Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions.
Sanders, Mark
Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth
Commissions, Teresa Godwin Phelps (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 180 pp., $39-95 cloth.
The court of law shares much with theater. This idea is elaborated
by Teresa Godwin Phelps in Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the
Work of Truth Commissions. By turning to drama and to the law, Phelps
demonstrates how, in an era when truth commissions are at the fulcrum of
"transitional justice," soliciting the testimony of victims
and commanding that of perpetrators in forums other than criminal trials
may achieve a dimension of justice lost in traditional juridical proceedings.
Phelps opens with Death and the Maiden, the 1991 play by Chilean
writer Ariel Dorfman that posed the question of whether the truth
commission established to investigate crimes of the Pinochet
dictatorship would be just to all of its victims. In the play, Paulina
Salas threatens with a gun, then binds and gags Miranda, a chance
visitor whose voice and turns of phrase convince her that he is the man
who tortured and raped her fifteen years before. Paulina's husband,
who will lead the commission, which will investigate killings only,
implores her to release Miranda, "for the good of the
country." Paulina responds with a question: "What about my
good?" (p. 4). Taking Paulina's question as its point of
departure, Shattered Voices unites two projects: an advocacy, if not of
the act, then at least of the impulse of revenge--which has, Phelps
claims, been suppressed historically; and an argument for the ability of
truth commissions, rather than tribunals, to allow victims to reclaim
through speech what was taken away from them. Phelps's conclusion
is that the possibility for expression afforded by truth commissions, if
not ideal or the same in each case, is an alternative to revenge as
violence for violence.
The first two chapters detail the repression of the impulse to
revenge in Western history. Blood feud was, over the course of many
centuries, supplanted by the state, whose monopoly on revenge and
retribution is now so well established as to be largely unquestioned.
The Oresteia is an example for Phelps of how revenge was, by degrees,
subsumed by the state; in Aeschylus's drama, the Furies are
"acknowledged and incorporated, they participate in justice but are
not irrationally destructive" (p. 21). Hamlet, notwithstanding the
monotony of its critical reception, complicates revenge. The ghost of
King Hamlet, in successive apparitions, injures Hamlet with the
open-ended "remember me," and, later, with the violent
exhortation to "revenge his foul and most unnatural murder"
(p. 24). Phelps observes that Hamlet's own dying words are a plea
for Horatio to tell his story. The cycle of blood for blood is broken by
a call for narrative. Victims do not have to let blood in order to
satisfy the desire for revenge. Paulina, after all, says that "the
only thing I really wanted" is for Miranda to own up to what he has
done to her and others (p. 4). Generalizing this wish as one for
retribution as a "pay[ing] back to her of something that she has
lost as a result of the crimes against her" (p- 5), Phelps argues
that it is language, not violence, that will realize it.
After exploring links between language and violence and assessing
the efficacy of storytelling in the rehabilitation of victims, Phelps
usefully compares the reports of three Latin American truth
commissions--in Chile, Argentina, and El Salvador--noting how each
tends, more or less, to produce a master narrative of political events.
Nunca Mds, the report of the Argentinian commission, is, in her opinion,
the most successful of the three in transmitting "a cacophony of
individual voices" (p. 89). Phelps concludes her book with an
analysis of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(TRC), the hearings of which were, as Phelps is not the first to
observe, more important in shaping its reception than its massive
seven-volume report (1998-2003), which has not been widely read except
by jurists and scholars. The exceptional degree to which the TRC induced
the testimony of perpetrators occupies Phelps less than one might
expect, given that the more provocative implications of her book concern
Paulina's wish not simply to speak herself but to have Miranda
confess.
Phelps's intervention is timely for questioning the
established opposition between revenge and reconciliation. If speaking
and demanding speech from offenders can in certain ways satisfy the
passion for revenge by effecting retribution in her special sense of
getting back something (of the self), then the speaking fostered by
truth commissions looks like a benign alternative to the violence of
legally sanctioned and extralegal punishment that tends to exclude
victims from the equation.
There remain questions to be asked, however. A difficult one
concerns Phelps's conceptualization of revenge as nonviolent.
Having someone speak and answer questions may require the exercise of
violence; Paulina in Death and the Maiden holds a pistol to the head of
Miranda--whose name must allude, with some irony, to Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the case that, in the United States, established the right of a
person under arrest to remain silent. The question is whether this
violence should be viewed as part of the process of self-reclamation or
not. Should one insist on the irreducibility of this violent remainder
to retribution, as I maintain one must, we cannot simply say that this
coercion is not violence: we need a model that accounts for the
(minimal) retributive violence of the victim that appears to be an
essential moment of his/her recovery. One such model, I would suggest,
is the psychoanalytic one of reparation proposed by Melanie Klein in her
works of the 1930s, in terms of which the infant undertakes symbolic
efforts to repair the damage that it phantasizes having done to the
mother's body. This process is part of the development of the self,
and, as commentators have observed, the development of the self as an
ethical subject; the infant's efforts are a condition of
possibility for ethical action in later life--when violence done may be
actual. The acknowledgment of an unavoidable violence is necessary for
the full restoration of the self through reparation. We have to question
the idea that Paulina or any other victim knows what she "really
wants." In order for the cycle of vengeful violence to end, the
perpetrator must speak. In order for that to happen, however, he or she
must be made to speak. For Phelps's model to work, it is through
this ethical aporia that a victim must inevitably pass. Drama has the
means to stage this aporia of violence, whereas simple opposition of
locution to juridical violence risks repressing it, much as law is said,
in the first place, to have repressed the passion for revenge.
MARK SANDERS
Brandeis University
