Transnational Testimonios by Patricia DeRocher

Author:Patricia DeRocher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press

PART III

Testifying to the Politics of the Imagined

CHAPTER 6

“Sometimes My Geographies Get Jumbled”

The Temporal and Spatial Disruptions of Living Memory

Literature should not be charged with the awesome burden of chastising readers into guilt and burdensome recollections. Neither should literature completely neglect the testimonial voice of the times.

—SAÚL SOSNOWSKI, “OF MEMORY’S LITERARY SITES”

In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Edward Said suggests that while the arts and humanities have no obligation to solve the world’s problems, they nevertheless comprise a critical component of social justice projects for the critical perspectives and imaginative visions they provide (53). Feminist literary testimonios seem to understand themselves in a parallel fashion. If activist testimonios utilize the writing form to stage political interventions, literary testimonios perform more epistemological reflections that come to bear on pressing social issues, including the uses of historical memory, the social function of writing, and the ability of language to convey traumatic circumstance. These literary deployments collectively capitalize on the increasing cultural currency and recognition of testimonio by applying a testimonial narrative framework to works that do not otherwise conform to traditional conceptions of what constitutes testimonio.

Chapters 6 and 7 are centrally concerned with how and why actual historical events become translated into the world of fiction, and what opportunities this affords. While some directly draw upon oral histories and interviews to produce an imaginative text, others either loosely interpret what little exists in historical archives or create stories within a testimonial framework that imagine how else life could be. The effect is more exploratory and deliberative than functionary. While most do not utilize a co-narrational framework that mirrors those in activist deployments, they do employ other polyvocal tactics—through experimentation with narrative point of view and fragmented narrative practices—or find other ways of making the absent polyphony present. While not as pointed in considering how their words resonate with specific audiences, these works nevertheless offer epistemic possibilities for diverse readerships, regardless of their racial or national locations. Such practices open conceptual doors to reassess how historical events have been conceived and to prompt readers to consider new ways of being in the world through modeling alternate modes of epistemic dialogue.

Through narrative disruptions and poetic reflections on the subject of memory, literary testimonios work to mirror the disorienting effects of how the past continues to haunt and overshadow the present, and to dramatize the feelings of isolation and misrecognition that often accompany these experiences. These reflections on the living past continue a critique of recent quandaries on the relevance of testimonio when it lives beyond the immediate circumstances of its intervention by highlighting how these traces of personal and national trauma are always bubbling under the surface. Through poetic language, the writers of literary testimonio shift readers to move from “knowing” about specific historical circumstances to “understanding” their continued effects on the present; in so doing, they take testimonio to new cognitive places, opening up new epistemic possibilities for this writing project.

Testimonios have become more widely recognized as legitimate texts since the days of the

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