement—he also accedes to her request to leave the door open while she uses the phone, which allows the second assailant to enter. “I do so because she desires it,” he explains; even though he found her request incomprehensible “this is her country and not yet mine.” 38 With advice that reflects not the realities of Deng’s life in the United States, but instead a fantasy of the United States as a site of comfort and security, his sponsor has made him an even easier target. Not that this harm was intentional, of course. Her well-meant advice was based on a failure to observe, or at least to process, the obvious fact that the only place that Deng can afford to live is not at all safe. A similar compartmentalization is apparent during the pre-departure orientation session in Kakuma. A spokesperson informs Deng and his fellow refugees that since they are beyond high-school age they will receive only temporary assistance with housing and living expenses, so it is imperative that they seek work immediately upon arrival. The sorts of jobs that are likely to be available, the speaker advises, will generally pay between five and six dollars per hour, so they will have to budget carefully. He instructs them to add up the costs of food and rent, and the figures demonstrate that it will be impossible to live on those wages, but “no particular solution was offered.” 39 Transportation problems are similarly glossed over. The sponsoring agencies advise refugees to use public transit, but never look closely enough to see that schedules and routes will make it nearly impossible to cobble together the required commute from their remote apartments to work and community college.

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Not all of the consequences of sponsors’ fantasies of refugee life are quite so serious. One couple, cooking enthusiasts, has taken it upon themselves to equip the kitchen of the refugees’ apartment. As a result, Deng and his roommate, who continually struggle to afford food, nevertheless possess a wide variety of luxury kitchen gadgets, including a pair of goggles specially designed for use while slicing onions, which Deng’s apartment mate Achor Achor conscientiously dons. He tries diligently, Deng reports, “to find occasion to use each one.” 40 Equally superfluous to the refugees’ needs are the organizations’ frequent motivational events, directing them to Horatio Alger paths to success. Manute Bol, for instance, has been invited to instruct the boys that they are “no longer on African time,” that in the United States they cannot be late because “time is money,” and to exhort them to work very hard here. 41 Anyone who listened to the refugees, observes Deng dryly, would have known that they were already “hell-bent on getting a college degree and being able to send money back to Sudan.” 42 It is the sponsors who are likely to find such speeches heartening and reassuring. You are doing enough, they confirm; the boys can take it from here. Sponsors are not the only ones who leave Deng with unrequited expectations. Without money for entertainment, Deng watches a lot of television, especially police procedurals. Counter to his experiences with the police in real life, after the attack he finds himself eagerly anticipating the arrival of the squad car. So far he has always been the suspect, and even now he and his roommate first review carefully whether all of their documents are in order before they report the crime. Now, however, Deng expects that “for the first time, an officer will act on my behalf,” and the thought makes him “giddy.” 43 He envisions the authorities moving swiftly to track down his cell phone, arrest the perpetrators, and recover his belongings. In the event, the police response is slow and obviously pro-forma. One officer asks which of the roommates is the victim, appearing not to have noticed that only one of the men is bleeding from the head. In the end it makes little difference, since neither officer bothers to keep their names straight or to write down the number of the stolen cell phone. They leave Deng with a printed complaint card memorializing the visit, and a friendly admonition to “take care now, okay?” 44 The experience at the emergency room is similarly disappointing, when Deng’s TV drama-driven hopes for immediate attention give way to an all-night wait, culminating only in the handing over of another business-sized card, this time with instructions to call the next day for the results of the MRI. Like the ritual handing over of cards, the leave-taking admonitions to take care seem to bolster officers’ and staff members’ self-image as protectors and providers, and to reinstate for them the comforting notion of refugees’ capacity to care for themselves, even after it has just been proven false.

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Like many language learners, Deng is initially unable to distinguish the new language’s phatic utterances—the “take cares” and “hang in theres” along with the questions and answers that neither ask for nor convey information—from their literal counterparts. 45 In Eggers’s hands this disjuncture between surface and significance becomes a leitmotif. Over and over, Deng mistakes formulaic phrases for actual advice, questions, or answers. Eventually he masters the expected responses. For his interlocutors, hearing his equally phatic assurances keeps their interactions brief and pleasant. Deng, on the other hand, remains uncomfortably aware of the literal meanings of both questions and answers, and of the burden of keeping his interlocutors happy by telling them what they want to hear. When one of the gym members, a history teacher, asks him about his classes, he lies that they are going well; “Headed to college? Yes sir, I say.” 46 Dorsetta, another member, asks “Still hanging in there?” Deng again knows the appropriate rejoinder: “I am.” With a cheerful “That’s what I like to hear,” Dorsetta leaves. 47 Deng, however, still has more to say. “The truth is,” he protests, “that I do not like hanging in there. I was born, I believe, to do more.” 48 Dorsetta, he notes, has a spouse, children, and a job as a restaurant manager; “she does more than hang in there.” 49 “I have a low opinion of this expression,” he explains, “hang in there.” 50 This silent follow-up after the conversation is over is not l’esprit d’escalier, the belated realization of the perfect response that Deng wishes he had delivered. Rather, it is the response that he wishes he could have delivered. Deng knows that he cannot speak this way to Dorsetta. As a service worker, part of his job is the emotional labor of keeping clients happy. For the ones who think of themselves as socially responsible and concerned, that also means assuring them that he is progressing in school and hanging in there, even though it is not true. His continued livelihood rests on telling them what they like to hear. “It is my right and obligation,” Deng insists, “to send my stories into the world”; when a listener is willing and “wants to know everything I can remember, I can bring them forwards.” 51 From Eggers’s chronicle we know that this is not literally true; Deng cannot remember key moments of his own history. In the novel’s representation of storytelling, however, the obstacle is not Deng’s inability to recall details and dialogue. Rather, it is the lack of a suitable interlocutor. Hardly anyone is willing to take the time to listen. Only one sponsor, Phil, actually wants to hear everything that Deng needs to tell and is willing to expend the effort. Inviting Deng to his house for dinner with his family week after week, afterwards he listens intently for hours. Phil musters the patience and courage to attend even to the most painful episodes, and responds not only by assisting Deng directly, but also by sending Deng’s father five thousand dollars to reopen his shop. Having listened to Deng’s whole story, Phil recognizes the refugee’s own network of obligation.

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Phil is clearly an outlier. Most of Deng’s contacts do not listen at all, or resist hearing those details, and even the ones who will listen tend to demand a specific storyline. There are, Deng has come to understand, certain expectations for the performance of his role of Lost Boy, with rewards for scripts that conform and consequences for failure. Just as he has mastered the art of the phatic exchange, he has learned that “sponsors and newspaper reporters and the like expect the stories to have certain elements.” 52 The refugees, in turn, “have been consistent in their willingness to oblige.” 53 “Survivors,” Deng observes, “tell the stories that the sympathizers want.” 54 Sometimes that means making the accounts as shocking as possible. In other cases, the telling of stories for survival and rescue demands the omission of certain key facts and experiences. Observing the resettlement agencies’ selection principles and priorities, children who are living in camps with their parents learn to declare themselves unaccompanied minors on the application forms. Boys learn to omit their experience as soldiers. At first, Deng’s reports of fictionalizing in Lost Child narratives might appear to be an effort to set his own story in contrast to them, to present himself as a teller of the whole truth and nothing but. That notion, however, is immediately undermined by his statement that his own story “includes enough small embellishments that I cannot criticize the accounts of others.” 55 A number of critics have observed that this admission helps to inoculate Deng against skeptical investigation. For instance, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson assign a protective function to the novel’s “negotiable ‘I,’” in which conventional markers of authenticity such as cultural detail are coupled with explicit acknowledgement of Eggers’s fictionalization of Deng’s life story. 56 A critical focus on establishing, maintaining, and defending the credibility of the speaker still appears to respect, albeit in the breach, the terms of Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, an assumption of the responsibility of the subject to supply a complete and actual account, so that anything else requires justification of Deng’s and Eggers’s choices. While Smith and Watson conclude that such “collective ‘I’s” can only be accounted for by a new paradigm of reading, 57 the novel’s explicit construction of the subject and intense attention to the acts of storytelling and listening are consonant with the alternative and specifically testimonial pacts already described by Lyotard and Partnoy, where they instead serve to make visible to readers their own implication in the matter of which stories survivors are permitted, encouraged, or required to tell. What Is the What repeatedly emphasizes the emotional labor performed by Deng in his narratives, the attentions and reassurances that he is obliged to direct not only to clients, but also to sponsors and other sympathizers. Ever attentive to sponsors’ emotional state and anticipating their needs, Deng can predict when one is likely to burn out, and he stands at the ready with emotional first aid. Mary, he has observed, is especially fragile, tiring easily and subject to tears when criticized or

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questioned. When other refugees, feeling frustrated and slighted when there are not enough resources to go around, begin to single her out for gender-based insults, Deng tries to assure her that it is not her fault. “I benefitted,” he believes, “from the patience and compassion I showed her.” 58 Acutely aware of the generosity that people have already extended to him, he is also constantly wary of its potential withdrawal. He has seen it happen before. Sometimes, as with the college offer, that withdrawal comes as a result of circumstances beyond his control. Other rejections, he believes, may be preventable. Many of the refugees “take the generosity of a person and stretch it to breaking.” 59 So determined is Deng not to be that sort of person that even after the attack, when he cannot bear to go back to the apartment and drives instead to the house of one of his sponsors, he does not knock on their door. Although he is certain that the family will take him in, and can envision in perfect detail their welcome, he does not want to be a burden. He will, he revises his plan, wait in his car in the driveway until daylight. Eventually he berates himself even for having gone there. Driving to their house at 5:00 is a lapse in judgement, a temporary madness. Deng must be careful to calibrate his revelations of need in order to maintain sponsors’ reserve of good will, a form of savings to be drawn on later, and as a result he is painfully aware of the practical consequences of asking too much, as well as personally ashamed of always needing things. “Make a noise and the opportunity might be taken away,” he knows; “complain about anything and get nothing.” 60 This is the place of the precariously helped, obliged constantly to evaluate the witness’s disposition to assist, and to shape or withhold one’s story accordingly. As a result of Eggers’s writerly decisions, Deng’s resentment toward this position is brought to the surface by those interactions that require him to lie about the assault, and boils over just before his final address to the readers. He is compelled to speak, he says, asking “How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you pretending that I do not exist.” 61 For someone who must endlessly scan his surroundings for potential helpers, this final “you”—the witness who cannot pretend that he does not exist—is nothing more or less than a hopeful construct. There are, after all, ample examples in the novel of people pretending that he does not exist, either by refusing to listen to his story or else by listening without acting. As its most extreme there is young Michael, whom Deng calls “TV boy.” When Deng speaks, Michael first turns up the television to drown him out, then drops a book on his head. Finally Michael makes Deng literally disappear from his field of vision, building an improvised fortress of couch cushions around the man on the floor, wounded and bound. But there are also subtler evasions, as apparent in Deng’s imagined conversation with Julian, the emergency room clerk. “Does this interest you?” Deng wonders; “you seem to be well informed and of empathetic nature, though your compas-

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sion surely has a limit. You hear my story, but then I wait. . . . But you sit and think you can do nothing.” 62 In Eggers’s hands, Deng’s story is transformed into a testimony not only about Deng’s experiences, but also about the act of testimonial storytelling, its exigent demands and dicey potential outcomes. The novel’s emphasis on Deng’s need to give clients and sponsors the story they want, which may not be the one he needs to tell, confronts readers with their own complicity in the shape of this tale, and with their potential role in its outcome. I am, after all, reading this book. What story do I want? What, if anything, will I offer in return? NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Bone, 67. Bixler, 107. Bixler, 96. Bixler, 96. Peek, 117. Eggers, What Is the What, 5. Eggers, What Is the What, 5. Eggers, “Boys Walking.” Eggers, “Boys Walking.” Eggers, “Boys Walking.” Eggers, “Boys Walking.” Eggers, “Boys Walking.” Eggers, “Boys Walking.” Eggers, “Boys Walking.” Eggers, “Boys Walking.” Eggers, “Boys Walking.” Eggers, “Boys Walking.” Barnet, “Documentary Novel,” 19–32. Barnet, “Documentary Novel,” 19–32. Barnet, “The Alchemy of Memory,” 206. Barnet, “Alchemy,” 205. Barnet, “Alchemy,” 205. Barnet, “Alchemy,” 204. Peek, 115. Eggers, What Is the What, 422–423. Eggers, What Is the What, 420. Eggers, What Is the What, 420. Eggers, What Is the What, 11. Eggers, What Is the What, 10, 13. Eggers, What Is the What, 12. Eggers, What Is the What, 28. Eggers, What Is the What, 28. Eggers, What Is the What, 29. Eggers, What Is the What, 11–12. Eggers, What Is the What, 10. Eggers, What Is the What, 10. Eggers, What Is the What, 50. Eggers, What Is the What, 9. Eggers, What Is the What, 456. Eggers, What Is the What, 215. Eggers, What Is the What, 156–157.

