Witness Narratives Research Articles

Girls at War, Girls in War: Three Female African Child Soldier Narratives

In echoing Obioma Nnaemeka’s fluid understanding of the war front and her insistence on the need to expand the notion of war as armed conflict to incorporate the idea of war as a figure of violence against humanity and human dignity, this article examines witness narratives by and about former female African child soldiers in Uganda and Eritrea. A critical reading of China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier (2002), Senait Mehari’s Heart of Fire (2006), and Evelyn Amony’s I Am Evelyn Amony (2015) reveals that the girl child is continually in/at war, regardless of whether she is at home or on the battlefield. Adopting Judith Butler’s strand of precarity and her notion of framing, the article teases out the nodes of African female livelihood in the militarised patriarchal cultures related in the memoirs, emphasising how the female African child soldier’s body occupies, inhabits, and lives through spaces of combat and domestic violence. The study also examines the feminist critique of otherness and aggressiveness towards those whose lives are considered less grievable and the authors’ agentive paradigm in their writing.

Witness Reporting as Resistance and Recovery–The Swedish Missionary Alma Johansson and the 1915 Armenian Genocide

ABSTRACT Western missionaries became important eyewitnesses of the 1915 Armenian genocide, and many reported on the events. This article analyses witness reporting from a biographical and gendered perspective, taking into account the significance of studying local activism and transnational networks in a humanitarian setting. Taking the witness accounts of the Swedish missionary Alma Johansson as an example, I discuss the conditions and strategies for women to reach out and form opinions in a transnational setting. I also analyse how gender shaped the humanitarian message. Using a narrative analysis, the article further explores the dual motives of the witness accounts of Alma Johansson—the aims of public resistance and private recovery. She wanted to protest openly against the violence and the perceived silence of the world concerning the genocide, at the same time as having to work on her personal trauma. The article assumes that witness narratives can be a catalyst of change, and that these two motives, resistance and recovery, were deeply connected.

Witnessing the Ghost, Letting the Ghost Witness: Exploring the Impediments of Witness Narratives in Holocaust Camp Testimonies through Spectrality and the Metaphor of the Muselmann

Abstract: Within debates surrounding "Levi's Paradox"—the idea that through their survival, survivors are not necessarily the "complete witnesses" of the Holocaust—the Muselmann is frequently posited as able to reconcile this conundrum. Within testimonial literature, these emaciated prisoners were perceived as ghost-like entities who were neither alive nor dead but somehow between life and death. The observed absence left in witness narratives thereby appears to be testimony from inside the experience of these Muselmänner . What is ubiquitously overlooked in such analyses is that the Muselmann primarily functions as a metaphor—rendering the absent dead legible in language. Ignoring this risks instrumentalizing the Muselmann , which threatens to allow the metaphor to become shorthand for something more generic—obfuscating the reality that Muselmänner signify real Holocaust victims. However, all metaphors contain a potential for semantic flexibility. Cannot the Muselmann's ability to pollute rigid dichotomies therefore be approached productively and more ethically when refocalizing him as a ghostly entity in testimonial literature? By examining passages from Primo Levi's If This Is a Man and Charlotte Delbo's Auschwitz and After , this article asks: if the Muselmann is viewed as a ghostly or spectral metaphor—a haunting force within the Holocaust's literary corpus—how might this spectral witness be able to draw attention to erasure and historical blind spots? Constituting an ethical and an interpretive undertaking, this refocalization simultaneously allows one to speak with the Muselmann and enables these anonymous victims to manifest themselves anew as haunting forces through literary testimony.

FORENSIC TESTIMONY AS A GENRE OF NARRATIVE DISCOURSE

Previous narrative researches have never focused on witnesses as the primary tellers of events in courtroom, but rather on lawyers. It stipulated the need to foreground the role of the witnesses who have first- hand knowledge of these events. To that end, this paper explores forensic testimonies from a new perspective and suggests to consider this type of institutional discourse as a separate kind of the narrative genre. In order to classify forensic testimonies as a genre of narrative discourse it was essential to provide a systematic review of contemporary literature related to the problem of genre definition with the aim of determining relevant criteria for assigning discourses specific generic affiliation. These criteria include: the institutional roles of the participants in courtroom context, the pragmatic goals of the lawyers and the witnesses in co-construction of the story within the testimony, as well as the constraining nature of courtroom context. Further the results of theoretical analysis of genre definition were mapped on major narrative dimensions (tellership, tellability, linearity, embeddedness and moral stance) in institutional context of courtroom hearings. The findings of this research showed that witness narratives in testimonies are fragmented, characterized by nonlinear chronology and nonlinear causal logic of events presentation; even though the witnesses are restricted in what and how they tell, the stories they tell are highly relevant for the fact detection in court; testimonies are of dialogical nature, with the lawyers inevitably becoming co-tellers of the witness story; testimonies are embedded into power-asymmetrical ‘question-answer’ pattern of examination; the identity of the witness (and their credibility) is constructed and deconstructed throughout the testimony.

