testimony
my master class this weekend is with video artist lamia joreige from lebanon (lamiajoreige.com).
it has been a very intense way to begin a new semester.
many of her videos are documents of testimony about the lebanese civil war(s). the person in her video brings an object connected to the war and uses it to tell a story about an experience during the conflicts. the camera creates a space for such unheard testimony, the object a trigger to bring out details and fragments of memories. it was very emotional and powerful- both in the recounting and in our witness of this recounting.
in one of the videos, a man had brought a large, antiquated radio as his object. it had many knobs, needles, measurements and looked like a radio used exclusively during wartime. his father had brought it home, never using it to listen to music, but brought it out every time the shelling and fighting would begin. he told a story of the war but largely he told the story of his relationship with his father. he shared an experience of manhood. his father had been the ‘breadwinner,’ bringing home not only the money that supported the family, but also the news from the outside world. he would go to his office each day, see the world, gather information, and bring this back to the family. when the war began, he could not leave the house to go to his office. he could not gather the news. he lost a piece of how he identified himself. the man had found the radio while cleaning out his father’s office as his father had fallen too ill to continue working. the radio represented the war, his father, and the son’s care for his father. it was a very beautiful story. many different types of wounds.
lamia spoke very beautifully, eloquently about her practice, concerns, thoughts. some fragments i wrote down:
‘mechanism of memory and its distortions.’
‘the impossibility of accessing a complete narrative’
‘traces used to diagnosis our time(s)’ ‘history escapes us and we are left with fragments’
‘memory and oblivion at the same time’
‘alternative histories to serve as counter-histories.’ …many of these stories from the 1980s/90s and earlier continue to be timely and/or have an impact. many are still dangerous in their recounting…
she is interested in the instance of rupture in time. she talked about the sea as a place of uninterrupted rupture. …
as my passion tends towards very similar questions and concerns, emotions and thoughts, i am responding very strongly to her work and what she shared with us. there is one question in particular that i am struggling to articulate. (it relates to a book i had been reading last year- feminist criticism and the crisis of the ‘real,’ edited by wendy s. hesford and wendy kozol.)
feminist critique and strategy has centered largely on personal testimony. testimony empowers the person recounting what they have experienced, gives voice to those who may not have had a voice (or whose voice has been taken from them), de-centers the power of discourse and the writing of history, and posits a multiplicity of truths in the face of an overarching, master narrative. this ‘multiplicity of truths’ is what i am concerned with.
how we define and describe what has occurred to us or in the world comes out of the meeting place between our beliefs, thoughts, convictions and what we have witnessed or experienced. that place is held together by how we already identify ourselves and how we already interact with what goes on around us. when something occurs, how we meet it has as much to do with what has happened as how we already behave and understand ourselves in the contexts we find ourselves. it is our multitude of internal variables meeting a multitude of experiences in the world. (you could also say that these internal beliefs also affect and create the communities, societies, and world we live in especially – together with the subjectivities of all the other people around us).
when an injustice occurs, there can be strength in organizing as a collective to fight in opposition (or support) for change or restitution. what does this collective organize around? what are the common beliefs or convictions of the participants? what i am wondering about is the role of testimonies and multiple truths here? how do multiplicities relate to a common cause or union?
the strategy of testimony has become a powerful tool. i have witnessed it here in the united states in relation to abortion rights, in opposition to police brutality, and particularly as a powerful giving-voice for survivors of sexual assault. it was interesting to hear lamia talk about it in the context of lebanon and the middle east. the lebanese civil wars had been technically declared as over (when can something like that be declared over?), however, the conflict that has continued into 2006 and beyond has extended it. the war has not really ended, the events that have occurred over the past few decades still have a great impact on lebanese society. there is still a lot of silence around what everyone went through. there is a lot of fear and a lot of bravery that goes into the testimonies that lamia and others are recording. this creation of a new counter-history has been very important. it has been multi-faceted in its chorus of voices and may one day serve a more direct role in restitution, recovery, and change in the face of what has occurred there.