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42. Eggers, What Is the What, 157. 43. Eggers, What Is the What, 216. 44. Eggers, What Is the What, 218. 45. For more on the challenges that phatic utterances present to language learners, see Padilla Cruz. 46. Eggers, What Is the What, 447. 47. Eggers, What Is the What, 447–448. 48. Eggers, What Is the What, 448. 49. Eggers, What Is the What, 448. 50. Eggers, What Is the What, 448. 51. Eggers, What Is the What, 29, 33. 52. Eggers, What Is the What, 25. 53. Eggers, What Is the What, 25–26. 54. Eggers, What Is the What, 26. 55. Eggers, What Is the What, 26. 56. Smith and Watson, 613. 57. Smith and Watson, 620. 58. Eggers, What Is the What, 157. 59. Eggers, What Is the What, 409. 60. Eggers, What Is the What, 465. 61. Eggers, What Is the What, 475. 62. Eggers, What Is the What, 227–228.

SEVEN You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught Ethics Lessons for Beginners in Uwem Akpan’s “What Language Is That?”

In his 2008 collection of short stories, an Oprah Book Club selection, Nigerian writer Uwem Akpan considers the effects of violence on children in five countries in Africa. Say You’re One of Them was recognized with a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, and a PEN/ Beyond Margins Award, among other literary prizes. In her review for the New York Times, Janet Maslin calls “startling” Akpan’s fusion of “knowledge of African poverty and strife with a conspicuously literary approach to storytelling, filtering tales of horror through the wide eyes of the young.” 1 Maslin is far from the only critic to have made such an observation. Vince Passaro, for instance, pronounces Akpan’s writing “surprisingly expert.” 2 The Washington Post’s Susan Straight calls attention to Akpan’s unusual “talent with metaphor and imagery.” 3 Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Adelle Waldman notes that Akpan’s work is “admirable artistically as well as morally.” 4 “Open the book at any page, as in divination,” promises Louise Erdrich, “and a stunning sentence will leap out.” In the Independent, Alastair Niven insists that “any notion that the short-story form is languishing irrelevantly is disavowed by this terrific, and sometimes terrifying, collection.” 5 Jennifer Mattson, of Booklist, asserts that Akpan’s literary prowess “lift[s his stories] above consciousness-raising shockers.” 6 John Freeman, in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, goes further: “like Flannery O’Connor’s best work, these stories absorb any light you project upon them . . . even when his characters are providing testimony, it can feel like art.” 7

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What is notable here is not the plethora of superlatives, which are after all the stock discourse of the book blurb, but rather the many expressions of surprise at Akpan’s employment of literary art in the production of testimony. That effect is only heightened when reviewers mention Akpan’s birthplace in Nigeria and vocation as Catholic priest, but not his higher education—philosophy and English majors from Gonzaga and Creighton, and an MFA from the University of Michigan. What are critics counting as notably literary in stories written by someone with a terminal degree in creative writing? It is not the artistry itself, but rather the presence of aesthetic devices in the specific context of testimonial storytelling, departures from forensic and epideictic “anti-literary” conventions. As Michael Vander Weele chronicles, Akpan’s first attempts at social intervention came in the form of didactic essays, which were promptly rejected. It was only when Akpan “noticed that the same paper frequently published stories,” that he turned his hand to narrative. 8 As a collection, Say You’re One of Them has been described as an “almost unreadable must-read,” due to its “unrelenting horror.” 9 In “An Exmas Feast,” a twelve-year-old teaches her ten-year-old sister the tradecraft of sex work while they sniff glue, a holiday present thier mother pours to assuage their hunger. “Fattening for Gabon” finds two children being groomed for international trafficking. “Luxurious Hearses” follows a sixteen-year-old first through amputation of a hand as punishment for petty theft, then years later to his death, his throat slit after the missing hand serves to identify him as Muslim. In “My Parents’ Bedroom,” a child watches her father kill her mother with a machete to the skull. Read amid these stories, “What Language Is That?”—a brief account of a friendship between two upper-class six-year-olds disrupted by ChristianMuslim conflict in Bahminya, Ethiopia—is conspicuous for its lack of abject poverty and extreme and graphic violence. These girls occupy the privileged side of the social divide. “What Language Is That?” is also unique in the collection—and arguably the most literary of the stories—in its employment of the second person “you,” that Monika Fludernik asserts “flies in the face of any ‘realistic’ conceptions of fictional storytelling” and “constitutes one of the most ‘nonnatural’ or contrived types of narrative.” 10 The story opens with a strikingly symmetrical description of two little girls, one of which is the narrative’s “you,” the other her friend Selam. Inseparable, each appears first as a parallel reflection in the eyes of the other, reciprocally described with sequences that start with facial features and end with communication skills. “Best Friend said she liked your little eyes and lean face and walk and the way you spoke your English”; you in turn admire your counterpart’s “dimples, long legs, and handwriting.” 11 Your friend is the youngest in her family. You are an only child. You live in two-story brick buildings across the street from each other and attend the same school. So intense is your friendship that, like many twins, you

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have developed a secret language. After school every day you play together on one of your balconies. Both pairs of parents treat you girls like siblings. They take you both along on family outings, and whenever you have a falling out admonish you to “make up or we go home now.” 12 Even the wait staff in a favorite restaurant mistakes you for sisters. The first episode of the story unfolds in idyllic fashion. We learn of the religious difference between your two families—yours is Christian, your companion’s, Muslim—only through a query over dinner at a restaurant. “Is hamburger pork?” Selam wonders. 13 This potential point of friction is immediately smoothed over—not only once, but twice. When your father hastens to assure her that there are other options and that she is “always free to eat what [she] is comfortable with,” it turns out that his paternal counterpart has beaten him to the cosmopolitan punch. 14 “Yes,” Selam replies placidly, “already my daddy said I could eat pork if I wanted.” 15 Little global consumers, you contentedly share a world that appears to have been created specifically for your joint pleasure, partaking of doro wat and spaghetti, pizza and mahberawi, all while watching the Disney channel and playing Snakes & Ladders. The segment closes with a carefree image of the two of you sitting side-by-side, sipping pomegranate juice through “long red and white straws” as you chat about the next day’s games. 16 The second episode is set some days later, in your family’s flat, which is “full of a burning smell.” 17 While your home and the one across the street remain intact, the buildings have been damaged and parts of the neighborhood have been destroyed. School is canceled, and your father, obviously uncomfortable, explains to you that he and your mother no longer want you to play with the child to whom they now refer as “that girl.” “What girl?” you inquire, not understanding the unfamiliar reference. “That Muslim girl,” your mother adds. You are incredulous. “Best Friend?” you ask, waiting for your parents to say they are joking. 18 They attempt to pacify you, explaining that “At six you’re a bit too young to understand these things,” but you are bereft and angry. 19 You throw the remote on the floor and break it. When your parents try to explain that there is “tension between us and them,” you can imagine only the personal. 20 So did your mother quarrel with Selam’s mother, you attempt to clarify, or was it the fathers who quarreled? “It’s complex,” your parents say, “not personal,” “faith differences.” 21 Your protest at the unfairness of it all is met by your mother’s reprimand, the title question “What language is that?” a familiar parental response to children’s use of inappropriate language. 22 Disobeying your parents’ admonitions to stay inside, you and your friend continue to go out on your balconies, staring at each other across the street. Later your parents attempt to distract you with the prospect of a trip to Addis, but you also overhear their conversation about “how the government had kept the complex thing from the news. And how it had

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done the same thing when Muslim radicals suddenly slaughtered Christians in Jimma churches two years back.” 23 The use of italics for the words “complex thing” signals that the you narrator regards this as a new term—one for which she possesses no referent. Finally, both of you furtively return to your balconies to wave and mime hugs and kisses, then retreat to avoid being spotted by Selam’s mother. Having “discovered a new language,” you now cheerfully ask your mother when you will be leaving for Addis, and politely respond “Yes, mommy” to her promises that “Addis will be fun!” and you “will make new friends there.” 24 “Good girl” approves your father, and he promises to “buy a new remote.” 25 Most critical articles on Say You’re One of Them pass over the anomalous “What Language Is That?” in a few lines, treating it as a conventional epideictic parable of the essential goodness of children and their ability to communicate across cultures. Adaobi Nkeokelonye observes approvingly that “these girls mock their parents’ response to faith difference by improvising a new language that can only be decoded by those who still love as children do.” “By regaining the control of awareness of the strong ties between them and again by awakening to the need to disregard the parental surveillance,” elaborates Yildiray Çevik, and “secretly mimicking each other on the balconies,” the girls “reach awakening that an artificially designed language of mutual understanding can do well even without words.” 26 These readings celebrate “What Language Is That?” as a struggle for power in which the two children overcome the strictures imposed by prejudiced adults to reconstitute their original connection. Fewer critics take note of the brevity of that restoration of solidarity. Lisa Long asserts that although “two young girls form a close friendship, despite being of different faiths,” that “friendship is forced to an abrupt end when they are banned from playing together following MuslimChristian conflict.” “They communicate their final farewell through tender mimes across a street from their balconies,” she concludes, “and in doing so are able to transcend the chaos of the conflict around them.” 27 If this is indeed the girls’ final farewell, that brief moment of transcendence offers little hope for the future. Michele Slung’s review of the collection treats this story almost as filler, scarcely interrupting the collection’s overall bleakness. In “the least arresting story, slight and familiar,” the two “families profess liberal, inclusive attitudes, but a Christian child and her Muslim best friend are prohibited from communicating when rioting breaks out.” 28 For Slung, the hope expressed by the girls’ improvised communication is as fleeting as the story’s duration. “Although the girls do find, perhaps briefly, ‘a new language’” she concedes, “that miniscule glimmer of hope for humanity disappears in “Luxurious Hearses,” which goes beyond disturbing toward unbearable as the children of a Tutsi mother and Hutu father in Rwanda witness the unspeakable acts their decent parents are forced to commit.” 29

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While the phrase “decent parents” is here used in reference to another story, it bears noting that the parents in “What Language Is That?” are hardly the villains that most of the above readings imply. Not only do they “profess liberal, inclusive attitudes,” a phrase that suggests hypocrisy, they also act vigorously upon them—at least in the beginning of the story. It is not only the children who are friends, but also the parents. “I like your dad,” the narrator’s father tells Selam; her father is “open minded” and a “nice man.” 30 That affection does not seem to be feigned for the benefit of the children, either. The fathers also socialize independently of their offspring, watching football together at Cinima Bahminya, for instance, and the entire families go together to the bicycle race in nearby Jimma. The Muslim parents even confront their own religious authorities in defense of cultural diversity and progress. When the imam criticizes children’s kite flying as “foreign,” and takes the parents to task for “exposing their children to strange ways,” “Best Friend’s parents told your parents that they had told the imam that he should not try to tell them how to raise their children in a free Ethiopia.” 31 By socializing so openly and embracing those “strange ways,” the parents in the story run much greater social risks than their daughters. Theirs is a liberalism writ large and practiced publicly. Moreover, that ideology appears to be supported by other authority figures in the girls’ lives. In their schoolroom, for instance, Christian and Muslim children attend together, and the map that the teacher has taught the children to trace is labeled simply “Africa, Our Continent.” 32 Meanwhile, the children in the story are not universally avatars of appreciation for difference, as seen when little Hadiya, a jealous classmate, attempts to use religion to drive a wedge between the two best friends. She was the one, reports Selam, who said that hamburger was pork. For the you narrator, Best Friend’s having spoken to Hadiya constitutes in itself an unpardonable offense, regardless of the content of the conversation. “I told you not to talk to Hadiya!” she exclaims, “she’s not our friend.” 33 Despite Selam’s apologies and protestations that she did not speak to Hadiya, that rather “she just came up to me and said I follow Christians and eat pork at Hoteela Federalawi, and ran away,” the narrator is prepared to shun her. 34 As she moves her chair away and vows never to speak to her again, Selam retaliates. “I won’t talk to you again either,” she declares, “and I won’t even hug you.” 35 It is only through the intervention of the narrator’s father that their relationship is repaired. “‘Oh no Selam,” he assures, “She’s kidding. She’ll talk with you, she’ll sit with you.” 36 “Sweetheart,” he admonishes, “don’t be mean to Best Friend.” 37 Were the father actually opposed to the girls’ friendship, this would have been a convenient moment to allow it to end. Neither Hadiya’s attempts to sow religious discord nor the narrator’s father’s active brokering of peace between the girls would seem to square with readings of