ОСОБЕННОСТИ И ЗНАЧЕНИЕ НАРРАЦИИ В СВИДЕТЕЛЬСКОЙ ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ

Witness literature is an important and significant factor in the historical memory formation. Third-person witness narratives are well-known, and 1-person fictional descriptions are equally well-known. However, first-person factual narrative evidence is of particular interest. They represent the initial reflection narratives of personal experience. In addition, this reflexive narration contains the meaningful being picture dynamics, including changes in the content of this picture. The article contains the results of a value-normative analysis of little-known sources of witness literature, which presents the experience of the repressive practices in the USSR in 1920 1980. Generalization of the analysis results allows us to speak about two cycles of radical performance of the semantic picture of the world. In turn, each such cycle includes two phases. The first phase is associated with strangeness of familiar experience and the liminality of new experience. The second phase expresses the subsequent reaggregation of a new understanding of social life. These dynamics are very close to the dynamics of the conceptual narration of war experiences. The main differences are related to the greater emphasis on victimization, different attitudes towards actors and the reasons for victimization. Over the years, witness literature has become an important material for the socio-cultural engineering of building ideas about the sad events of the past – their oblivion (as meaningful unoblivion) in order to prevent their repetition in the present and in the future. A simple hush-up of such circumstances forms the enduring trauma of public consciousness, its «neuroticism», the inability to distance oneself from the past, to live confidently on, causing obsessive associations, or even repetitions, it becomes a source of internal and external conflicts. Constructive oblivion provides not suppression and deletion, but a systematic comprehension of historical experience.

Witness Narratives and Working-Class Suffering: “The Cry of the Children,” <em>Corn Law Rhymes</em>, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Unpublished Hunger Ballad

The primary historical context for interpretations of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children” (1843) has long been the 1842–43 Children’s Employment Commission reports. Examining the poem in light of Barrett Browning’s prior attempt to address working-class suffering in “O pardon dear lady” (1842) offers new evidence for her engagement with the reports. It also, however, underscores the effects of the anti-Corn Law movement and of what Barrett Browning termed “agricultural-evil” on her “factory-evil” poem. An unfinished ballad in the voice of a starving rural child, “O pardon” exhibits multiple features connecting it to Ebenezer Elliott’s Corn Law Rhymes (1830–31), some of which appear also in “The Cry of the Children.” The first part of this essay considers literary engagement with the anti-Corn Law movement initiated by Elliott, his connections with Barrett Browning, and her intensifying interest in anti-Corn Law politics and in Chartism in 1842. The second part analyzes images, echoes, and rhetorical strategies connecting “O pardon” to “The Cry of the Children” and both to Corn Law Rhymes. It also explores similarities between the poems and witness narratives as these are conceptualized in contemporary life-writing and human rights studies.

Injury narratives in occupational safety and health prevention in Italy.

Storytelling is an effective information source when coupled with technical-scientific evidence. It can promote a structured relationship between evidence-based knowledge and field experience of workplace safety and prevention services (WSPS) inspectors. This is key to identifying the causes of workplace injuries and to set priorities for prevention strategies. The main aim was to describe and report how story collection can be used for deriving validated indications for injury prevention. The specific objectives were to report the results of the creation and dissemination on the web of the story collection and the experience of setting up a community of practice (CoP) to develop preventive recommendations. WSPS inspectors from local health boards in Piedmont (northwest Italy) were asked to write injury stories. They identified the key elements of their stories and developed a narrative of witness accounts to explore the critical issues identified during the investigation. In sessions with the CoP, the inspectors validated the indications for prevention elaborated in each story to reduce bias and standardize recommendations. Between 2012 and 2017, 60 WSPS inspectors wrote 53 injury stories which were collected and published on the institutional website. Twenty-two stories were selected for discussion during peer review sessions in the CoP and the indications for prevention were transformed as preventive solutions. Occupational safety and health prevention can benefit from a narrative-based approach that provides a more comprehensive look at health and safety by facilitating knowledge improvement and sharing.

