|
|
|
Book Review
| Teresa Godwin Phelps, Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Pp. 180. $42.50 (ISBN 0-8122-3797-8).
|
| Teresa Godwin Phelps has made an original contribution to the expanding literature on truth commissions. Although the history of these commissions now spans roughly thirty years, Phelps's Shattered Voices is the first book-length study of these extra-judicial bodies to incorporate the premises of narrative theory. The distinction she draws throughout between narrative content (i.e., what victims recollect in their testimony) and narrative form (i.e., how commissions render this evidence in their final reports) will be familiar to those who have read the work of Hayden White, Paul Ricoeur, and Michel Foucault. Her focus on storytelling technique and narrative "construction," however, raises troubling questions about the relationship between political violence and the "radically new kind of justice" (9) which she believes these commissions can administer. |
1
|
|
Phelps believes in the healing power of storytelling. Steeped in the traditions of both psychoanalysis and structuralism, she is inclined to see truth commission reports as therapeutic correctives to the warped "master narratives" (46) which illegitimate regimes develop to control their populations. In the context of democratic transition, where new governments are called upon to confront the past without jettisoning their responsibilities to the future, the greatest potential of the truth commissions, Phelps posits, is their ability to give the victims of state-sanctioned violence an opportunity to speak freely and openly against the regimes that tortured and brutalized them to the point of inarticulacy and psychic (if not physical) dismemberment. Phelps writes, "If one of the significant things that victims lose in oppression is the ability to use language, then language as retribution begins to make sense" (39). By placing victims at the center of the process and allowing them to rehearse their stories outside the formal setting of the courtroom, the truth commissions acknowledge the desire for revenge which many of these individuals feel, but also redirect these impulses to discourage reprisal. Language in the form of an officially commissioned report is substituted for state-sanctioned violence in the traditional form of retributive justice. |
2
|
|
Phelps's analysis is particularly engaging in chapter four, where she details how the reports of truth commissions can work to restore the dignity of victims and rebalance societies unhinged by long periods of systemic violence. By rendering "inchoate pain and grief" as narrative, victims who testify before these commissions, Phelps argues, can assume control of their lives and establish a healthy distance from the traumatic episodes to which they have been exposed. The storyteller "moves from passive victimization to being a morally responsible agent capable of choosing the shape of the narrative in which he or she is cast" (59). This shift toward individual responsibility, Phelps asserts, also helps to promote social cohesion in societies where violence and fear have undermined solidarity. By establishing themselves within a community of survivors whose claims on justice are validated by the new regime, individuals who share their stories "help to bridge the chasm between the past, in which people were enemies to each other, and the present, in which former adversaries coexist as fellow citizens" (59). This bridging exercise turns what is essentially a reprisal and cataloguing of past injuries into a moral tale for the larger community. The commissions not only help to discover and establish the truth about the past, they elaborate a new set of "aspirational norms" (71) for the future. |
3
|
|
To bolster her theoretical arguments, Phelps presents four case studies (Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, and South Africa) that highlight the role which language plays, both in the initial harms to which the victims of political terror are exposed and in the work which truth commissions undertake to promote healing and reconciliation. While her overall assessment of these commissions is positive, Phelps does not hesitate to describe shortcomings in their work. For example, she criticizes the Argentinean report (Nunca Más), in spite of the good reception which it enjoyed at home, for the way it replicates the "authoritarian" logic of the regime it condemns (86). Though she relishes the "carnival space" (67) which these commissions create, Phelps correctly points out here that justice cannot be achieved where imbalances of power are merely inverted. |
4
|
|
For those without a taste for "post-modern" seasoning, Shattered Voices will not go down easily. The desire of some victims to tell their stories, of course, should not be discounted, but the traumas which these narratives reveal have a real basis which goes much deeper than language. Phelps is not naïve about the realities of torture, but her theoretical interests and her concern for the "voices" of victims overshadow many of the most damaging legacies of torture regimes. Where resources have been siphoned and squandered, where physical impairments overload survivors with constant pain, where fields are still fallow or heavily mined (or both), the reports generated by truth commissions can only help to partially restore what has been lost. |
5
|
| Alexander Karn
|
| California State University, Fullerton |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|