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Cynthia Franklin and Laura E. Lyons, eds.
“Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 27.1 (Winter 2004)
Honolulu, Hawai’i: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004
312 pages
ISSN: 0162-4962
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Reviewed by Lena Khor

Testimony lies at the heart of the Winter 2004 special issue of Biography, “Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing.” Guest edited by Laura E. Lyons and Cynthia Franklin of the English Department at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, “Personal Effects” comprises an introduction by the editors, seven articles by scholars from various disciplines, and two interviews conducted by the editors with cultural and literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Hawaiian scholar and activist Haunani-Kay Trask. The issue investigates different sites of testimony, formal and informal, and considers not only the relation¬ships among these various sites but also their effects on those who testify and those who witness the testimony. It brings together a collection of thoughts on the connections between the production, circulation and reception of oral, visual and written life narratives and the legacies of extreme state violence around the globe, on the one hand, and the efforts of rights advocacy and for social justice, on the other hand.

The relationship amongst violation, testimony and justice is poignantly captured in the work of Argentine artist Claudia Bernardi, whose 1996 fresco-on-paper piece, “The Intricate Machine of Untruth,” graces the front cover of the issue. The cover image that depicts, among other things, a half-decomposed female body is barely discernible. As the editors note, this elusive yet haunting image simultaneously demands and defies interpretation, illustrating the challenge of bearing witness to the truth of a massacre, especially in the face of state machinations designed to conceal, refute and contain the facts and feelings of the violence. As an artist and a member of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team that examines mass graves across Central and Latin America, Bernardi engages at once in the process of disclosing the truth for political criticism of the state and of representing the truth for communal memories of the survivors. Her art, like her forensic work, visually and physically remembers and re-members the dead based on what they have left behind—their belongings or their bones.

These remains of the dead inform, in part, Franklin and Lyons’s selection of the issue’s title, “Personal Effects.” They see testimony as the “personal effects,” the remains and reminders of the dead. The introduction states: “In the context of struggles against human rights abuses, often what remains of victims are the stories that can be told about their work, their relationships, and what is known of their end.” The title also resonates with the issue’s interests in 1) how testimony reveals the personal effects of political acts on individual lives, and 2) how the personal nature of testimony affects the political movements for social change. Franklin and Lyons’ thoughtful approach to cover image and title selection informs the rest of their editorial work in “Personal Effects.” The result is an elegantly composed and eloquently expressed collection of work on a range of pertinent topics.

Each essay in this issue lends a different perspective to the theme of “personal effects.” Indeed, the variety of representations emerges as one of the issue’s strengths. The articles, interviews and intro¬duction cover various historical events in different geographical regions, including the Holocaust in Germany, the forced separation of native Australian children from their parents in Australia, rape warfare in Bosnia, apartheid in South Africa, colonialism in India, the annexation of Hawai’i, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The contributors write from several locations: Australia, Germany, Hawai’i, South Africa and the continental U.S. They represent multiple disciplines as well, ranging from Anthropology, Communications, English, Hawaiian Studies, and Jewish Studies, to Social Inquiry and Women’s Studies. Such diversity means that almost anyone—academics and non-academics, life writing scholars and non-life writing scholars—will likely find something of value and interest in “Personal Effects.” This interdisciplinarity also suggests the relevance of life writing in fields besides literary studies and even beyond the academy.

Cohesion and continuity prevail in the issue despite the wide variety of events, regions and disciplines. Franklin and Lyons carefully arrange the articles so that each builds upon the other, thereby enabling an increasingly nuanced understanding of the complexities of individual testimony and state violence. The opening essay, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith’s “Conjunctions: Life Narratives in the Field of Human Rights,” represents an almost ideal introduction to “Personal Effects.” The article lays the groundwork for the discussion of life writing and human rights violations in subsequent essays by providing an overview of how personal narratives intervened in the development of human rights in the past and how they might continue to do so in the future. For instance, the essay charts how acts of personal storytelling spawned various rights movements and how the Holocaust both shaped the very idea of testimony in the Western imagination and sparked the genre and study of trauma literature.

Schaffer and Smith’s speculations on the recent boom in the production and consumption of life narratives are particularly arresting. They suggest that the popularity of life writing stems from its ability to help individuals reconstitute identities that are increasingly fragmented by social, economic, political, and cultural turmoil. The editors write:
Such dislocations of identity unsettle psychically experienced understandings of time (the before, the new, the possible future), space (the old place, the new place), subjectivity (the me I used to be and the me I am becoming), and community (the ones to which I used to belong and the ones of which I am now a member).
In light of such destabilized identities, “storytelling functions as a crucial element in establishing new identities of longing (directed toward the past) and belonging (directed toward the future).”

The issue of identity, so critical to any study of life writing, is especially complicated when the personal story is construed as testimony. In terms of giving testimony, questions of authenticity, authority and accuracy inevitably problematize almost any personal story that purports to testify to the truth. In terms of bearing witness to testimony, problems with inappropriate or inadequate identification abound. Ethical dilemmas of empathy and engagement on the part of those who witness testimony and of representation by those who solicit, transmit and circulate testimony proliferate. The articles in “Personal Effects” contribute insightful analyses and innovative approaches to these questions of identity and identification.