‘No ordinary crowd’: Foregrounding a ‘hooligan schema’ in the construction of witness narratives following the Hillsborough football stadium disaster

This article examines the linguistic appropriation and deflection of blame in the witness testimonies and evidence-gathering processes of the South Yorkshire Police (SYP) following the 1989 Hillsborough football stadium disaster. It specifically focuses on patterns of stylistic features, such as negation and syntactic foregrounding, which, it is argued, function to encode alternative institutionally congruent stories. It employs schema theory to explore how a ‘hooligan’ narrative was readily invoked and accepted by the SYP. Moreover, it addresses instances of both self-incrimination and the upgrading of police efficacy within statements produced by the South Yorkshire Metropolitan Ambulance Service (SYMAS), and offers a linguistic analysis that points to police involvement in the construction of the SYMAS testimonies.

Orality and the Archive: Teaching the Partition of India through Oral Histories

This article is a reflection on how select oral histories and witness accounts about the partition of India and Pakistan, especially those by Urvashi Butalia and Veena Das were used in a graduate seminar in Bengaluru. The article explores the strength of oral archives as repositories of radical enquiry that may be used in classrooms to understand the complex nature of history, historiography, and interrogate the State’s archival processes. The article explores how students began to see the potency in oral archives as a space that embodies the victimhood of partition victims as opposed to an effacement of the sufferers in most state archives of the event. It observes how the memorialisation of Partition is different in the State’s construction of partition: to the victims who recount their stories, it is the ‘everyday’ that becomes predominant as opposed to State archives that seek to represent the differences between the two nations as paramount in its processes of memorialisation. The note concludes by emphasising the need to put such oral histories to use in classroom, especially to understand the nature of suffering. Through a reading of such stories, it is proposed, an affective literacy is enabled in students’ modes of enquiry about trauma, memory and suffering. Keywords: Partition of India, affective literacy, archives, oral histories, witness narratives.

Postmemorial Autobiography in Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

Scholarship on written Holocaust accounts deals extensively with problems of witnessing, but primarily assumes that the writer is a survivor. As a result, attention focuses on the process of survivors reflecting on their experiences in autobiography. Yet autobiography relating to the Holocaust has also been written by nonsurvivors. In Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006), Daniel Mendelsohn adapts the genre of written survivor accounts and incorporates it into his own autobiography. Both an autobiography about himself and his relationship to his family, as well as a memoir about his six lost relatives, Lost explores whether or not someone who was not there to witness can nevertheless function as a witness. immense scholarship on written Holocaust survivor accounts, viewed in relation to autobiography,1 demonstrates the rise of a new type in the context of Holocaust Studies: postmemorial autobiography.2 With this term, I draw on Marianne Hirsch's concept of and relate it to autobiography.As a nonwitness nonetheless affected by the Holocaust, Mendelsohn retains the of postmemory.3 Post does not signify a movement beyond memory, but signifies instead that those who came after, for example, the second generation, cannot possess the memories themselves, only the traumatic aftereffects. Hirsch ties her concept of postmemory to photography, arguing photographs mediate familial memory and postmemory.4 Photographs, in their capturing of an image in the past which endures into the present, function as a medium in which presence and absence, memory and postmemory come prominently to the fore.In his description of the genre, autobiography theorist Georges Gusdorf employs diction that immediately raises the issue of witnessing: The narrative [of the autobiography] offers us the testimony of a man about himself, the contest of a being in dialogue with itself, seeking its innermost fidelity.5 Earlier in the essay, Gusdorf describes the autobiographer as a of himself [who] wishes to produce his own portrait, who gives himself the job of narrating his own history.6 Along with the term historian, Gusdorf also uses witness: The witness of each person about himself is in addition a privileged one.7 According to Gusdorf, the autobiographer acts as both historian and witness and his autobiography is his testimony; he possesses a privileged position of spectatorship in reference to himself. scholarship on written Holocaust survivor accounts provides a conceptual framework that must be adapted to allow for written Holocaust accounts by nonsurvivors, as exemplified by Lost.Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson identify witness narratives as one of the cases that complicates autobiography: Autobiographical theory . . . raises questions about narratives of witness, about who is authorized to tell stories, why, and when, of what kinds, and to what ends.8 Written survivor accounts of the Holocaust bear witness to the victims of the Holocaust while at the same time providing a narrative of the survivor's experience during the Holocaust. In other words, witness narratives, and thus, written survivor autobiographies, carry out a double function. Mendelsohn's autobiography becomes a witness narrative: in tracing the story of Shmiel Jager and his family, Lost bears witness to a fraction of the victims of the Holocaust, while simultaneously narrating Mendelsohn's own experience in uncovering their story. Mendelsohn is not a witness to the events of the Holocaust themselves, but is a witness to the structure of postmemory and the way in which postmemory affects his own life.This article examines the narrative strategies, more specifically, the interplay between text and image, or between narrative and photography, that Mendelsohn employs throughout his autobiography.9 Mendelsohn grew up knowing only that his great-uncle, Shmiel Jager, along with his wife and four daughters, had been killed by the Nazis. …