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“What Language Is That?” as children versus parents on the matter of intercultural friendship. Given the extent to which the paired protagonists’ world has been smoothly globalized, it is not even clear that they perceive their friendship as somehow specifically intercultural. The two girls seem to have existed in a private bubble, one where “the world was only big enough for the two of you, and your secret language was an endless giggle.” 38 While clearly they are aware of differences on such matters as eating pork, the story makes explicit that this is not an issue for Selam’s family, and the spat that Hadiya does manage to provoke hinges not on religious difference but instead on Selam’s alleged violation of the two little girls’ very private code regarding conversations with classmates. “It is only when the riots break out,” between episodes one and two, notes Adrian Knapp, “that the two families suddenly drift apart and the parents forbid their daughters from having any further contact.” 39 Seen from the perspective of the girls, and in light of the context supplied in episode one, it is no wonder that the narrator finds this development baffling. Given the parents’ active encouragement of the girls’ friendship and their own apparent friendship in episode one, what would explain their sudden about-face in episode two, severing all contact? As evident in the Hadiya incident above, the narrator can well imagine ending a relationship on the basis of a personal quarrel, but her parents deny that anything of the sort has happened. Even after the violence, the two fathers have remained in communication. “Your daddy and her daddy spoke this morning about you two,” reports the narrator’s mother. 40 She also rejects out of hand the possibility that she might have fallen out with Selam’s mother. “Ai, no,” she responds, “she’s a sweet woman.” 41 The parents go on to stress that the prohibition is not only on their side, that Selam’s family has made the same decision and “also told her to keep away from you.” 42 While there is now “tension” between Christians and Muslims, the parents say, they still express not only their positive regard for Selam and her parents, but also a more general conviction that that Muslims are not “bad people,” “not really.” 43 This scene seems a far cry from one critic’s description of “What Language Is That?” as a story that “reflects on the relationship of Selam and her best friend as their parents inject into them the language of hatred triggered by their misunderstanding of faith difference.” 44 The language of hatred is notably absent from the parents’ discourse, and they take pains to counter it when they hear it. The implication here is that both sets of parents are acting reluctantly and in concert to keep the girls apart, not out of religious animosity on either side, but rather out of a common desire to protect their daughters from violence. In the face of the rioting, the parents now find their children’s friendship too dangerous to sustain. A subtle detail that Akpan has slipped into the story, that recollection of “when Muslim radicals had suddenly slaughtered Christians in Jimma two years ago,” lends further

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support to the idea that their separation of the girls is a function of protection rather than prejudice. 45 Jimma is the site of the bicycle race the two families recently attended together. Apparently, the families had thus far managed to sustain an intimate friendship between adults as well as children, even when the violence had come as near as one city away. It is only when the risk is literally on their own block that they separate the girls. The story’s conclusion also underscores this family’s privileged position vis à vis the conflict. While the lower floor of their house has been damaged and the father’s Peugeot vandalized, they still have the means to travel. Their socioeconomic position permits them to keep the violence at a safe remove, and the replacement of television’s remote becomes a metaphor for restoration of spectatorial distance between them and the riots. Seen in this light, “What Language Is That?” ceases to be a clear-cut contest between child heroes and adult nemeses, and Knapp’s reading of the story does temper slightly the assessment of the adults. Rather than religious hatred, Knapp describes the parents’ response to the conflict as a “partially self-imposed passivity, which is largely predicated on the perception of oneself as victim.” 46 When it comes to the presumed heroism of the daughters, however, his assessment remains staunchly epideictic. “The incomprehensible, culturally-imposed separation,” he maintains, “only increases the girls’ awareness of the strong social bond that exists between them and results in them undermining their parents’ authority.” 47 “While the children’s way of making sense of the world was formerly exclusively filtered through their parents’ eyes and filial obligations,” he argues, “the religious turmoil and violence compel them to question their parents’ ideological beliefs and, albeit secretly, stand up for their own ideals.” 48 “Being free from their parents’ authority, the two girls fight the enforced control of their intercultural communication” and seize the moment to “reclaim a sense of personal agency laying the foundation for a new form of ‘subjective in-between.’” 49 This is a lot of weight to assign to a mute exchange of waves and gestures of hugs and kisses between a couple of six-year-olds. And what are the ethical implications for readers? “After experiencing the world through the eyes of suffering children,” Knapp declares, adult readers “cannot but feel guilty about the world we have created,” so that the story becomes an invitation “both to see the world differently and to take a public stand, and to condemn the violence inherent in our present social web of relationships.” 50 Despite his more nuanced characterization of the parents, Knapp’s reading ultimately magnifies the scant power of the six-year-olds, placing the story back in an orthodox interpretation where rebel children lead adult readers to change the world. In this framework, the narrator’s obedient and cheerful responses at the end of the story would need to be read as a sort of strategic subterfuge: the tiny progressive sleeper cell headed temporarily underground. Knapp’s char-

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acterization of the daughters’ response to their separation brings his reading perilously close to a position that he dismisses earlier in his article as an “escapist strategy,” a projected future that can also serve to authorize spectatorship, allowing readers to cheer on from the sidelines the next generation’s determination to resolve the social conflicts that today’s adults have not. 51 While Knapp and many others clearly hope that the example set by child characters will make readers feel at once guilty, hopeful, and eager to accept that invitation to act, this is hardly the only possible response to “What Language Is That?” In general, those epideictic readings focus on plot and character, with scant attention, if any, to the employment of second person narration. Michael Vander Weele asserts that such readings constitute not just limited analytical approaches, but, from an ethical standpoint, evasive ones. Citing Oliver Lovesey’s assertion that “attending to the child as character but not as teller reduces attention to the strain of the postcolonial child’s marginalization,” Vander Weele argues that overlooking the unusual narrative voice also “weakens the opportunity Akpan desires for the reader to ‘sit with these children for a while’ and maybe be able to say ‘For the sake of our children, let’s change something on the way we think about these issues.’” 52 “The drama of the story,” insists Vander Weele, “cannot be separated from the drama of its retelling.” 53 Critics who do take into account the story’s second person narration tend to reach different conclusions from those who consider only its plot, both about the future implied for the children in “What Language Is That?” and about the mechanisms through which Akpan’s stories might operate in terms of social justice. Vander Weele’s analysis rests not on the premise of the characters’ future triumph but rather on acknowledgement of their present losses. The many broken relationships across the collection, he observes, make clear that “there are all sorts of socio-historical, psychological, and moral obstacles to the beauty of human exchange.” 54 “Attention to these broken narratives,” he argues, “should caution us about early claims for the children’s self-assertion or for the stories’ immediacy, which may not be Akpan’s goals.” 55 Vander Weele characterizes the girls’ relationship as an “interfaith kindergarten friendship resisting and then collapsing under the weight of societal conflict in a Bahminyan neighborhood.” 56 Bereft of Selam, her constant companion and interlocutor, he suggests, the “you” narrator may now be left speaking to herself, struggling to come to terms with that painful separation from her virtual twin. “As with the first person narratives,” he asserts, “the story-teller is retelling her own experience, trying to make sense of it but in the second person, with more objectification and perhaps less understanding, between past and present self, that is, she situates her past self (‘you’) outside of herself.” 57 “The gap, between experience and its retelling, gives the story the structure of a literary tale” and leaves the

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reader “almost as if overhearing the child’s effort to find a language that will help her understand the ways in which she has suffered.” 58 Given the six-year-old’s small store of knowledge and experience, it is no surprise that she struggles to make sense of what it is that she has just witnessed, a situation in which contact with her best friend has ceased to be possible due to a “complex thing” called “faith differences,” which, as Daddy has tried to explain, has caused a “tension between us, but not ‘us’ as in us.” 59 The previous cordial relations between the two families, the parents’ insistence that Muslims are not bad people, and the ideologies of unity, progress, and globalization that she has absorbed from the community only make that “complex thing” more puzzling. Vander Weele suggests that she may in fact not manage to understand it, at least not at six. “While we might expect stories in a realistic mode to move from the flux of experience to a hard-won understanding,” he finds that the stories in Say You’re One of Them, including this one, “move in the opposite direction.” 60 The six-year-old finds herself cast out not only from her relationship with Selam, but also from a world that was idyllically pleasant and, to the extent of her limited perception, comprehensible. The task that she faces now is nothing less than the reconstitution of reality. In contrast to the epideictic readings’ robust assessments of the girls’ reestablishment of communication, Vander Weele’s judgements are much more measured. This new “non-linguistic language,” he observes, also “serves to make the ‘you’ less defiant.” 61 He notes that “the language that follows, and that brings the story to an end,” the exchange between the narrator and her parents, “is full of lies and superficiality and acquiescence.” 62 The girls’ new line of communication, he cautions, “seems promising but inarticulate. It does not seem strong enough to counter Selam’s angry mother, or the superficial talk of Mommy and Daddy with which the story ends.” 63 Vander Weele finds in that “fragile” new language only the merest possibility of overcoming the “adult desire for control” that “seems to shut down exchange,” 64 and his reading is more in the deliberative vein, replacing certainties about the future of the girls’ friendship with a contingent hope. Fludernik explains that “there are . . . some [second person] texts in which the generalized reading (“you” equals “one”), in the form of a very specific reader role, persists despite the narrowing of reference, and it does so because in these texts the desired effect is precisely to make the reader feel personally responsible, personally caught in the discourse and exposed to its political thrust.” 65 “Second person narrative,” she continues, “can, and frequently does, correlate with great emotional depth since the dialogic relationship it puts at its very center allows for an in-depth treatment of human relationships, especially of relationships fraught with intense emotional rifts and tensions.” 66 But how about this particular second person narrative? Is “What Language Is That?” likely to catch readers and expose them to a political thrust? Perhaps, depending upon

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which addressee position the reader adopts. The obvious choice for reading is the overt addressee position—that of the six-year-old girl who serves both as narratee and point of focalization. Not only is it natural to try on—at least for a while—the perspective of someone called “you,” the child’s position is also a far less demanding one from a moral standpoint. After all, what can six-year-olds do about anything? The likely conclusion of this reading is still a sort of distant sense of promise, a bland “see, children do not harbor prejudices, so there is hope for the future after all” that can serve to let the present reader off the hook. There is, however, another possible second person reading, one in which the reader occupies a more distanced and critical perspective. Based on Susan Z. Andrade’s observations on “the swing to anti-mimeticism” 67 in African literature of the twenty-first century, Isaac Ndlovu contends that the stories in Say You’re One of Them constitute a sort of border genre, participating not only in the realist or mimetic tradition— the one that would support the conventional epideictic readings considered earlier—but also in the anti-mimetic tradition of satire. 68 “The satirical quality of these narratives,” he argues, suggests that Akpan is “not necessarily interested in mimetic realism but rather in a satirical exposé.” 69 “It is tempting,” Ndlovu concedes, “to read the texts for their documentary content . . . rather than the literary strategies the author employs,” but in fact “the consistent and expert use of the satirical as a literary strategy is what saves these texts from falling over the precipice of savagery and from being merely historical and journalistic accounts of African children’s misery.” 70 Or, in the unique case of this story, I would add, from soaring away in anticipation of children’s future triumph. Charles Taylor, considering the potential social outcomes of Akpan’s collection, gestures to such a satirical reading when he observes that “in Akpan’s view, before Africa can be rescued, it must first be rescued from being a fashionable cause. Say You’re One of Them is an implicit rebuke to sentimentalities like the ad campaign of celebrities doing themselves up in multi-culti kitsch and proclaiming ‘I Am African,’ an arrogant boast as blind as the blindness it means to address.” 71 “No one,” Ndlovu insists, “escapes Akpan’s keen, sardonic satire.” 72 Viewed in this light, the initial globalism and mutual acceptance of the two families in “What Language Is That?”—so exceptionally smooth as to be over-the-top—can be seen as itself a form of parody, an ironic criticism of the facile avoidance of larger social and political issues. In the story, violent conflict—“no big deal” and vaguely embarrassing—is dealt with almost as neatly as the girls’ spat in the restaurant, in which the potential threat to their friendship posed by religious difference, played out in microcosm by Hadiya’s provocation, ends in the same saccharine “Huggzee, Huggzee” that the girls mime on the balcony. 73 When the narrator’s anger at the enforced separation from her friend threatens to upset the calm façade, her mother rebukes her with the title phrase