in her video, a journey (un voyage), lamia follows her grandmother, taking the viewer on a personal journey that also takes us through stories of middle eastern history. there is a scene where lamia is talking to her mother at a table while they look through photographs and documents. she is asking her mother about the fact that her grandmother is palestinian and about what it means for her mother to be palestinian. lamia’s mother had supported ‘the lebanese right’ against the palestinians in the struggle around palestinian refugees and palestine involving israel. there are a myriad of perspectives about a historical event expressed together in this conversation. the viewer meets a testimony between two, an unresolved conflict over this conflict. the artist has both a perspective around these events as well as a desire to create a space for dialogue around it. what is the relationship of belief, a desire for truth, and the creation of counter-histories? how do we write a narrative without the firm foundation of agreed upon Truth?
just some convoluted thoughts… (convulvere ‘roll together, intertwine’)
*
this break i have been reading, memory for forgetfulness: august, beirut, 1982 by palestinian poet mahmoud darwish. it is a collection of prose poems reflecting on the 1982 israeli invasion of lebanon, his experience of living there during this time, and the political/historical aspects of the events that ensued.
a small excerpt that relates to my photographing/scanning of newspapers and this class:
“Coffee should not be drunk in a hurry. It is the sister of time, and should be sipped slowly, slowly. Coffee is the sound of taste, a sound for the aroma. It is a meditation and a plunge into memories and the soul. And coffee is a habit which, along with the cigarette, must be joined with another habit- the newspaper.
Where is the newspaper? It’s six o’clock in the morning, and I’m in hell itself. But the news is that which is read, not heard. And before it is recorded, the event is not exactly an event. I know a researcher in Israeli affairs who kept denying the ‘rumor’ that Beirut was under siege simply because what he read was not the truth unless it was written in Hebrew. And since Israeli newspapers had not yet reached him, he wouldn’t acknowledge that Beirut was under siege. But this is not a madness I suffer from. For me, the morning paper is an addiction. Where is the newspaper?
The hysteria of the jets is rising. The sky has gone crazy. Utterly wild. This dawn is a warning that today will be the last day of creation. Where are they going to strike next? Where are they not going to strike? Is the area around the airport big enough to absorb all these shells, capable of murdering the sea itself? I turn on the radio and am forced to listen to happy commercials: ‘Merit cigarettes- more aroma, less nicotine!’ ‘Citizen watches- for the correct time!’ ‘Come to Marlboro, come to where the pleasure is!’ ‘Health mineral water- health from a high mountain!’ But where is the water?
Increasing coyness from the women announcers on Radio Monte Carlo, who sound as if they’ve just emerged from taking a bath or from an exciting bedroom: ‘Intensive bombardment of Beirut.’ Intensive bombardment of Beirut! Is this aired as an ordinary news item about an ordinary day in an ordinary war in an ordinary newscast? I move the dial to the BBC. Deadly lukewarm voices of announcers smoking pipes within hearing of the listeners. Voices broadcast over shortwave and magnified to a medium wave that transforms them into repulsive vocal caricatures: ‘Our correspondent says it would appear to cautious observers that what appears of what is gradually becoming clearer when the spokesman is enabled except for the difficulty in getting in touch with the events, which would perhaps indicate that both warring parties are no doubt trying especially not to mention a certain ambiguity which may reveal fighter planes with unknown pilots circling over if we want to be accurate for it might confirm that some people are now appearing in beautiful clothes.’ A formal Arabic with correct information, ending with a song by Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab in colloquial Arabic with the correct emotion: ‘Either come see me, or tell me where to meet you / Or else tell me where to go, to leave you alone.’
Identically monotonous voices. Sand describing sea. Eloquent voices beyond reproach, describing death as they would the weather, and not as they would a horse or motorcycle race. What am I searching for? I open the door several times, but find no newspaper. Why am I looking for the paper when buildings are falling in all directions? Is that not writing enough?