Writing Trauma, Writing Life in Chanrithy Him's When Broken Glass Floats

Abstract In “Writing Trauma, Writing Life in Chanrithy Him's When Broken Glass Floats,” I discuss Him's autobiography within the context of recovery narratives, where survivors of traumatic events use writing as therapy and healing. In my exegesis of the text, I demonstrate how not just Him's memory but also the history and culture of Cambodia are reclaimed in this recovery narrative, with Him somewhat paradoxically infusing her memoir, a genre that goes against the grain of Cambodian literary tradition with its focus on the self, with elements of Cambodian culture, history, and poetic structure. The result, I argue, is a text that is neither traditional Cambodian literature nor typical American immigrant literature. I conclude the essay by locating this emergent literature within the recent global boom in witness narrative and, more specifically, within the emergent discourse of Southeast Asian American studies.

Ethics, trust and the first person in the narration of long-form journalism

The use of the first-person narrator is one of the rhetorical devices that distinguishes literary journalism with its qualities of immediacy, intimacy and spontaneity in the pursuit of truth-telling. But how do the particular qualities of the narrator’s style relate to specific effects and what are the differences between an ‘implied’ and a ‘dramatised’ narrator? Through the writings of British columnist and author, Ian Jack, and through the work of the late Gitta Sereny, this article explores how these qualities convey different meanings and whether one appears more authentic (and therefore, more ethical) than the other. While Jack employs a witness narrative, reflecting and analysing the impact of the subject upon him, Sereny’s narrator is more distanced, a technique employed to address difficult moral issues. Through these examples, the article asks how writers can avoid the inherent danger that self-revelation will collapse the distinction between the creation and creator.

Analysing Deception in Written Witness Statements

Written witness statements are a unique source for the study of high-stakes textual deception. To date, however, there is no distinction in the way that they and other forms of verbal deception have been analysed, with written statements treated as extensions of transcribed versions of oral reports. Given the highly context-dependent nature of cues, it makes sense to take the characteristics of the medium into account when analysing for deceptive language. This study examines the characteristic features of witness narratives and proposes a new approach to search for deception cues. Narratives are treated as a progression of episodes over time, and deception as a progression of acts over time. This allows for the profiling of linguistic bundles in sequence, revealing the statements’ internal gradient, and deceivers’ choice of deceptive linguistic strategy. Study results suggest that, at least in the context of written witness statements, the weighting of individual features as deception cues is not static but depends on their interaction with other cues, and that detecting deceivers’ use of linguistic strategy is en effective vehicle for identifying deception.

Do testimonies of traumatic events differ depending on the interviewer

While differences in witness narratives due to different interviewers may have implications for their credibility in court, this study considers how investigative interviews by different parties to the proceedings, as well as the gender and nationality of interviewers, can influence the testimony of witnesses in court who share comparable traumatic experiences. The foundation of the analysis was answers given to judges, prosecutors, civil party lawyers and defence lawyers in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) located in Phnom Penh. Transcribed testimonies of 24 victim witnesses and civil parties which were translated from Khmer into English were analysed using a computer-based text analysis program, the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC). Results showed that when answering questions by females, witnesses used significantly more cognitive process words. When interviewed by international rather than by Cambodian parties to the proceeding witness accounts were composed of significantly more verbal expressions of affective processes and of perceptual processes. Furthermore, witnesses used most cognitive and affective process words during the interview by civil party lawyers and defence lawyers. These results may be due to a prior supportive relationship between civil parties and their lawyers and due to a more interrogative question style by the defence lawyers, who attempt to undermine the credibility of the interviewed witnesses. Data shows that LIWC analysis is an appropriate method to examine witness accounts and, therefore, contributes to a better understanding of the complex relationship between testimony in events under litigation and credibility.

Witness or False Witness: Metrics of Authenticity, Collective I-Formations, and the Ethic of Verification in First-Person Testimony

One possible response to allegations of hoaxing that surround the contemporary traffic in witness narratives is to re-theorize issues central to testimonial narration. Rather than arguing that the truth or falsity of witness narratives can be definitively determined, we complicate the transparency of the first-person narrator in testimony and the claim of authenticity that has become the guarantor of that subject position. To do so, we explore how the effect of authenticity is produced by certain “metrics,” and how differing “I”-formations—here, composite, coalitional, translated, and negotiated—generate the aura of authenticity a text projects, as well as the imagined relation of readers to personal stories of witness. After tracking the metrics of authenticity in four exemplary texts—“Souad”’s Burned Alive , the Sangtin Collective’s Playing with Fire , Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone , and Dave Eggers’s What is the What ?—we suggest an alternative reading practice to “rescue” the reading often associated with testimonial narratives.