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“What language is that?”—the familiar parental code for things of which well brought up people do not speak, a phrase that calls out a mere violation of etiquette. Such a satirical reading has much in common with Fludernik’s take on Max Frisch’s “Burleske,” in which she finds a demonstration that “even second person texts that do not openly indulge in reader provocation can operate in fairly critical ways through the mere subject matter of the story,” providing “an analysis of ‘the’ bourgeois susceptibility both to succumb to intimidation and, at the same time, to reinterpret one’s cowardice as broadminded liberality.” 74 In this more twisted reading of the story, the lesson learned by the “you” child is not the “we are the world” discovery of the mute language of secret friendship, but quite a different function of silence—as the proper way to respond to religious and ethnic violence. All that is needed to resolve the problem of burning houses in the neighborhood is a quick family vacation and the purchase of a new remote—anything to put some distance between yourself and the “complex thing” of intercultural conflict and violence. Children do not only rebel against their parents, they also learn from them—in this case, to speak a new language in which relationships across cultures are understood to be pleasant in peacetime but impossible in times of conflict, in which Addis really will be fun and she will make new friends. In this reading, the new language that she is learning and beginning to try out is not a ruse on her part, nor is it at odds with the speech of the adults: the language she is learning is her parents’ language. The adults do, as they say, “understand how she feels,” because they used to feel that way too—before they grew out of it, that is, and learned about the “complex thing.” 75 Ndlovu has observed that the stories in Say You’re One of Them derive “most of their potency by constituting their narratives by what cannot be said and what cannot be shown.” 76 This satirical reading of “What Language Is That?” confronts readers with a child who is just now learning those subtle rules of what she should not see or say. Here the message of “What Language Is That?” is not another endorsement of the familiar piety of how adults need to learn from children how to be friends across cultures, but rather a sardonic exposure of a subtler lesson that many children learn from their parents—how to quietly and politely abandon that ideal as part of the process of growing up. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Janet Maslin, quoted on Akpan, “Praise.” Vince Passaro, quoted on Akpan, “Praise.” Susan Straight, quoted on Akpan, “Praise.” Adele Waldman, quoted on Akpan, “Praise.” Alastair Niven, quoted on Akpan, “Praise.” Jennifer Mattson, quoted on Akpan, “Praise.”

110 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

Chapter 7 John Freeman, quoted on Akpan, “Praise.” Vander Weele, 137. Kirkus Reviews, “Uwem Akpan, Say You’re One of Them.” Fludernik, “Introduction,” 290. Akpan, 176. Akpan, 178. Akpan, 177. Akpan, 178. Akpan, 178. Akpan, 178. Akpan, 179. Akpan, 179. Akpan, 180. Akpan, 181. Akpan, 182. Akpan, 184. Akpan, 185. Italics in the original. Akpan, 186. Akpan, 187. Cevik, 55. Long. Slung, 33. Slung, 33. Akpan, 178. Akpan, 175–176. Akpan, 182. Akpan, 177. Akpan, 177. Akpan, 177. Akpan, 177. Akpan, 177. Akpan, 175. Knapp, 6–7. Akpan, 181. Akpan, 181. Akpan, 180. Akpan, 182. Nkeokelonye. Akpan, 185. Knapp, 2. Knapp, 7. Knapp, 7. Knapp, 7, 2. Knapp, 13. Knapp, 2. Vander Weele, 120. Vander Weele, 132. Vander Weele, 130. Vander Weele, 130. Vander Weele, 123. Vander Weele, 134. Vander Weele, 127; 136. Akpan, 182. Italics in the original. Vander Weele, 127. Vander Weele, 134. Vander Weele, 134.

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63. Vander Weele, 135. 64. Vander Weele, 135. 65. Fludernik, “Test Case,” 452. 66. Fludernik, “Test Case,” 466. 67. Andrade, 183. 68. Ndlovu, 74. 69. Ndlovu, 74. 70. Ndlovu, 97. 71. Taylor, “Can I Get a Witness?” 72. Ndlovu, 89. 73. Akpan, 179–180; 185. 74. Fludernik, “Test Case,” 470. 75. Akpan, 180. 76. Ndlovu, 79, notes that the phrase “what cannot be said and what cannot be shown” comes from Judith Butler’s Precarious Life, xvii.

EIGHT My Life Is Based on a Real Story Recursive Witness in Alicia Partnoy’s “Rosa, I Disowned You” and “Disclaimer Intraducible: My Life / Is Based / on a Real Story”

Human rights advocate, writer, producer, scholar, and professor of Latin American literature at Loyola Marymount University, Alicia Partnoy is best known for The Little School, a 1986 testimonial short story collection detailing her disappearance, imprisonment, and torture by the Argentine junta from 1977 to 1979 in response to her student activism, one of over 30,000 disappearances at the hands of that military regime. Reissued in 1998, The Little School became a classic of the testimonial genre. Four decades after her disappearance, two of Partnoy’s recent works loop back to deal with its ongoing sequelae, as the very responses that initially allowed her to endure and survive have begun to exact a delayed price. “Rosa, I Disowned You” (2008) hinges on the present-day consequences of the denial and dissociation that rendered her a skeptical witness to her own rape. A linked narrative, “Disclaimer Intraducible: My Life / Is Based / on a Real Story” (2009) returns to the Rosa story as point of departure for analysis of the nature of testimonio and the constraints that even well-meaning witnesses, among them not only readers but translators, publishers, and human rights professionals, impose on survivors’ storytelling. In “Lesson in Survival,” her preface to the second edition of The Little School, Julia Alvarez takes note of the “vivid, felt particulars” of Partnoy’s first collection of stories, and also of the stories’ almost telegraphic brevity. 1 “Perhaps,” Alvarez muses, that reticence is a kindness to the reader, perhaps Partnoy “realizes that humankind cannot tolerate much reality, 113

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and she keeps us engaged for as long as she thinks we can bear it.” 2 But it is not only readers who have limits, Alvarez adds, “perhaps, too, this is all that this brave and talented woman can bring herself to put down.” 3 While more subtle and more modestly speculative than many critical observations on the motivations of testimonial writers, Alvarez’s comments still signal a blurring of autobiographical and testimonial expectations. On the one hand, her assessments still honor, if only in the breach, a Lejeunian expectation that autobiographical accounts should normally be expected to tell all. 4 On the other, Alvarez’s acknowledgement of the goal of engagement and the constraints it might entail reflects at least the outlines of a testimonial contract. In fact, The Little School as published contained considerably more about Partnoy than she had originally elected to reveal. The manuscript that she submitted to Cleis Press had focused on stories of her fellow prisoners’ experience, not her own. As a condition of acceptance, editors demanded that Partnoy “create more tales for the collection because they wanted the focus of the book to be more on the autobiographic.” 5 “Most of the stories were about my friends who never reappeared,” recalls Partnoy; “I wanted it to be about a whole generation, but the editor told me that the reading public would want to see me in the stories.” 6 “I was desperate to get the book published,” she explains, “so I started to write the new stories about me; by writing more about me I became the main character in the book. I did not want to give the impression that I was a special person, that I could go through torture and not show any signs of damage.” 7 Even as she complied with those editorial demands, Partnoy still managed a measure of resistance. The self-descriptions in those autobiographical stories that she wrote in exchange for publication are often explicitly anti-heroic. At the same time, her self-comparisons to fellow prisoners do dwell on their vulnerabilities: one is younger, another disabled, many are more naïve. With its complex display of resistance, doubt, resilience, and assistance to others, the rich specificity of The Little School still serves as a useful counterweight to defensive readings that might allow witnesses to injustice to evade responsibility on the grounds that social change can only be brought about by superheroic figures. Partnoy has since written much more about disappearance, its aftermath, and the act of writing testimonio. “Rosa, I Disowned You,” published in Jennifer Langer’s collection If Salt Has Memory: Jewish Exiled Writers from Africa, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East, returns to the Little School 8 and Partnoy’s prison experience. The new story chronicles a haunting event that appears nowhere in the previous collection, and in which Partnoy herself is the central character. Or to put it more precisely, Partnoy’s several selves are the central characters. On the one hand there is the narrator, present day Alicia, now a tenured professor at a university in California. On the other, back in prison in Argentina as well as back in time, there is the twenty-year-old self she calls Rosa, the one

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described in the title as disowned. Rosa is the protagonist of a slowly developing rape narrative, a story from the Little School that Alicia is only now beginning to tell. In “Rosa, I Disowned You,” Alicia narrates her present life in first-person, but when she finally brings herself to tell Rosa’s story, it appears in third-person. This is not Rosa’s first appearance in a story by Partnoy. In The Little School, she mentions that she and her friends had all adopted aliases back then, intending to minimize the information they held about each other to prevent disclosures in the event of arrest and torture. When her friend Graciela was arrested, she recalls, “I left my house for some days,” and “I named myself Rosa.” 9 “Just as a precaution,” she hedges; “sometimes the whole affair of the alias seemed ridiculous.” 10 In a small town, of course, it might be possible to find the one Alicia, but in her city there were hundreds, maybe thousands. “When they came to arrest me,” she reports, “I didn’t know whether they were coming for Rosa or Alicia, but it was for me that they came.” 11 Alias notwithstanding, in narrating her time in prison in The Little School she consistently refers to herself as Alicia. Even on the day she is kidnapped, when the officer demands her name she answers “Alicia Partnoy.” 12 To his next question, “Alias?” she replies “None.” 13 That story, “My Names,” published barely a decade after Partnoy’s disappearance, presents the Rosa alias as nothing more than a temporary and ineffective expedient, not as an alter ego or a persistent identity in prison. On the contrary, in fact. She writes that after the guards threaten to call the prisoners by numbers and give her the nickname “Death,” “every day, when I wake up, I say to myself that I, Alicia Partnoy, am still alive.” 14 Some forty years later, in a new story, Rosa is back. She now appears to have taken on, or perhaps more accurately returned from, a life of her own. Self-referential in multiple senses, “Rosa, I Disowned You,” begins with a disclaimer that this, the story we see, is not the story that Alicia initially had in mind. That tale is introduced only apophatically, as the story she had planned to work on before her daughter called to tell her about a nightmare. The anticipated story was going to begin with an “image of my husband’s back.” 15 Readers first learn the central fact of the story under construction not directly from the narrator, but instead obliquely, through her description of her husband’s reaction to it, blaming himself for her not knowing sooner that she was raped. “He screamed,” she recalls, “I’m a piece of shit!” 16 Second person narrative, observes Monika Fludernik, can be a very strange thing, and this instance raises a compelling question. 17 How does it fall to the narrator’s husband to tell her that she was raped? The frame story will later reveal the rest of the narrative that he is reacting to, one containing all of the elements of the rape narrative, save, apparently, that key classification. For now, however, that story is left hanging. Rosa’s horrific narrative is put on hold while Alicia responds to a daughter’s nightmare, one in