That’s not quite right. The one looking for a paper in the midst of this hell is running from a solitary to a collective death. He’s looking for a pair of human eyes, for a shared silence or reciprocal talk. He’s looking for some kind of participation in this death, for a witness who can give evidence, for a gravestone over a corpse, for a bearer of news about the fall of a horse, for a language of speech and silence, and for a less boring wait for certain death. For what this steel and these iron beasts are screaming is that no one will be left in peace, and no one will count our dead.
I’m lying to myself: I have no need to search for a description of my surroundings or my leaky interiors. The truth of the matter is that I am terrified of falling among the ruins, prey to a moaning no one can hear. And that is painful. Painful to the extent of my feeling the pain as if the event had actually happened. I’m now there, in the rubble. I feel the pain of the animal crushed inside me. I cry out in pain but no one hears me. This is a phantom pain, coming from an opposite direction- out of what might happen. Some of those hit in the leg continue to feel pain there for several years after amputation. They reach out to feel the pain in a place where there is no longer a limb. This phantom, imaginary pain may pursue them to the end of their days. As for me, I feel the pain of an injury that hasn’t happened. My legs have been crushed under the rubble…”
“the sea as a place of uninterrupted rupture”
Judith Herman’s book, Trauma and Recovery, (an easy read, as these things go, sort of basic but worthwhile) is a historical overview of the recognition and treatment of trauma, the political contexts in which it is understood, cataloged. Understood as what? The basic fact, the core of what various definitions and theories have gleaned over time puts trauma as that which cannot be understood. Or ignored. “Idée fixe” for Janet, the interruption, preoccupation, the obsession. The terrible absence, more than silence. The nightmares that can’t be forgotten or remembered.
so is the sea, as a place of “uninterrupted rupture” the site of trauma itself? all those blurs and fogs that haunt our daily. sometimes its so still. as still and strange as the raging. but we could never live there, just humans, flesh and bone.
In Herman’s work at Cambridge Hospital she directs a program that focuses on autobiography as a tool to integrate traumatic memory. It takes patients years and multiple drafts to remember, to grasp and to feel their horrors, to come around to some perspective, seeing themselves as characters in a larger unfolding, having sympathy for themselves, engaging in an inner dialog outside the one scripted by the trauma.
In so many ways i see the work i find engaging, the work i try to do, as the broader implementation of this process. These are murky waters, as the same reason that a story is mine to tell is the same reason that it’s not. I swear i can make that make more sense… so, if i’m telling the stories my mother told me throughout my childhood, of family long dead (and yet very alive) it is my story, a part of my identity to share if i choose. eh, but it’s the story and identity of my whole family as well and, of course, these are not pretty stories. what fun would that be? still, the bottom line is, that’s a lot of fucking cousins to get consent from. perhaps more than concern for offending or violating them, i fear that none of them really care, have enough pride, sense of (that kind of) self to give a damn. which is probably closer to the truth. my question of them is, what happens to the stories we aren’t telling? the ones we’re actively forgetting? the ones we never learn, never dare to ask?
so many of these stories, the ones told, the ones forgotten, chronicle (for me, at least) the process of becoming american. and as americans – i’m a little offended just calling myself that, but it’s true, no matter how you dice it – we are so removed from our effect on the world. we have no place within it, we are it. and images of trauma are almost entirely censured, especially the most pertinent. so of course that planes and buildings thing (i’m so sick of talking about it) dominates the national mindset. not only are such images, by definition, sites of compulsion, fixation, but we have no framework for dealing with them. pearl harbor? seriously?
so that film i saw friday, crónica de una fuga, is about four men who escaped a detention center during the dirty wars in argentina.
