"Truth as Accessible as Looking Out a Window"Unit 731 and the Ethics of Virtual Postwar Testimony Patricia P. Chu Professor and psychoanalyst Dori Laub, creator of the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, has drawn upon his own experiences in interviewing Holocaust survivors to construct a model for the interactive work of the interviewer. According to Laub, the interviewer in this delicate and unique situation must act as an analyst and create a steady, safe, and supportive environment, one in which Holocaust survivors can face their often vivid but fragmented memories and draw them into narrative form. In defending his procedure, in which the interviewer focuses on the survivor's memory and helps her articulate her own internal truths, Laub argues that the survivor's testimony should be valued for what it reveals about her psychological experiences rather than judged by its congruence with verified facts. In a series of essays about the interview process published from 1991 through 2018, Laub brackets the historiographic implications of these testimonies while foregrounding the psychological power and necessity of the listener's intervention. These essays emphasize a survivor's need for an active, empathetic, trustworthy, and deeply engaged listener to support her as she returns, in memory, to painful or traumatic events that she may have suppressed from conscious memory for decades. In the absence of the right listener, a hole or gap in a survivor's memory may mark something that has been forgotten and become unspeakable, but which may drive the survivor into unconscious reenactment or into involuntary recollections, and which may give rise to a deep urgency to testify and to bring into orderly narrative memories that may otherwise remain fragmentary. Testimony, for Laub, requires a collaboration between the survivor and her listener. This collaboration is needed to remedy historic wounds of silence and erasure. Laub has called the Holocaust an event without a witness, because the experience was too great and complex for survivors to [End Page 682] comprehend and verbalize in the moment, and because the survivors came to be silenced by the lack of a sympathetic listener or witness to their experiences. Here, I can't be sure, but Laub seems to refer both to a public erasure or denial of the events at the time, and to a private erasure of the voices of those persecuted, as they were forced internally to confront the lack of an Other who would acknowledge their suffering and their humanity, let alone their rights. The task of the interviewer is to counter this wounding by providing, for a limited time, a faithful and empathetic listener. For instance, the interviewer must sense, when a survivor pauses, whether she needs to be encouraged to continue or to be given space to retreat or rest internally in silence. Having once been traumatized or silenced, survivors are liable to experience similar events, such as the death of another family member, or the inability of family members to fully enter into their trauma-informed worldview, as repetitions of their initial wounds. The sense of being unrecognized and unheard—externally and internally—resonates with the tropes of silence, marginalization, and erasure in numerous Asian American texts. Through fiction, Asian American writers such as John Okada, Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men), Nora Okja Keller, and Michael Ondaatje have given voice to the unheard victims of publicly sanctioned injustices from internment and slavelike labor conditions to actual enslavement and murder, while others such as Jung Yun, Kingston (The Woman Warrior), and Monique Truong have explored forbidden topics such as domestic abuse, rape, and invisibility as a gay son and colonial subject. In addition, Asian American scholars and memoir writers have discussed the silencing and shaming of parents not fluent in English, as well as the silences with which (immigrant or adoptive) parents reject transgender off-spring, deny the immigrant origins and losses of transracial adoptees, and seek to contain or forget traumatic historical experiences (David L. Eng and Shinhee Han, Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation; Andrew X. Pham, Mandala and Catfish; Jane Jeong Trenka, The Language of Blood; and Thi Bui, The Best We Could Do). Thus Asian American writers often assume a role analogous to...
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Jan 1, 2019
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