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which she reports that blood came out of her mother’s mouth. Reading it as a portent, her daughter begs her to take care with what she eats. This daughter’s heightened level of concern for her mother does not come as a surprise. As Michael Dobkowski observes, “children of Holocaust survivors may assume more responsibility for their parents and carry greater anxiety and guilt.” 18 The military junta that ordered the disappearances, imprisonment, torture and murder of 30,000 Argentines constituted in many ways an extension of the genocidal project that was cut short in Europe. Argentina harbored and hired German and Italian Nazi fugitives from justice after World War II, and the junta sought to stoke anti-Semitic sentiment with references to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fabricated exposé of Jewish plans for world domination. 19 In prison, Partnoy had been singled out with anti-Semitic threats. 20 Attempting to brush off her daughter’s warning and lighten the mood, Alicia replies teasingly: “Or maybe with what I say?” 21 For readers, that danger is already apparent, but the daughter, unaware of the emerging story, merely repeats her plea to take care with food. Having just witnessed the pain that the emerging narrative caused her husband, Alicia now withholds it from her daughter. Again she makes a joke, reminding her to submit a bill for her clairvoyant service. They “both laughed, and that was that.” 22 As for the details of the rape narrative, readers will have to wait longer still. Alicia, who has a paper to present at a conference, needs to get to the airport. The frame story’s chronicle of the process of composition depicts the rape narrative yet to be written as anything but a spontaneous cry for help, as testimonio was once assumed to have been, and this subject as anything but a naïve informant. Not only is the testimony described as carefully planned, its development is repeatedly put on hold, subordinated to more pressing matters that range from the maternal to the professional. An anxious daughter is skillfully soothed, conference travel accomplished. The narrator’s self-possession here contrasts sharply with the husband’s searing emotional reaction. It is only once she reaches the airport and joins the security line that her attention returns to the anticipated story, and now she has doubts. It was not, she observes, “a simple rape.” 23 If it had been, she insists, she would have reported it along with all of the other abuses of human rights that she and her friends had suffered in the Little School—torture, murder, the kidnapping of her friend Graciela’s newborn in the camp. Partnoy has testified to all of those events, and not only in The Little School but also officially, forensically, in front of the truth and reconciliation commission that made Argentina a sort of poster-country for transitional justice. 24 She even helped to write the final report of the Comisión Nacional Sobre la Desapariencia de las Personas [National Commission on Disappeared Persons], hopefully but ironically titled Nunca más [Never Again]. She has not, however, reported this rape.

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As she waits in line at the Frontier Airlines counter, a fellow passenger points to “a red, shiny, fat drop of blood on the floor.” 25 This is not the first time that Partnoy has written about seeing blood on a floor. The image recalls an instance at the beginning of The Little School when, newly arrived at the prison, she glimpses through a gap in her blindfold a small puddle of blood. That earlier episode also shares this story’s halting pace of revelation, as next to that pool she notices a small patch of blue that seems somehow familiar. It is the same color as her husband’s pants, she slowly realizes, and yet another beat will pass before she can bring herself to the conclusion that readers will already have reached. “It was him,” and that was his blood. 26 In that episode, the repeated delays in recognition have a lifeworld analog; fear and pain can slow cognitive processing. But whose blood is it this time? And why does Rosa’s story keep getting interrupted? “Just what one needs to see before boarding a plane these days,” another passenger remarks. 27 “Or,” Alicia thinks, “before writing these kinds of confessions.” 28 “Confessional writing” is an accurate generic label for personal experience tales such as this. Even so, the connotations of confession take on an edge when referring to a story in which the writer is the victim. The choice to couch the rape narrative within a chronicle of its own development cannot be fully accounted for by real-life analogs. As in Jarrett-Macauley’s novel, the pre-emptive revelation of the nature of the violence shifts the narrative focus from the event itself to the act of telling it. Moreover, since unlike that novel, here the speaker is also the survivor, the developing suspense and perhaps even impatience of the reader with the will I/won’t I sequences has an additional effect. Even as the narrative hesitation underscores the risk and pain the speaker faces in telling her tale, it also confronts readers with the intensity of their own appetite for that narrative. Speculation on whose blood it is this time brings on yet another digression, as Alicia is reminded of a childhood tale in which “drops of blood talked to children.” 29 The fairy tale reference is from a Brothers Grimm collection: “The Goose Girl,” published in 1815 in the second volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen. 30 With its references to the folk motif of the crime that cries out for justice, in which inanimate objects supernaturally step up to identify a perpetrator when the victim cannot, as well as the ancient ritual of blood sacrifice for the benefit of others, “The Goose Girl” bears obvious parallels to this testimonial story. Moreover, with its plot of restoration of justice through the intervention of resourceful and sympathetic witnesses, the allusion holds out the hope of a successful narrative project. The queen mother’s drawing of blood to protect her daughter recalls as well another instance of blood imagery from The Little School. In “Bread” Partnoy describes the risk that she and her friends ran by resisting the junta as “betting our blood” that their children (including her daughter, the “big kid” whose warning appears in this story) might come of age in a more just society. 31 Telling this tale now is another

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painful and risky bet, the reference suggests, but one that may yet pay off. Besides, Alicia reflects, her upcoming reading of the story to be called “Rosa, I Disowned You,” has already been advertised. People are expecting it. This rationale acknowledges the enabling role of engaged witnesses, but also the ongoing risks to the bearer of the tale. Again, she hesitates, asking herself why that blood on the floor has a man in line “freaking out,” and “if it is true I was raped,” then “who is going to benefit from the telling?” 32 The matter of consequences is not only the familiar cui bono, for whose good? There is also the serious concern of cui malo—beyond the certainty of suffering fresh pain herself, a price Alicia has paid before and may be willing to pay again, she faces as well the prospect of inflicting pain on others, including her parents and children. She has reason to worry. Having already witnessed her husband’s anguish, she can well imagine the pain that her story is about to visit on the rest of her family. The testimonialist’s questions here demolish any illusions that this new testimony will somehow serve a straightforward forensic purpose, that any individual might be brought up on charges. Moreover, she is painfully aware that deniers of the Argentine extension of the Holocaust might use the belated publication of this new story to impeach her other acts of witness. The nature of the crime, an incident that she herself acknowledges that she has not always classified as rape, may make it easier for them to portray her as the sort of person who makes things up. Now it falls to Alicia’s husband to reinforce her original account. Taking up the painful task of reiterating her story in second person, he recounts to his wife the story of her own rape. He calls attention to the defining details of the crime, the fact that she was “blindfolded, helpless” before the guard, and obviously “that was not consensual.” 33 Her husband had spoken those words in Spanish, Alicia explains to her readers, but she is using English “so you do not take over my bedroom.” 34 For bilingual individuals, including those like Partnoy who are highly proficient in two languages, the first is likely to remain the language of intimacy, the second of “outside” transactions. 35 This explicit choice to withhold that esoteric language from readers is a pointed counter to any sense that they are already parties to that intimacy, or that the degree of selfrevelation that testimonio entails is in any way easy. And again she hesitates. Perhaps, she reflects, she should heed her daughter’s nightmare and the blood at the gate, especially when the story she plans to tell is based on dreams—the ones she had at twenty that had led her to the student resistance movement, the ones that had for so long obscured her recognition of the rape, and the ones of the past week that had permitted the story “to take shape without disturbing my busy days.” 36 If this is a story made up of dreams, she wonders, how could it be endangered by “a dream and a drop of blood?” 37

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“Rosa,” she finally opens the much-anticipated story, “was not afraid of blood. She had joined the resistance movement.” 38 In contrast with the deliberate anti-heroism of Partnoy’s self-portrayal in The Little School, Rosa is here described in the mold of Fearless Girl, 39 strong and certain. The syntax and lexicon here, the bold declarative sentences, all recall the conventions of orthodox socialist realism, narratives in which the heroes, like monumental Soviet statues of mothers and workers, are larger than life. But even after that resolute beginning, the development of Rosa’s story is interrupted yet again, this time by a series of intrusive images from a film that a colleague has recommended, a documentary about Filipina women “forced into sexual slavery during the Japanese occupation” that contains painful images of a line of soldiers repeatedly raping a teenaged girl in prison. 40 For readers, the parallels between these women and the violence done to Rosa at the Little School are obvious, even as Alicia rejects the connection. Rosa, she maintains, was not like those victims, and “shed neither blood nor the information that the enemy demanded.” 41 As Rosa’s story unfolds, however, parallel lines of imprisonment, vulnerability, and shame draw her inexorably closer to the women in the film. Rosa was “imprisoned and deeply humiliated,” concedes Alicia, and she “wanted to believe that by pleasing the guards” she could regain some degree of control over her life. 42 Both the style and the content of this description of Rosa’s circumstances contrast sharply with the confident characterization in the earlier segment. At the time, Alicia recalls, Rosa had constructed other identities, ones that shored her up and restored to her some sense of agency and security. At one point she had convinced herself that she was the one in control, “a sort of Mata Hari.” 43 Mata Hari was the stage name adopted by Margaretha Geertruida Zella Macleod, a Dutch dancer. Fleeing an abusive marriage, she invented an exotic stage persona that she described as an East Indian temple dancer. Mata Hari’s story of glamour and intrigue inspired a number of films and novels, including a classic feature starring Greta Garbo. MacLeod herself would be imprisoned and executed in France as a spy for the Germans during World War II, on charges of espionage that may have been trumped up. 44 Over time, Rosa’s defensive narrative morphs from instrumental seduction to romance plot. The guard had told her his name, she offers as evidence of his sincerity, and had even promised to shelter her in his family home. The romance narrative begins to break down as soon as the facts are laid forth. When one day Rosa, still blindfolded, asks to see his ID, he drops something in her hand; it turns out to be a chocolate bar. 45 Many critics have commented on the phenomenon of dissociation or “doubling” in Partnoy’s testimonios. Diana Taylor cites Robert Jay Lifton’s research on doubling in The Nazi Doctors, on what he termed “an active psychological process, a means of adaptation to extremity” that “enabled tormentors to function in a culture of systematized murder, to

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see themselves as humane and reasonable human beings, to reconcile themselves to their environment and avoid guilt.” 46 Partnoy’s writing, Taylor observes, demonstrates “that victims also experience doubling as a protective strategy that works to maintain their sense of psychic integrity, albeit at a cost.” 47 Even as writing may constitute “a reenactment of the doubling/splitting phenomenon,” Taylor asserts, it “also provides a therapeutic way of dealing with the long-term effects of the torture, of exerting control over a series of events in which one had no control.” 48 “Rosa, I Disowned You,” reveals the nature of that long term cost, doubling’s complex sequelae. In a chilling inversion of the split that Lifton identified—the compartmentalization that allows perpetrators to commit atrocities while still conceiving of themselves as decent people, distancing themselves from their own guilt—this story demonstrates how victims’ self-protective doubling may also come to obscure the crime. In prison, those assumed identities of Mata Hari or secret lover helped to sustain Rosa’s sense of self. In the process, however, they also displaced guilt from the rapist, who became Mata Hari’s victim or Rosa’s lover. For Rosa/Alicia, the prospect of relinquishing those constructed identities now creates an excruciating bind. Rosa the revolutionary, the spy, the young lover, has suddenly become one of those prisoners who did not survive. With the removal of the protective bandage that those alternate identities constituted, the failure to report Rosa’s rape, not only to others, but even to herself, becomes for Alicia a fresh source of survivor guilt. By so far disowning that younger self’s experience, it appears, she may have failed to testify for another fellow prisoner. Even as those cover stories collapse, Alicia still holds out against identification with the Filipinas. Rosa was not, she reiterates, as vulnerable as they were. She struggles to count the ways. But now that the facts of Rosa’s life have been brought to light, they undermine the argument that she somehow had it better. Ultimately, the fiction that Rosa was not like the women in the film becomes unsustainable. At the end of the film Alicia hears a woman say, “my name is Ninotchka,” but now the name sounds to her like “Alicia.” 49 The narratives’ multiple plot lines have at last converged, closing the distance between the Filipinas’ story, Rosa’s past, Alicia’s past, and Alicia’s present. In many therapeutic narratives, this moment would count as the triumph, the iteration of the traumatic memory and its integration into the client’s life story. What appeared at first to be narrative digressions are likewise tightly integrated. The goose girl and the women in the documentary have told their stories, which have in turn provided the impetus for Alicia to see hers in different light. Rosa’s experience is now a part of Alicia’s life story, as apparent from the present tense verb in “my husband knows that Rosa loves him.” 50 For Alicia, however, the act of testimonial telling is further complicated by her current status as a writer and academic. Those roles carry certain expectations of behavior, and of how to write. She is not permitted out-