it was a little crazy-making, but really, it got me to finally write, when i’d been fucking whack, abuzz with poetry all week, making furious notes but unable to get anything out. and the themes that came out of this were sort of the impossibility, not just of trauma itself, but of survival. i was rather dumbstruck, and disappointed in myself, it had never occurred to me that anyone ever escaped. in what could be an extension of that theme, i kept coming back to the children, born in prison and sold to wealthy families while their parents were tossed into a ditch, while their grandparents marched around the plaza de mayo. some of these children were eventually found and returned to (what was left of) their families, some were found and refused to return. without romanticizing, or extending the analogy of these horribly misplaced orphans any further than is obvious, what does this say about justice, about love? what is the adhesive in that silence? what is it in the stories, told or untold?
and if the nation is the imagined extension of the family unit… well, that explains a few things, right? don’t think the economists can measure that. and, of course, these histories parallel our own…
“When realist discourses of testimony, autobiography, or documentary are utilized to narrate tales of surviving trauma or oppression, they generate the additional problem of representing the essentially unrepresentable psychoanalytic ‘Real’ of trauma. Although all experience is inseparably enmeshed in the telling of it, as conflicts between reception of textual performance and intention often show, trauma is paradoxical in its tenaciousness and its belatedness, both of which contribute to its resistance to narrativization. The traumatic event resists cogent narration and appears ‘unreal’ to the person experiencing it because it occurs in such extraordinary circumstances as disrupted time, space, causation, or scale.
The subsequent narration or documentation of trauma by survivors of historical events such as combat, torture, the atomic bomb, and the Holocaust or interpersonal events such as rape, sexual abuse, and incest paradoxically perform the impossible task of bearing witness, forging community, and/or inciting political resistance to erasure, invisibility, or denial that often exacerbates the original traumatic event. At the same time that disciplinary categorization may reinscribe subjects in networks of domination by ‘realizing’ them, the absence of mooring identity categories as the template that coheres one’s experience is equally problematic because traumatic experience is delegitimated as the exceptional unreal. Writing of the paradox of bearing witness to the Holocaust, the psychoanalyst Dori Laub writes:
‘The trauma is thus an event that has no beginning, no ending, no before, no during and no after. This absence of categories that define it lends it a quality of ‘otherness,’ a salience, a timelessness and a ubiquity that puts it outside the range of associatively linked experiences, outside the range of comprehension, of recounting and of mastery. Trauma survivors live not with memories of the past, but with an event that could not and did not proceed through to its completion, has no ending, attained no closure, and therefore as far as its survivors are concerned, continues into the present and is current in every respect.’ (’Bearing’ 69)” (pg. 267-8)
(Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the ‘Real,’ edited by Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol, U of Illinois Press, 2001)
“[T]rauma… is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available. This truth, in its delayed appearance and its belated address, cannot be linked only to what is known, but also to what remains unknown in our very actions and our language.” (pg. 1-2)
(Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History by Cathy Caruth)
“Caruth’s point in ‘Unclaimed Experience’ is that history and trauma bear an indissoluble connection with each other. We consider history that which can be preserved as a memory and written, but the event that serves as the object of history, that which happens, is erased or blotted out. Maurice Blanchot’s argument about the ‘immemorial’ nature of the disaster suggests that once an experience occurs, it is forever lost; at this point- ‘upon losing what we have to say’ (21), the point of forgetfulness- writing begins. Forgetfulness is the source of memory. The ‘victim’ of [trauma] was never fully conscious during the [event] itself: the person gets way, Freud say ‘apparently unharmed’ (Caruth 187). The witness saw, the traumatic deed or circumstance; the deed or circumstance was never fully known- and hence could not be remembered- and what follows is a profusion of language. In survivor testimonies like Mary R.’s, we read the displacement of the traumatic event- the historical event, lost to memory- by the language of testimony, the sometimes broken, sometimes contradictory stories of the camps, or of hiding, or of the aftermath. But it is a language disrupted by that event, a language of repetition, in which the event is narrated over and over again but in wording that may not be clearly associated with the event. [pg. 1307]
(from Beyond the Question of Authenticity: Witness and Testimony in the Fragments Controversy, Michael Bernard-Donals, PMLA, 116.5, p. 1302-14)