Claire Harris's “Where the Sky Is a Pitiful Tent”: How Two Women Respond after Witnessing Political Torture

Abstract

In her long poem “Where the Sky Is a Pitiful Tent”, Claire Harris juxtaposes quoted prose passages from I, Rigoberta Menchu to an imagined account, in poetry, of a woman's loss by murder of her rebel husband. Although Harris's topic in “Sky” is a dominant group's use of torture to control a resistant victimized group, the poet is primarily interested in the effects of such brutality on the rhetorical choices made by the two victimized women speakers, each of whom is recovering her voice in the aftermath of traumatic experience. In her two speakers Harris dramatizes the contrasting ways of knowing and speaking that Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule in Women's Ways of Knowing identify as “separate knowing” and “connected knowing”. They define the first of these approaches as “detached,” “public” and “disinterested”, the second as personal, “empathic”, “imaginative” and emotionally aware; both perceptual methods correspond to contrasting rhetorical purposes and methods. Harris shows that though each speaker recovers an authoritative voice, each voice reveals both surprising strengths and rhetorical effectiveness as well as a tendency for omissions and distortions resulting from self-protective instincts and from the limitations intrinsic to particular genres. Irony and paradox abound, as Harris dramatizes her two speakers' isolation as well as their mutual dependence: full awareness requires rhetorical and generic inclusiveness.