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bursts like those of the Filipina woman in the documentary, whose words now come to her as “Rosa, I disowned you.” 51 “Rosa, I Disowned You” is not a classic catharsis tale of recovered memory and its integration, and so far Alicia does not feel better for having told her story. Moreover, if the Filipina woman in the kitchen, Ninotchka, is indeed Alicia, then this story may just have turned back into a confession, one in which Alicia is watching herself admit guilt for disowning Rosa, presumably by not testifying earlier to Rosa’s rape. Just as this was “not a simple rape,” here there is no simple coming to terms with the past, much less a story that ends with a promise of relief for the survivor. For her, the only certain outcome is pain. Even the beginning of telling has caused enormous new suffering—to Alicia, in relinquishing the cover stories that had insulated her younger self by portraying her as a daring spy or romantic heroine, and to her husband, who has assumed the blame for not knowing that she had been raped. And clearly, there is more pain to come, beyond the bounds of this narrative, when Alicia’s daughters and parents learn this new part of her life story. Alicia will injure herself and the ones she loves in the telling, extracting fresh drops of blood. Like “The Goose Girl,” “Rosa, I Disowned You” is finally a story about sacrifice, about suffering and causing pain to one’s family in the hope of protecting others. At the story’s end, in a characteristic deliberative challenge, the question of whether or not all of this pain will be worthwhile is put directly to the reader. “I just beg of you,” asks Alicia the narrator, “to let me know that to tell it was not in vain, that somebody’s soul will breathe better because of it.” 52 “As stories,” writes Taylor, “both the author and the reader must evaluate the effectiveness of the representation of the terrible ‘real.’ Do they illuminate or obscure the very real pain inflicted on the desaparecidos?” 53 Partnoy’s own question here on her testimonio’s effectiveness is significantly different. The objective she describes is not only to bring to light her own pain. If it were, she would not need to ask the reader whether the telling was in vain. Nor, as she has made clear in the story, is this telling a forensic matter of bringing the rapist to justice. For the pain of this telling to be worthwhile, it must serve someone else, allow their soul to “breathe better.” One possibility, for instance, might be that Alicia/Rosa’s story provide an opening for addressing other so far disowned accounts of “not-simple rape.” In that vein, Rosa’s testimony, the goose girl’s folktale, and the documentary on the Filipinas are all part of a network, messages of solidarity from a narrative community that spans centuries and seas. Beyond an immediate function of seeking a measure of restorative justice for one individual or group, this story implies, testimonial narratives also serve to motivate and elicit new testimonies, permitting other survivors to breathe and to speak. In a linked narrative, “Disclaimer Intraducible,” subtitled “My Life / Is Based / on a Real Story,” and published in Biography in 2009, Partnoy

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comes back to Rosa’s story yet again. This text begins with a prosaic— and entirely translatable—disclaimer. “Little can I write these days without experiencing severe pain,” begins Partnoy. 54 Anticipating that readers familiar with her background will assume that the pain is psychic, she hastens to clarify. “I am not referring to the emotional distress of recording my life as a disappeared person,” she explains, “this is just physical pain.” 55 Medical issues with her neck and wrist have led to the installation on her computer of the speech-to-text program called Dragon. The required training interval, during which in theory the program learns to recognize the individual user’s speech patterns, but in fact usually nudges the speaker toward pronunciations that the program already recognizes, has not been particularly successful. Her given name, “Alicia,” for example, keeps appearing on the screen as “I’ll see you,” and “Guatemala” is “what a mama.” 56 Partnoy soon comes to reconsider her earlier dismissal of the program’s sensitivity to distress, speculating that the Dragon may be challenged by “rage and impotence in my voice.” 57 By design, the program functions best for conventional business correspondence, a discourse totally inadequate for the messages that she needs to compose. “How can I produce businesslike standard utterances,” she asks, when emailing Rosa Franco, whose sixteen-year-old daughter, “is one of over three thousand women killed in her country in the past five years.” 58 That technological barrier to writing about trauma and injustice serves Partnoy as a metaphor for the broader considerations to come, a wide-ranging account of the conditions of possibility for testimonio and the constraints imposed by the academic circuit of criticism and publication. First among these is critics’ attempt to “translate” the work of testimonio to the discourse of autobiography, a model that Partnoy finds fundamentally inadequate to a genre that serves “to denounce current human rights violations through the testimonio mode of writing about our life— a strategy that many survivors of state terrorism in Latin America have embraced.” 59 Testimonio is not only a matter of remembrance or selfexpression, Partnoy emphasizes, it seeks action: “for us, to remember and to tell might be useless if it does not help to stop the violence, put an end to impunity, and protect the dignity of victims.” 60 Attempts to critique testimonio by the standards of autobiography are not only technical errors, she contends; such a misprizing actively impedes its social objectives. Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical pact defined the responsibilities of authors—to provide an accurate and sufficiently detailed account of their own lives. As he acknowledges, his model serves as a contract, inviting readers to scrutinize autobiographical texts for authorial violations, whether in the form of errors of fact or significant omissions. “Confronted with what looks like an autobiographical narrative,” Lejeune writes, “the reader often tends to think of himself as a detective, that is to say, to look for breaches of contract.” 61 Partnoy proposes a different set of

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standards for the testimonialist, whose narrative is to be “sincere,” and, ideally, effective. 62 It is not the testimonialist’s obligation to tell all, she argues, only what is strategically necessary to achieve its social projects. Partnoy’s model of testimonio also differs from Lejeune’s autobiographical pact when it comes to the role of the reader. Publishers and scholars, Partnoy observes, “have constantly failed to see that the reader of testimonios does not fit” Lejeune’s model. 63 In the “solidarity pact” that Partnoy envisions for testimonio, readers are not detectives policing the author’s compliance, rather they come to share with the author a responsibility for social change. 64 Moreover, readers do not only receive and evaluate testimonial narratives; they have a significant role in these narratives’ creation and outcomes. “Memories,” she observes, “can be freer as they circulate in friendlier territories populated by sympathetic listeners and potential allies who trust their sincerity, which is different from expecting the truth.” 65 Partnoy next explains the format of this story’s subtitle, lines she calls a brief poem that “showcases the tensions between the need of survivors to tell our life stories, and the constraints exercised by publishers, translators, scholars, and human rights professionals.” 66 She wrote “My Life / Is Based / on a Real Story,” she reports, as a response to comments on her own work by scholar Mary Jane Treacy, who had found Partnoy’s narratives of witness, along with those of a number of other testimonialists, to be marred by missing pieces as well as overly optimistic—in Treacy’s words, “at least partially thwarted by adherence to the genre’s demands for rebirth and the lesson of solidarity.” 67 Testimonio, Partnoy counters in her theoretical writing as well as this brief verse, is not a defective or misguided autobiography. In fact, the genre is defined by precisely such demands and lessons. “Since the killing spree is over in Argentina,” Partnoy explains, “I can afford to problematize the process of disseminating our testimonial texts.” 68 That space for critique and resistance was a luxury she could not afford earlier in her life, when the urgency of publishing The Little School required that she compromise her vision for the text with the publisher’s demand that she satisfy autobiographical expectations. Now that she has more options, she takes issue with two of the commonplaces of academic criticism of testimonio, the “assumptions that intellectuals give voice to those who do not have one, and that truth should be the central concern for survivors when engaging in the production of testimonial texts.” 69 These two assumptions are not only incorrect, she argues, they are antithetical to the genre’s central project. “Nurtured by scholars and writers,” she warns, “and comforting to the society at large, both premises can dis-empower survivors while claiming the opposite effect.” 70 Partnoy turns again to “Rosa, I Disowned You” to illustrate the unique risks of her intersectional position as survivor, academic, and family member. That story, Partnoy explains, reflects a separation be-

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tween her “academic and creative worlds” and her family life, and “paradoxically this discordance takes place around the telling of intimate personal memories.” 71 “I have published this story,” she notes, “read it in public, and discussed it here.” 72 Nevertheless, she reports, “I have yet to find the courage, el momento perfecto, for my closest relatives to learn about these memories. In that sense, my life now is based on this real story. I have produced a set of circumstances that will force me to find that momento.” 73 Partnoy’s reservations here challenge any notion of testimonial discourse as a chance for survivors to benefit from the cathartic relief of letting it all spill out. On the contrary, she insists, testimonio is a carefully contemplated social and political action. Its prime beneficiaries are not the speaking survivors, for whom the resurrection and communication of memory is most often experienced not as personal opportunity but rather as painful obligation; testimonio serves the larger community. As painful as testimonio’s general reading audience may find it to read those accounts, that pain can hardly be compared to learning that a loved one of one’s own has been raped. And it goes further; once that momento perfecto arrives and the loved ones learn about Partnoy’s rape, she will know that she is the proximate cause of their pain. For all of the rational understanding that fact of the rape is no more their fault than it is hers, loved ones in turn are likely to take the blame to heart. “I’m a piece of shit,” sobs the husband in “Rosa, I Disowned You.” “If this your mother knew, her heart would break in two,” chant the drops of blood in “The Goose Girl.” In a perverse further transfer of the rapist’s guilt, the survivor, the bearer of the news, or the witness who hears it, may come to feel like the inflictor of pain. Where autobiography begins with a subject’s desire to tell, testimonio has its roots in a determination to help, as apparent in the dedication of “Rosa, I Disowned You,” “to all my sisters who are still silent.” 74 Partnoy’s reflections here remind readers of uncomfortable facts that testimonial criticism has often overlooked. Survivors are not merely bearers of memory, to be unburdened for their own good. Nor do they exist as isolated specimens; the stories they share, whether under constraint of the demands of publishers, or by their own choice, exact pain that extends beyond the individual to family and friends. As illustrated by the prosaic demands of motherhood and professional life that Partnoy writes into her stories, she is more than the survivor of violence and the teller of the tale; she is a person who still has to live a daily life. At the end of “Disclaimer Intraducible,” Partnoy turns back, unrepentant, to the insistent resilience for which Treacy had taken her to task. “Anything based on a true story, and written within the proximity of the Hollywood Hills,” Partnoy warns, “risks a happy ending.” 75 A trainer comes to her office “to teach both the Dragon and myself to communicate with each other,” and this particular obstacle to testimonial telling is overcome. 76 Still, she reports, “after reading Chuck Rosenthal’s My Mis-

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tress, Humanity, I have great difficulty conceiving the existence of a Dragon that lacks will power.” 77 “These reflections,” she adds ironically, “only prove that parts of my life are based on fiction, and therefore, they are irrelevant here. They might, as well, be fitting matter for future dictation.” 78 A testimonial Scheherazade, with her concluding comment Partnoy underscores the possibilities of the genre, a story that can serve to change a life, even as she continues to hold out the promise of additional stories, inventions, revisions, and interventions. NOTES 1. Alvarez, 9. 2. Alvarez, 9. 3. Alvarez, 9. 4. Lejeune, 12–14. 5. Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 166. 6. Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 166. 7. Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 166. 8. In addition to serving as the title of Partnoy’s story collection, the Little School is also the name she uses for the camp in which she was held. 9. Partnoy, Little School, 42. 10. Partnoy, Little School, 42. 11. Partnoy, Little School, 42. 12. Partnoy, Little School, 41. 13. Partnoy, Little School, 41. 14. Partnoy, Little School, 43. 15. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 253. 16. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 253. 17. Fludernik, “Introduction,” 290. 18. Dobkowski, 69. 19. Timerman reports on the Argentine junta’s attempts to extend the Holocaust in Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. 20. Partnoy, Little School, 61. 21. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 253. 22. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 253. 23. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 253. 24. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 253–254. “Since the restoration of democracy in 1983,” Filippini reports, Argentina “offers an important example of the positive results of both domestic efforts and international advocacy to achieve justice for past crimes against humanity. Due to its recent and ongoing success in the prosecution of human rights criminals, it is arguable that Argentina has one of the best records of transitional justice in the world. It has fostered transitional justice developments in the region, and offers critical insights for other communities struggling with the past which are following Argentina’s efforts with deep interest.” 25. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 254. 26. Partnoy, Little School, 27. Italics in the original. 27. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 254. 28. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 254. 29. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 254. 30. In “The Goose Girl,” a princess sets out to a kingdom where she is to be married. As she leaves, her mother the queen cuts her own finger and catches three drops of blood in a handkerchief to serve as a talisman for her daughter. On the journey the princess is overpowered by a maid who forces her to trade places, compelling her to