Andrew S. Gross and Michael J. Hoffman’s “Memory, Authority, and Identity: Holocaust Studies in Light of the Wilkomirski Debate” adds to the study of the affective power of testimony and to the debate on the reliability of testimony as evidence. The article investigates the story of Binjamin Wilkomirski, a Swiss whose obsession with Holocaust survivor narratives led him to reframe his traumatic childhood in the shape of Holocaust testimony and to identify himself as one of its survivors in his 1995 memoir Bruchstücke or Fragments. For Gross and Hoffman, the Wilkomirski scandal illustrates that “testimonies are questionable sources of historical evidence, but they are paramount vehicles of identification.”

Gross and Hoffman’s analysis of the Wilkomirski scandal illuminates the status of the Holocaust and its testimonial literature in Western culture. The authors propose that Holocaust testimony captivates its audience by allowing them to identify not so much with an individual survivor as with a community of victims, thus valorizing a kind of Holocaust victim culture. Wilkomirski validated his childhood suffering and his status as victim by reframing his pain in terms of this extreme event. Gross and Hoffman argue that the power of victim culture is easily tapped to promote national and international agendas. Turning to the on-going Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they reflect on how the Jewish cause in that war is fueled by the hallowed status of the Holocaust as the ultimate violation and Jews as the ultimate victims.

Rosanne Kennedy’s “The Affective Work of Stolen Generations Testimony: From the Archives to the Classroom” continues the discussion of an audience’s identification with the survivor in the context of Stolen Generations testimony in Australia. “Stolen Generations” refers to the generations of Aboriginal and Indigenous Australian children who were forcibly separated from their parents during British colonial rule under a policy designed to eradicate native Australian settlements by assimilating the next generation of native children into white Australian society. The reactions of Kennedy’s predominantly white Australian students in her undergraduate class, “Trauma, Memory and Culture,” to the Stolen Generations testimony offer a valuable, albeit limited, case study of testimony reception.

Based on the reflective essays of these students at the Australian National University, Kennedy argues that teaching these testimonies enables non-Indigenous teachers and students to be conscious of themselves as inheritors of a postcolonial history. For some white Australian students, the testimonies elicited the awareness that the native Australians and their concerns were not as disconnected from their own lives as they had initially assumed. Some even began to question their implication in the historical events. Kennedy’s consideration of Indigenous artist Pamela Croft’s work and the artist’s visit to her class will be of particular interest to those concerned with how audiences might be invited to engage with survivors and their testimonies. Teachers of trauma literature and testimony may also find the pedagogical strategies in the essay to be useful.

Like Kennedy, Tikka Wilson’s “Racism, Moral Community, and Australian Aboriginal Autobiographical Testimony” deals with the separation of native Australian children from their parents and is concerned with how testimony may improve relations between the native and non-native populations in Australia. Her article examines If Anyone Cared, the 1977 autobiography by Margaret Tucker, an Aboriginal activist in New South Wales. She suggests that Tucker’s autobiography invites white readers into a moral community with the Aborigines. Wilson explains how the racist notion that Aboriginal people were “not quite human Others who were outside moral community with white colonists” justified the separation policy. She argues that Tucker challenges these stereotypes of white readers about Aboriginal families by characterizing the similarities between white and Aboriginal families and by emphasizing the moral superiority of Aboriginal people. Based on her reading of Tucker’s autobiography, Wilson proposes that testimony by Aboriginal people who were separated from their families have the potential to narrow the racialized distance between Aborigines and non-Aborigines.

Wendy S. Hesford shares Kennedy and Wilson’s interest in bridging the gap between those who testify and those who witness testimony, but worries about facile forms of identification and representation that usurp and exploit the identity and pain of the survivor. While Kennedy and Wilson are invested in narrowing the racial divide in Australia, Hesford is concerned with reducing the survivor-witness distance globally. Her essay, “Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the Spectacle of Distant Suffering,” examines how the representation of suffering by “international observers”—journalists, artists and filmmakers—and the conventions of documentary depiction influence the audience’s reception. Drawing from numerous texts on rape warfare in the Balkan conflict of the early 1990s, the essay analyzes, among other things, ways in which suffering may be represented without graphic depictions of violence that perpetuate trauma or exploit the survivor.

Photojournalist Melanie Friend’s 1996 photo-testimonial project, Homes and Gardens/Documenting the In¬visible: Images from Kosovo, for instance, refrains from images of violence. It conveys the sense of violation by juxtaposing testimony from Albanian Kosovars living under the terror of police raids in the 1990s with photographs of their homes as quiet, orderly and intimate spaces. Hesford suggests that, when compared to the media’s coverage of the conflict, the contrast between the terror of violence and the calm of the domestic abodes in Friend’s photo-testimonial work provokes viewers to re-evaluate their subject positions and their relationship to the conflict. She states that the juxtaposition not only “encourages viewers to consider the relationship between testimony and visual evidence, and the distance between what one sees and what one hears or reads” but also “prompts viewers to contemplate how they are positioned by media to see themselves, and to consider the problem of implication.”

