Autobiographical Narrative of Traumatic Experience: Disruption and Resilience in South African Truth Commission Testimonies

Abstract

Abstract Following a suggestion by Crosthwaite (2005) that autobiographical narratives can be viewed as organizational practices, this article turns attention to events of recalling and articulating personal histories of trauma produced during and after the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings of 1996–8. Witness testimonies at the TRC were institutionally framed to fit the aims of national reconciliation in ways that may have limited the kinds of contribution witnesses unfamiliar with the institutional structure could make. Discourses recorded at the human rights violations hearings of the TRC give evidence of speakers recalling traumatic events of state violence that disrupted their lives and displaced them both physically and psychologically. This article considers how traumatic experience poses challenges to the coherence of autobiographical narrative as well as how narrative structures that do not fit institutionally introduced formats can become opaque to the institutional setting. It will also reflect on how the Truth Commission narrations of trauma carry linguistic and cultural cues that signal not only disruption but also the resilience of the narrator.