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swear an oath not to tell anyone in the royal court her true identity. At this the drops of blood on the cloth lament that if her mother knew it would break her heart. When maid and princess arrive in court the true princess is sent to herd geese and her beloved horse is beheaded, but a servant boy hears the severed head of the horse recite the same rhyme as the drops of blood: “if your mother only knew, her heart would surely break in two.” He informs the king, who circumvents the princess’s oath by having her tell her story not to a person but to a stove, while he listens at the other end of the pipe. The maid’s crime discovered, she is punished and the princess returned to her rightful place. For one version of this traditional tale, see “Goose Girl.” 31. Partnoy, Little School, 83. 32. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 254. 33. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 254. 34. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 254. 35. Hayakawa, Tannenbaum, Costa, Corey, and Keysar. 36. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 254–255. 37. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 255. 38. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 255. 39. “Fearless Girl Statue,” Atlas Obscura. 40. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 255. 41. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 255. 42. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 255. 43. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 255. 44. Mata Hari. Biography. 45. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 256. 46. Lifton, 422. Italics in the original. 47. Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 170. 48. Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 170–171. 49. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 256. “Ninotchka” may refer to Ninotchka Rosca, a Filipina activist and writer who, like Partnoy, had been a political prisoner. For more about Rosca see Kim Watson, “Stories of the State: Literary Form and Authoritarianism in Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War.” 50. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 256. 51. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 256. 52. Partnoy, “Rosa,” 256. 53. Taylor, Disappearing Acts, 171. Italics in the original. 54. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 16. 55. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 16. 56. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 16. 57. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 16. 58. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 16. 59. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 16. 60. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 16–17. 61. Quoted in Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 14. 62. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 19. 63. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 19. Italics in the original. 64. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 19. 65. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 19. 66. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 20. 67. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 20. 68. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 17. 69. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 17. 70. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 17. 71. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 20. 72. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 20–21. 73. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 21. 74. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 21. Italics in the original.

My Life Is Based on a Real Story 75. 76. 77. 78.

Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 23. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 23. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 23. Partnoy “Disclaimer,” 23.

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Conclusion Deliberative Testimonio and the Reactivation of Human Rights Discourse

In 2011 Susan Sontag’s son, David Rieff, reflected on the proliferation of the phrase ‘Never again”—its spread from Buchenwald through Chile, Rwanda, and on to Argentina, where in Spanish, Nunca más, it had served as the title to the official report on the disappearances—along with the phrase’s unrealized promise, the persistence of genocide. “Since 1945,” he observes, “‘never again’” has meant, essentially, “‘never again will Germans kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s.’” 1 Rieff cites the US State Department’s report on Darfur, authored by Madeline Albright and William Cohen, their joint declaration that “the world agrees that genocide is unacceptable and yet genocide and mass killings continue.” Although he finds “commendable candor,” in their admission that “to find ways to match words and ‘stop allowing the unacceptable,’ is in fact one of most persistent puzzles of our times,” he does not extend that commendation to “the befuddlement the authors of the report confess to feeling.” 2 “Like most thinking influenced by the human rights movement,” he writes, “the task force seems imbued with the famous Kantian mot d’ordre: ‘Ought implies can.’ But to put the matter bluntly, there is no historical basis to believe anything of the sort, and a great deal of evidence to suggest a diametrically opposing conclusion.” 3 As JeanFrançois Lyotard could have told them, outside the specific terms of the testimonial pact “ought” is not a call to action, but instead only a vague sense that somebody else should do something. Samantha Power identified a constant cycle of responses in the face of each new occurrence of genocide, what she called the “problem from hell”—from protestations of not having enough information to act on it, that the risk is too high or the chances of success too slim, to realizing that it is too late, and then to vowing that this instance will be the last—never again, over and over again. In her comparative study of narratives of trauma, Kalí Tal has observed that testimonies of human rights abuse ranging from the Holocaust to Vietnam to contemporary domestic violence have all passed through similarly predictable stages of reception. The stories of survivors are first “sacralized,” and treated with reverence. 4 Later they become “contextualized” objects of historical analysis, a 129

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quest to understand how such events could have happened. 5 Finally, Tal found, each new genre of trauma literature is “appropriated,” and reading those texts comes to be seen as a trauma in itself, over which the reader figuratively triumphs. 6 Conspicuous by its absence, as Rieff, Power, and Tal observe, is the effective use of the accounts of past trauma to prevent its recurrence. Instead, Tal found, the potential that testimony of a given injustice might spark social intervention is progressively diminished, until the reader’s persevering to the end of the book becomes the most that could be expected. As I argue, epideictic and forensic modes of writing and criticism (whether celebratory or mournful) can become a form of friendly fire in the struggle for human rights, inadvertently supporting that cycle from sacralization to appropriation that disarms testimony by leaving intact and even strengthening readers’ self-protective alibis—their beliefs that the project is already completed, impossible, or best left to others, or that their own obligation is discharged by the mere act of reading. Lisa Sainsbury likens such deactivation of human rights discourse to Dorian Lynskey’s description of Live Aid’s “removal of the risk from protest,” by making the cause “so uncontroversial that everyone could appease their consciences without the slightest risk of ruffling feathers.” 7 Safely defused and standing outside the bounds of Lyotard’s testimonial contract or Partnoy’s pact of testimonial solidarity, the phatic communion of talk about human rights helps people to believe themselves decent and just—like Deng’s gym client Ben, who “feels he is more helpful . . . than he really is.” 8 Exchanging a call for something that only resembles one allows discussions of human rights to serve merely as “niceties that lubricate” 9 social interactions by signaling membership in a progressive community, smoothing over the uncomfortable awareness of differences in power and privilege that might otherwise inspire action. Sontag identifies a similarly illusory sense of connection brought on by certain documentary images as one of the risks of realism. “The imaginary proximity to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images,” she writes, “suggests a link between the faraway sufferers—seen close-up on the television screen—and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power.” 10 When alliances are forged not in action but rather in the sense of counterfeit, it is small wonder that deliberative testimonialists so often employ literary techniques to de-mystify those relations—to lay bare the mechanisms by which literal accounts of abuse of human rights and requests for assistance have been converted to tokens of phatic communion—or that they seek other means to resist or reverse the cycles of reception and appropriation that Power and Tal identified. Testimonio has long been recognized as a genre that contests official stories from oppressive governments, but deliberative testimonio also contests the discourse of its own sibling genres—forensic and epideictic. From Alvarado’s

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pointed rejection of readers’ sympathy or admiration, Dickinson’s dual endings, Sáenz’s portrayals of protagonists full of feelings but failing to act effectively, Koff’s discovery of the demands of dead bodies, and Jarrett-Macauley’s valedictory reminder that her novel is a work of fiction, through Eggers’s and Akpan’s satires, to Partnoy’s employment of English to keep readers out of her bedroom, these texts push back against readers’ illusions of intimacy, generosity, and solidarity on the one hand, and of incapacity or impossibility on the other—and against the notion that the very act of reading constitutes a sufficient contribution—to demand something more. These texts present social projects as ongoing, possible, and, crucially, contingent on action from readers. The care that some writers and speakers in the deliberative mode take to establish their own bona fides, their attempts to avoid asking for leaps of faith that their own experience has taught them to avoid, sometimes surprises readers who believe they are already on intimate terms with testimonialists. Moves that might seem superfluous or even counterproductive—for instance, Alvarado’s insistence that Benjamin witness her field organizing first hand rather than just taking her word for it, or Deng’s admission that he too has embellished his tales to meet the demands of sympathizers—make sense in the context of real need, real asks, and expectations of real resistance. Especially in the deliberative mode, testimonialists often address people with more power than they have, and ones they expect may not be instantly sympathetic. Expanding the circle of targets of persuasion to include that audience at times leads testimonialists to rhetorical moves that sound conservative, as when Alvarado takes care to note that the campesinos strive to be self-sufficient, dislike charity, and exhaust legal options before going outside them to recover their land; or when Deng criticizes one of his fellow refugees for soliciting funds from the others to support a gambling habit. Aware that some readers may resist a call on the grounds that not everyone who asks for help is honest and deserving, these testimonialists make efforts to demonstrate that they share such concerns and are worthy of trust. Alliances, they understand, must be constructed. These testimonios expose and seek to combat the deactivation of human rights discourse, the sort of phatic exchanges represented here by Moses and Julia’s “doing Third Worldism” 11 and Joanna and Jaime’s “long live the Revolution!” routine, 12 as well as the many well-meant “hang in theres” of which Deng expresses such “a low opinion.” 13 Illustrating the impotence of a phatic human rights discourse, Alvarado calls out the passive celebratory or critical responses of gringos to her testimonio, Koff recounts listeners’ laments for the situation of the “Hutsis and Tutus” that devolve into “thank goodness that can’t happen here,” 14 and Jarrett-Macauley portrays Julia deflecting responsibility for action to “local people, people who understand.” 15 These texts reveal and resist the easy familiarity and illusions of solidarity that phatic communication

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about human rights offers to people of privilege, the assurance that they are decent, progressive individuals, interested and engaged in the struggle—even if all they do is watch, read, and talk about it. At the other end of the exchange, they demonstrate the ways in which for sufferers and survivors the compulsory performance of phatic communication becomes yet another burden, one more obstacle to persuading people to help. Read alongside each other, these deliberative testimonios demonstrate not only a common project, the reactivation of human rights discourse, but also a common armamentarium of discursive patterns, strategies, and tactics. First, there is the delicate matter of diagnosis and revelation, of demonstrating to many readers the emptiness of their would-be solidarity while constantly bearing in mind the need to persuade them to help, and therefore needing to accomplish that revelation without causing irreparable offense. With a practice that recalls the medical mannequins once offered by physicians so that ailments that might be embarrassing could be indicated by pointing discreetly to the ivory or wooden figure, many of these testimonialists offer such demonstrations at one remove. Characters other than the reader may be drafted to model the many available mechanisms for transforming human rights discourse from literal to phatic, for quietly dissolving the testimonial pact. Readers, in turn, are encouraged to recognize and revise their own stance without feeling accused. As Melvin Lerner and his just world colleagues have observed, witnesses generally find their own cognitive defenses unacceptable as soon as they are actually articulated; thus, making readers aware of those rationalizations and illusions, either by addressing them directly or by means of proxies, may actually forestall some of their defenses against acting for social justice. 16 Witnesses’ defensive constructs, Lerner finds, are in fact “relatively tentative or vulnerable,” and “often breached and sometimes abandoned when they are no longer functional.” 17 Readers may also be assured that the insufficiency of their current response to the suffering of others is not their fault—that they have been misled about the conditions and causes of human rights abuse or the possibility of remedy, or that they have underestimated their own capacity to help. Where epideictic and forensic testimonios permit readers to watch while speakers talk back to power, deliberative testimonio seeks to persuade readers that they themselves possess it. Next comes the matter of fostering a productive response to those revelations, an equally delicate matter of convincing readers of potentially painful propositions about themselves. Analyzing the unfulfilled promise of photography of conscience, Sontag concludes that “to set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine—be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some might imply the

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destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.” 18 Implicitly or explicitly, each of these testimonialists calls into question readers’ self-images of sympathy and solidarity, pointing up differences of power and privilege that include not only the ones between Alvarado and her gringos, but also subtler ones such as those between US Latino Jaime and Salvadoran refugee Franklin, or Sierra Leone-born Londoner Julia and her in-country family. Often these testimonios offer readers a glimpse behind the curtain, into an imagined space where individuals in need of assistance are free to voice criticisms that are usually precluded by the requirements of their performance of gratitude and humility. Reframing the role of the reader in order to evoke a sense of obligation, these testimonios also remind readers that the benefits of the testimonial contract do not only flow one way, with a boon to be handed over from witnesses to survivors. These testimonialists point out readers’ appetite for survivors’ tales and the consolations that they derive from regarding and addressing—even when only phatically, the pain of others. On the other side of the ethical balance sheet, testimonialists take note of the price that survivors pay in producing those tales and the uncertainty of their rewards. As Partnoy’s stories illustrate, survivors do not always experience self-revelation as relief, nor can they count on legal consequences for the perpetrators. The assembly of a testimonial story can be halting and difficult. The act of telling can exact fresh pain that extends beyond the individual to family and friends, and even jeopardize the teller’s credibility. Merely seeing one’s testimony published and read, as Partnoy’s stories make clear, is not nearly enough to make that much pain worthwhile. Capitalizing on the desires and motivations of readers who believe themselves just and generous, producers of deliberative testimonio must first break the unwelcome news that in many cases that cherished selfimage and sense of solidarity are only fictional, and then seek to persuade those same readers to participate in the literal acts of pragmatic solidarity—a formidable task, and an appeal whose outcome is never a certainty, only a chance. Maintaining hope even while acknowledging the possibility of failure, these testimonialists seek to reactivate the discourse of human rights—to convince readers to respond to the pain of others by living up to their own words. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Rieff. Rieff. Rieff. Tal, 59. Tal, 59.