Hesford’s rhetorical approach to the question of testimony reception and her critique of documentary conventions should intrigue scholars of rhetorical theory and film theory alike. Her proposal of the concept and practice of “transnational rhetorical witnessing,” a form of witnessing across national boundaries that is mindful both not to usurp the place of the survivor of trauma and not to consume the spectacle of trauma as a voyeur, adds to the burgeoning scholarship on ethics, empathy, and engagement in trauma studies.

Sandra Young’s “Narrative and Healing in the Hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission” shifts the focus from the relationship between survivor and witness to that of the survivor, the state and the site of testimony. Her article considers the limits and limitations of testimony for individual healing and social reconciliation at a state-sponsored public forum like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It evaluates the criticisms that the TRC hearings privileged the political agenda of nation-building over, and at times at the expense of, the personal sufferings of the citizens. Young argues that the “rituals” of the TRC— “the language of the church, psychotherapy, and nation-building” —constrained the potential of this site of testimony to address properly the impact of apartheid on South Africans. But, she insists, the TRC still enabled productive outcomes. Her essay demonstrates how various witnesses transformed the public forum of the hearings into a space in which to articulate their own interpretations of what the public hearings may or may not accomplish.

The TRC hearings are also the subject of Allen Feldman’s article, “Memory Theatres, Virtual Witnessing, and the Trauma-Aesthetic.” Originally commissioned as an afterword, Feldman’s essay references the other articles in this volume, drawing connections and identifying overlapping themes. It questions, for example, the problematic place of testimony as the medium for and the artifact of history. Echoing Gross and Hoffman’s concerns with Wilkomirski’s Fragments, Feldman asks, “How does [testimony’s] double status as both medium and artifact orient its relation to the historical? And wherein lies its authenticating status—as first-hand evidence of harmful acts, or as a product of institutional cultures of witnessing?” Like Hesford’s “documentary conventions” and Young’s “narrative’s transcendence,” Feldman is troubled by the “emplotment” in testimony. He identifies the presumed structure of testimony—identification of pain, inventory of incidents and prescriptions for cure—as limiting the kinds of stories that are told and consequently the stories that are written into history.

Feldman observes that testimonies “write histories of terror and harm, but they themselves are written into a history.” His article speculates on what kind of history this might be, especially in the case of the TRC. Feldman’s essay thus represents an important critique of testimony and trauma studies because it interrogates the premises and practices of memory, trauma, truth, witness and history that permeate these fields. For instance, Feldman critiques the focus on history for the restoration of justice:
The recent wedding of historiography, archiving, and witnessing to projects of restorative justice entails instituting a proper subject of history, and thus the imposition of a master narrative, a temporal transparency, and a foreclosing anthropological limit that can exclude emerging minorities characterized by gender difference, sexual preference, and compromised immune systems.
The interviews with scholar-activists Gayatri Spivak and Haunani-Kay Trask that close “Personal Effects” stand in sharp contrast to Feldman’s dense prose and unwieldy ideas. The candor of conversation in the interview format lends, for the most part, immediacy and increased comprehensibility to the words and ideas. Lyons and Franklin’s conversation with Spivak, “‘On the Cusp of the Personal and the Impersonal’: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” for instance, channels the complex discussion of the relationship between the testifier and the witness of testimony to the simple act of reading. Spivak’s description of reading involves bridging a distance between the self and the other: “By reading I do not mean analyzing and diagnosing. By reading I mean a kind of no holds barred self-suspending leap into the other’s sea.” Spivak is refreshingly lucid in speech and her comments on her decision to write less theoretically will no doubt interest many literary and cultural scholars.

Trask’s interview with the editors, “Land, Leadership, and Nation: Haunani-Kay Trask on the Testimonial Uses of Life Writing in Hawai’i,” describes how the petitions that Hawaiians signed in 1897 against annexation continue to fuel the contemporary sovereignty movement by lending it legitimacy and continuity. Trask proposes that the petitions illustrate the power of testimony: they elicit “the linking of generations, the mapping of resistance, the evidence of our own past through our own recording of it.” Trask’s rather forceful language of activism comes as somewhat of a surprise after the tempered tones of academic prose in the preceding articles. Both Spivak and Trask relate personal anecdotes that reveal how the on-the-ground interactions between speaker and audience are always subject to unpredictability and misunderstanding, thus shedding light on what Hesford, borrowing from Ulrich Baer, calls the “ungovernability” of testimony.

The editors include the transcript of the interviews under the “Articles” section of the journal. Their introduction explains that these interviews “serve as commentary and oral history.” They “occupy a middle space between the written and the oral.” It is exactly this kind of interest in extending and examining conventions of representation that makes this special issue of Biography a remarkable contribution to the scholarship of testimony, life writing and human rights. Ultimately, “Personal Effects” represents a timely reminder not only for care and consideration on the part of those working directly with testimony in the field but also for caution and critical contemplation on the part of those engaged with testimony in more philosophical ways.