Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions

Abstract

Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions. By Teresa Godwin Phelps. Pennsylvania Series in Human Rights, edited by Bert B. Lockwood. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 192 pp. $45.00 (cloth), $21.95 (paper). Dead? He's dead? The newspaper shimmered in my hands. How dare he? Now I'll near get to murder him. Rage from twenty years earlier engulfed me like a silent explosion of lava, molten and ashy, from deep in my core. That bastard has died on me. Damn him! I had never felt such anger before, not even when it happened. Especially not then: there was too much at stake. I was cool and restrained when he first propositioned me. I was cooler yet the next day, and the day after that, when he repeated his demands and threatened my career. I did not complain to the authorities. There could he no such complaint, because there had been no witnesses. My voice would never have been heard, my word never taken against his. Not in those days. I lost my job and moved on. But unbeknownst to me. rage had smoldered beneath my silence for decades. My anger that day came to mind again as I read Teresa Godwin Phelps s Shattered Voice*: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commnissions. For centuries, she explains, vengeance was a moral obligation: it reestablishes the honor of the victim and it reasserts communal moral norms. If we fail or refuse to avenge the victim, we allow perpetrators to get away with their malfeasance. Those who refuse vengeance thus become accomplices to evil. Over the years, my prudent silence had indeed come to feel like cowardice-a progression that explained much of my overwhelming rage. In our day, at least in the West, the moral obligation of vengeance has been surrendered to the state, which kills people dispassionately, according to the logic of the law, not with the rage of victims or victims' families. This surrender to the state serves social stability, theorists contend, because it stops the endless cycle of reciprocal violence. But what happens when the state itself is guilty of torture and murder? We must remember, Phelps insists, that fragile new governments seldom have the political power and other resources required for legal prosecution. But unless they restore the moral order, they risk an outbreak of the murderous rage of people victimized by the previous regime. How is it possible in such circumstances to restore both moral order and social trust? Phelps contends that the sacramental of truth commissions can meet these important needs by drawing together again all that has been shattered, dismembered, and silenced by torture and other systematic state violence. Shattered Voices analyses the rhetoric of truth commission reports in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, and South Africa to explore what storytelling can achieve and how it does so. …