134 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

Conclusion Tal, 59. Sainsbury, 82. Eggers, What Is the What, 427. Padilla Cruz, 9. Sontag, 102. Jarrett-Macauley, 13. Sáenz, 97. Eggers, What Is the What, 448. Koff, 264. Jarrett-Macauley, 16–17. Lerner, Belief in a Just World, 80. Lerner, Belief in a Just World, 6. Sontag, 102–103.

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Index

Abernathy, Rev. Ralph, 27 African Union, 34 Aid to International Development, 24 Albright, Madeline, 129 Alvarez, Julia, 113–114 Andrade, Susan Z., 108 anomalous replotting, 9, 37, 83n70 Appel, Markus, 37 Arias, Arturo, 4 Aristotle, 4, 63 Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, 11, 43 asylum, 11, 12, 43, 46–47, 49, 51, 52, 85 autobiography, 2, 12, 28n4, 85, 87, 88, 94, 114, 122–123, 124 Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, 87 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 1, 14n40 Bambara, Toni Cade, 3 Barnet, Miguel, 3, 13n11, 87–88 Beah, Ishmael, 31 Beasts of No Nation, 31, 72 Bernstein, Arielle, 7 Beverley, John, 4 bildungsroman, 81 Biografía de un cimarrón, 3, 13n11, 87 biography, 13n11, 87 Biography of a Runaway Slave, 3, 13n11, 87 Bixler, Mark, 85 Blacks Britannica, 58 Bones, 59 boy soldiers. See child soldiers Brecht, Bertolt, 11, 81 Brock, Timothy, 9, 22, 79 Bunting, Eva, 38 Burgos, Elisabeth, 18, 28n1 Bush, Margaret, 32 Camus, Albert, 1

Can Literature Promote Justice?, 4, 13n11, 14n19, 42n27–42n28, 83n70 Catch-22, 87 Çevik, Yildiray, 102 Child of the Dark, 3, 13n11, 25–26, 29n47 child soldiers, 10, 11, 31, 32, 34–35, 37, 38–39, 49, 60, 71–73, 79, 81, 94 civil rights movement, 3, 27 Code Pink, 10, 17 Cohen, William, 129 Comisión Nacional Sobre la Desapariencia de las Personas, 116 Commission for Demobilisation, Demilitarisation, and Reintegration, 72 “Continuity of Parks,” 53 Cortázar, Julio, 53 Crumley, Bruce, 31 CSI, 59 custodia occulorum, 45, 51 Dalton, Roque, 18 Davis, A.L., 18 defenses, readers’, 4, 6, 23, 26–27, 74, 76, 132 Del Negro, Janice, 37 Denov, Marilyn, 79 Dépret, Eric, 8 Dirda, Michael, 31 Dobkowski, Michael, 116 Dolby, Sandra K., 28 Dorfman, Ariel, 44, 53 doubling, 119–120 D’Souza, Dinesh, 4 Eagleton, Terry, 40 Ehrlich, Eugene, 19 Eisenberg, Nancy, 77 empathy, 14n40, 95 Erdrich, Louise, 99

143

144

Index

exotopy, 14n40 fantastic, the, 11, 57, 61–62, 64, 65–66, 68 Farmer, Paul, 29n30 The Fault in Our Stars, 32 Fearless Girl, 119 Fiske, Susan, 8 Fludernik, Monika, 10, 18, 100, 107, 109, 115 Food First, 22 Foster, David William, 1 Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood, 7 Franco, Rosa, 122 Freeman, John, 99 Freud, Sigmund, 61 Frisch, Max, 109 Fussell, Paul, 72 Gaiman, Neil, 41 genocide, 11, 57–58, 59, 61, 62–63, 65, 66–68, 116, 129 Gerrig, Richard, 9, 37, 83n70 González, Emma, 5 Green, John, 32 Green, Melanie, 9, 14n40, 22, 79 Grimm, Brothers, 117 gringo, definition of, 19 Grossman, Lev, 31 Gugelberger, Georg, 4, 49 Hamid, Mohsin, 27 Hamilton, 25 Haskell, Thomas, 80, 83n63–83n64 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 85 Hill, Nick, 87 hoaxes, 7, 14n30 Holocaust, 116, 118 Holquist, Michael, 1 How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, 27 Huckleberry Finn, 12, 85 human rights, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 20, 22, 23, 24, 27, 47, 51, 53, 57, 59, 86, 113, 116, 122–123, 125n24, 129–130, 131–132, 133 humor, 2, 26–27, 44, 45, 48, 49, 51, 116 Huse, Nancy, 38, 39

identification, 2, 20, 25, 35, 44, 46, 49, 60, 75, 120, 130 Innes, Jocasta, 87 Into the Valley, 38 irony, 2, 12, 40, 48, 49, 73, 108, 125 Iweala, Uzodinma, 31, 72 Jesus, Carolina Maria de, 3, 13n11, 25–26 Joyce, Christopher, 58 Julius Caesar, 80, 82 just world theory, 6, 7, 14n25–14n27, 83n64, 132 Kenyatta, 58 Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 117 Kitchener, Barbara, 31 Knapp, Adrian, 104–106 Koff, David, 58 Larsen, Neil, 52 Law & Order, 59 Lejeune, Philippe, 2, 12, 28n4, 85, 87, 88, 94, 114, 122–123, 124 Lerner, Melvin, 6, 7, 14n25–11, 83n64, 132 Leung, Cynthia, 37 liberation theology, 24 Lifton, Robert, 119–120 The Little School, 13, 113–115, 116–117, 119, 123 Long, Lisa, 102 A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, 31 Lost Boys, 12, 85–86, 88–90, 94 Lovesey, Oliver, 106 Luscombe, Belinda, 31 Lynskey, Dorian, 130 Lyotard, Jean-François, 9–10, 27, 52, 75, 80, 94, 114, 129–130, 133 MacCann, Donnarae, 38, 39–40 Macleod, Margaretha Geertruida Zella, 119, 120 Maddy, Yulisa Amadu, 38, 39–40 magical realism, 7, 78–79, 80, 82 Malcolm X, 7 Mármol, Miguel, 18 Maslin, Janet, 99

Index Mata Hari, 119, 120 Mattson, Jennifer, 99 Mau Mau, 58 Meiselas, Susan, 22 Menchú, Rigoberta, 4, 18 meta-testimony, 11, 43, 53, 72 A Million Little Pieces, 7 Miranda, Lin-Manuel, 25 Montejo, Esteban, 3, 87 Moya, Paula, 51 mutism, posttraumatic, 72 Mwinyipembe, Msindo, 58 My Mistress, Humanity, 125 The Naked and the Dead, 87 Nance-Carroll, Niall, 74 Nanquette, Laetitia, 1 narrative exposure therapy, 71 narrative transportation, 9, 14n40, 22, 37, 79, 82 National Commission on Disappeared Persons, 116 National Congress of Rural Workers, 22 The Nazi Doctors, 119 Ndlovu, Isaac, 32, 108, 109 Never Again, 116 never again, 86, 116, 129 Nikolajeva, Maria, 36 Niven, Alastair, 99 Nkeokelonye, Adaobi, 102 Nunca más, 116, 129 Nuremberg Trials, 57 Occupied Palestine, 58 Organization of African Unity, 33 organizing, community, 2, 7, 8, 10, 17–18, 19–20, 21, 22–23, 24–25, 28, 131 The Painted Bird, 87 parody, 7, 10, 27, 89, 108 Passaro, Vince, 99 Peace Corps, 24 Peek, Michelle, 88 Penzoldt, Peter, 65 Pereyra, Liliana, 58 phatic utterance, 5–6, 10, 12, 28, 48, 93, 94, 130, 131–132, 133

145

photography, 1, 4, 22, 26, 35, 51, 58, 60, 78, 80, 81, 132 Physicians for Human Rights, 11, 57 Power, Samantha, 129–130 Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, 125n19 Prose, Francine, 12, 85 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 116 Quarto de Despejo, 3, 13n11, 25–26, 29n47 Raine, Kai, 39 Ramirez, Aida, 19 realism, 7, 11, 37, 41, 57, 78, 88, 108, 119, 130 refugee, 1, 11, 12, 46, 63, 85, 86, 87, 89, 90–92, 93–95, 131, 133 Regarding the Pain of Others, 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 51, 73, 75, 76, 78, 81, 129–130, 132 Richter, Tobias, 37 Rieff, David, 129–130 The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy, 4 Romanos, Eduardo, 27 Rosca, Ninotchka, 126n49 Rosenthal, Chuck, 124 Sainsbury, Lisa, 37, 41, 130 Santiago, Esmeralda, 8, 19 Sartre, Jean Paul, 1 satire, 5, 7, 12, 108, 109, 131 Saver, Jeffrey, 72 Scarry, Elaine, 72 second person narration, 2, 10, 18, 27, 100, 106, 107–108, 109, 115, 118 self-help, 10, 27–28 Shakespeare, William, 4 Slung, Michelle, 102 Smalls, Biggie, 25 Smith, Sidonie, 94 Smoky Night, 38 Snow, Clyde, 58 solidarity, 2, 5, 6, 10, 11, 21, 22, 23, 27–28, 29n30, 49, 50, 51, 102, 121, 123, 130, 131–132, 133 solidarity pact, 94, 123, 130 Sontag, Susan, 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 51, 73, 75, 76, 78, 81, 129–130, 132

146

Index

Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 27 Southwell, Priscilla, 21 Stoll, David, 4 Stover, Eric, 58, 63 Straight, Susan, 99 Strange, Jeffrey, 37 Tal, Kalí, 129–130 Taylor, Charles, 108 Taylor, Diana, 119–120, 121 Les Temps Modernes, 1 Tenney, Tom, 25 testimonial contract, 9–10, 27, 52, 75, 80, 94, 114, 129–130, 133 testimonial novel, 2, 10, 12, 85, 87–88 testimonio, Casa de las Américas prize, 13n6 testimonio, deliberative, 4, 6–7, 8–9, 13, 14n19, 17, 21, 40, 41, 50, 52, 63, 78, 107, 121, 129, 130–131, 132, 133 testimonio, epideictic, 4–5, 5–7, 9, 63, 88, 100, 102, 105, 106, 107, 108, 130, 132 testimonio, forensic, 4–5, 5–7, 9, 11, 57, 63, 67, 68, 72, 88, 100, 116, 118, 121, 130, 132 text hegemony, 8

They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky, 86 The Things They Carried, 87 Timerman, Jacobo, 125n19 Todorov, Tzvetan, 11, 57, 61–62, 64, 65–66, 68 trauma, 12, 35, 71–72, 76, 82n5, 120, 122, 129–130 Treacy, Mary Jane, 123 Truth, Sojourner, 25 The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, 7 United Nations, 11, 32, 57 unspeakable, 11, 72, 73, 102 Vander Weele, Michael, 5, 100, 106–107 Vohra, Anupama, 1 Waldman, Adelle, 99 War and Peace, 87 Watson, Julia, 94 White Man’s Country, 58 Williams, Michael, 38 Winfrey, Oprah, 7, 99 Withers, Ernest, 26 Witnesses from the Grave, 58, 63 Young, Kay, 72

About the Author

Kimberly A. Nance (PhD University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), professor of languages, literatures & cultures at Illinois State University, is the author of Can Literature Promote Justice? Trauma Narrative and Social Action in Latin American Testimonio and Teaching Literature in the Languages, along with numerous chapters and articles on literature of conscience. She has chaired Modern Language Association committees on the teaching of literature and on teaching as a profession, as well as Midwest Modern Language Association divisions of history of critical reception, peace literature and pedagogy, Latin American literature, the short story, and multicultural literature in the classroom.

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