“What Was I?”: Literary Witness and the Testimonial Archive

Nonfictional witness narratives and literary testimony travel together. Although such accounts spring from diverse experiences, they increasingly take the form of neoliberal narratives of resilience and redemption. This essay examines how Jamaica Kincaid’s practice of literary witness contests this emerging norm in the humanitarian and philanthropic archive. Her autobiographical fiction refuses a script of suffering and overcoming as the basis for eliciting readerly empathy. Kincaid creates female protagonists who do not conform to gender norms, including selfless mothering, heterosexual virtue, and faith in Western-style education and empowerment. In so doing, she exposes the ambivalences with which testimony can be met when victims are not properly sympathetic. I argue that we should trace the itineraries of the ethical across nonfictional and fictional practices of witness in order to challenge the neoliberal requirement that all victims must tell the same story in order to be heard. (LG)

Testimony in Transmission: Victim and Witness Narratives in Contemporary Drama

Testimony in Transmission: Victim and Witness Narratives in Contemporary Drama

Vidnesbyrdets vidner: Receptionsangst og etik i mødet med det interviewede vidne

Witnessing the Witness: Anxiety of Reception and the Survivor Interview:In this article I highlight and discuss the ethical challenges raised in and by the reception of witness interviews, focusing on audiovisual and written interviews with survivors from what is commonly referred to as Holocaust. The article falls into three parts. In the first part I outline the basic features of witness interviews, arguing that such interviews may be described according to the different answers they provide to questions regarding authenticity, performativity and interactivity. Drawing upon recent theoretical approaches from the study of testimony and witness narratives, the second part of the article presents and discusses different ways of positioning oneself as the receiver of such cultural artifacts, suggesting the term ‘anxiety of reception’ to describe a common difficulty shared by these approaches, a difficulty not easily, if at all, avoidable. The final part of the article extends this discussion by turning towards some of the experiences gained during the making of a recent Danish publication of witness interviews – Vidnesbyrd: Danske fortællinger fra tyske koncentrationslejre (2008) [Testimonies: Danish Stories from German Concentration Camps], collected and edited by Henrik Skov Nielsen, Stefan Kjerkegaard and myself.

Memory Theatres, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma-Aesthetic

To enclave the human rights violation story at a primordial scene of violence is already to preselect the restorative powers of legal, medical, media, and textual rationalities as post-violent. Where violence is and is not positioned in the narrative of witness and the witnessing of narrative is the concern of this essay. I pose this question: Does the cultural intelligibility of the biographical and witnessing artifact depend on the violence of the signifier—by which I mean repressive authentication by various expert knowledge practices, truth-claiming procedures, and mass media circuits? And if so, how do we witness this particular violence?

Doukhobor Autobiography as Witness Narrative

For many writers who belong to minority groups, autobiography has come to operate as a where issues about ethnic identity, group memory, and minority subjectivity can be addressed. Anne E. Goldman's call in Take My Word a wider autobiographical field that can a wider spec trum of the ways and means by which people in the twentieth century speak themselves into existence (ix) recognizes how this mixing of autobiograph ical forms has resulted in a new position for autobiographical writing as a way in which minority identities can be negotiated. To help describe how the appropriation of autobiography within minority discourses can result in a different form of autobiographical representation, I want to present a new term called and I want to place it in relation to autobi ography theory. Then I will use a text by Gregorii Soukerov as a witness narrative, and I will connect that to what I call the dias poric imaginary, which I read as a set of tropes developed by Doukhobors so that they can construct their own history and their own way of relating knowledge about that history. The situation of the Doukhobors is ideal for a consideration of alternate autobiographical forms as technologies of identity construction because subjectivity is collective, is deliberately oppositional to main stream discourse, and is formed with reference to a type of embodied mysti cism rather than to psychologized notions of the unconscious and the con scious mind found in Western discourses of the self. The Doukhobors are a Russian-speaking religious sectarian group which has existed in Russia since the seventeenth century.1 The name Doukhobor means Spirit Wrestler. It was originally given to this group by the Russian Orthodox Church, who saw them as wrestling against the spirit of God—that is, against the church as an institution. The Doukhobors adapted the name to mean that they