Survivors of political violence give testimonies in families and communities, trials and truth commissions, religious institutions, psychotherapies, newspapers, documentaries, artworks, and even in solitude. Through spoken, written, and visual images, survivors' testimonies tell stories that may change history, politics, and life itself. In this book Stevan Weine, a psychiatrist and scholar in the field of mental health and human rights, focuses on the testimony of survivors for the hope it might hold-hope expressed by ...
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Survivors of political violence give testimonies in families and communities, trials and truth commissions, religious institutions, psychotherapies, newspapers, documentaries, artworks, and even in solitude. Through spoken, written, and visual images, survivors' testimonies tell stories that may change history, politics, and life itself. In this book Stevan Weine, a psychiatrist and scholar in the field of mental health and human rights, focuses on the testimony of survivors for the hope it might hold-hope expressed by survivors again and again that, no matter what horrors or humiliations they have endured, some good might come of their stories. It is through the thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin, and his approach to narrative, that Weine seeks to read the testimony of survivors of political violence from four different twentieth-century historical nightmares--and to read them as the stories they are meant to be, fully conveying their legitimacy, resourcefulness, power--and, finally, hope. A deeply involving, compassionate, occasionally confrontational blend of practical hands-on experience and dialogic theory, emerging from the author's decade-long work in Europe and Chicago with survivors of the Balkan wars, this book is committed to the proposition that efforts to use testimony to address the consequences of political violence can be strengthened--though by no means guaranteed--if they are based on a fuller acknowledgment of the personal and ethical elements embodied in the narrative essence of testimony. These elements are what Testimony after Catastrophe seeks to reveal.
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In this book, Stevan Weine, professor of psychiatry and the director of the International Center on Responses to Catastrophes at the University of Illinois at Chicago, identifies a profound lack in current conceptions of the function and utility of testimony as it appears within a clinical setting, specifically with respect to the treatment of individuals suffering from post-traumatic psychological difficulties following situations of extreme political violence. Weine argues that this lack is most notably present in the failure of the mental health profession to adequately comprehend the necessarily narrative structure of testimony, with all that narrative entails from the standpoint of literary and rhetorical theory. Weine seeks to bridge the gap between this ?clinical testimony? and the testimony that serves as the object of study in current literary and rhetorical theory by applying the theoretical framework of Bakhtin?s dialogic model of narrative analysis. The project is motivated by a desire to reconfigure the giver of testimony, the victim of political violence, as a key agent in the creation of history but also as a member of a community of storytellers who together and through their interaction constitute the truth of history.
The discussion begins with a brief introduction to the problem of clinical testimony as studied and experienced by the author in his scholarly and field researches. It then proceeds to a consideration of four ?spaces? of testimony, each highlighting a separate facet of the problem of testimony from a clinical perspective and pairing it with a literary or filmic work of testimony. Weine begins with ?Torture Testimony,? presenting a parallel between clinical testimonies of atrocity under Pinochet?s dictatorship in Chile and a dramatized testimony called Death and the Maiden by Ariel Dorfman. He then passes to the space of Holocaust testimony in which he takes up Art Spiegelman?s Maus as the literary text and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale as the clinical testimony. The chapter ends with a questionably founded critique of the field of Holocaust Studies as perpetuating a myth of the sufficiency of remembrance to ensure against the repetition of genocidal atrocity. Weine?s chapters on the spaces of testimony that emerge from the conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo differ from the first chapters in that the artistic works they engage are, in a sense, less refined responses to the political violence that prompted their creation simply because the incidents they represent are so recent. Part One ends with a meditation on the incompleteness or the gaps that mark all testimonies as perhaps an essential condition of their creation, a condition that can be read as a sign of the witness?s fragmented consciousness or as an indication that healing is a continual process that is never finished, never finalized. It is this quality of unfinalizability that serves as a segue into the discussion of Bakhtin?s dialogism as an analytical tool that is particularly well-suited to the study of testimonial narrative.
The second part of the book is devoted to the explanation and implementation of Bakhtin?s dialogism as an analytical tool with the aim of illuminating three fundamental needs that emerge from situations of trauma resulting from political violence: 1) relieving suffering, 2) creating cultures of peace and reconciliation, and 3) documenting histories. Weine applies the key Bakhtian concepts of polyphony, dialogism, and unfinalizability to show how mental health professionals and human rights workers might better understand the dynamics of testimony as a narrative phenomenon that engages speakers and listeners as partners in the creation of meaning through dialogue.
Ultimately, Weine succeeds in articulating the need for a revised conception of the possibilities and operations of testimony, but he fails to create a stable and useful bridge between the clinical practice of testimony and the philosophical problem of testimony as it is currently debated in the fields of literary and rhetorical theory. While Bakhtinian dialogism does appear to be a useful mechanism for the analysis of communication events involving testimony delivered by survivors of political persecution, its application in this book appears to be somewhat elementary, presenting the theory in an oversimplified form that does little to illuminate some of the deeper narrative structures that condition the appearance of acts of testimony, either in clinical or literary settings. Weine himself calls attention to the fact that he makes use of the theory in a rather unsophisticated fashion, but asserts that his advancement of the theory should function as a starting point for further dialogue on the subject.
As an introduction to some of the problems and possibilities that post-trauma testimony poses for mental health and human rights workers, this book nicely articulates a very real problem in the literature on testimony. Its intentional situation outside of current theoretical discussions of the nature and status of testimony as an ethical and linguistic performative event, however, while perhaps necessary for the engagement of the target popular readership, leaves the discussion seeming strangely ungrounded.
