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The Work of Testimony: Beyond Borders, Across Generations

May 21, 2014

by Helene Vosters

What does it mean to think of redress as rehearsal, as something in need of repetition, review, and refinement? In “Redress Rehearsals: Legal Warrior, COSMOSQUAW, and the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards” Len Findlay does just that. Using rehearsal (rather than trauma or reconciliation) as an organizing trope allows, Findlay argues, for “the diverse pursuit of redress as a performance of […]: academic, cultural, and political theatre which functions as a necessary preliminary to the big show of belated justice” (218).

making antigona1

Teresa Ralli of Peru’s internationally renowned Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani provided a stunningly embodied demonstration of the productive role of rehearsal in relationship to redress when she launched the second of RUTAS panamericanas / panamerican ROUTES conversatorios with her presentation, The Making of Antigona. Ralli begins by lighting a candle, signalling that this is something more than an artist’s talk, something other than a performance. Signalling that we are being hailed not as passive spectators, but as witnesses. Yuyachkani’s Antigona is told from the perspective of Ismene, “the sister who failed to act in defense of Antigone and her brother” (Taylor 206). This too is a signal. We are to bear witness not only to the dead, to Antigone and her brother, to the 70,000 killed during Peru’s militarized violence, to all the missing and murdered of the lands we occupy, but also to the complicity of the living, and to the necessity of testimony’s repetition, of refusing the disappearance of the dead.

“In Quechua,” writes Diana Taylor, “ the expressions ‘I am thinking,’ ‘I am remembering,’ ‘I am your thought’ are translated by just one word: Yuyachkani” (191). This non-separation of the “you” and the “I” are integral to Yuyachkani’s performance philosophy. In his RUTAS master class workshop earlier in the week, Yuyachkani’s director Miguel Rubio uses the metaphor of a circle — performers make up one half of the circle, the audience the other. Ralli’s performance illustrates the reciprocal relationship between the two halves that are necessary to make the circle whole — telling and listening.

During the development of Antigona Ralli invited women, families of the disappeared — wives, mothers, sisters, daughters — to meet with her. One at a time she sat with each woman. To each she told the story of Antigone and then invited the woman to sit in the chair that serves as the play’s sole prop, and tell her story: “In their gestures and their tears and the way they’d wring their hands, I started to see a vocabulary.” This is the vocabulary Ralli uses to tell the story of Antigone and Ismene — a vocabulary made of an alphabet of gestures, and embodied experience, of telling and listening, of social memory. In the three decades she has been performing Antigona through these women’s gestures of repertorial memory, Ralli tells us, “I have never not lit my candle. I light it for my ancestors. I light it for the disappeared who have still not found their path.”

The RUTAS conversatorio that followed Ralli’s presentation addressed the fraught relationship between testimony, reconciliation, and redress. Artists, scholars, activists and community leaders from Indigenous communities in Canada — Oneida Elder Grafton Antone; Anishinaabe/Ashkenazi artist-researcher Jill Carter; and Dylan Robinson, a First Nations studies scholar of the Stó:lō First Nation — engaged in dialogue with Latin American artists, writers, theatre makers and scholars —Miguel Rubio of Peru’s Yuyachkani; Argentinean writer, Nora Strejilevich; and Brazilian scholar and theatre and performance artist Carla Melo.

conf2 - TRC talk1

Like Ralli, Grafton Antone, begins with ceremony, with a cleansing, with an acknowledgement of the ancestors on whose land we stand. He reminds us as well, that this blessing is itself an act of reclamation. “They took away our drums, the rattles, the tobacco. So I had to learn about these things.” Hearing a young child from among the conversatorio’s audience, Antone lights up and reminds us of the importance of the presence of the next generations. They are the memory bearers. The state knew this. It is the basis of the residential schools system. The forcefully removal Aboriginal children from their families and communities was an act of cultural genocide through the violent rupture of social memory. The presence of children ensures that the circle of telling and listening can continue.

Staging a conversation about truth and reconciliation in a context that is simultaneously culturally specific, pan-hemispheric, and intergenerational helps liberate it from the domesticating script and dramaturgy of Canadian national white settler mythology. Moreover, re-staging a conversation about truth and reconciliation within what Findlay would call a rehearsal trope — a space of experimentation, recall and repeat — creates a space from which to think about testimony beyond its entrapment within the confines of a neoliberal trauma trope that emphasizes collective catharsis, working through, and reconciliation as the ultimate measures of a “successful” healing process.

But, as Jill Carter emphatically reminds us, despite the cultural clearing created by this RUTAS conversatorio and other spaces that operate outside of the dominant discourse of Canadian nationalism, Canada’s Residential Schools TRC must also be recognized as “a theatrical moment in the nation’s history” one whose mediatized broadcast onto the national stage and imaginary has, “a script, a set up, a dramaturgy.” As a theatre maker, a community activist, and an educator, Carter is concerned that the TRC as a national performance that permeates our media, our classrooms, and our spaces of public gathering has become a mechanism for the re-perpetration of trauma: “Many have come to see the parade of the tortured and the damned. What happens,” she asks, “when memorials become a state of public pleasure?”

For Nora Strejilevich it is important to distinguish testimony from the work it does. She argues, “If there is no empathetic listener, there is no testimony.” Strejilevich speaks from experience. A survivor of state terror Strejilevich testified before Argentina’s TRC in 1985. While her testimony was not received with empathy, she tells us, “there was something else.” There was the archival documentation of Argentina’s state terror. Strejilevich has also since published her testimonial novel Una sola muerte numerosa and a book length essay El arte de no olvidar: literatura testimonial en Chile, Argentina y Uruguay//The Art of Not Forgetting: Testimonial Literature in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay (2006). The TRC testimonies, together with the work of social movements in Argentina (Madres de Plaza de Mayo being one of the longstanding and internationally renowned), the cultural production of plays, novels, and poetry, have helped to keep the struggle for justice alive and have “pushed things so that we still have trials.”

Like Strejilevich, Dylan Robinson is interested in the different ways testimony functions in different contexts. Despite the spin Canada-the-good nationalism, Robinson notes that it is a misconception that Canada’s TRC is run by the Canadian government. The fact that Canada’s TRC’s are organized by First Nations communities has been critical in shaping the means whereby intergenerational survivors are invited to participate and has made possible the inclusion of a range of repertorial and artistic presentations including “plays, songs, stories, art work.” Though the TRC’s overarching emphasis is on the education of non-Aboriginal Canadians, Robinson points out that few of Canada’s non-Indigenous settler population attend TRC gatherings. But Robinson who, like Carter, is concerned with the risk of placing trauma on display, suggests that TRCs may not be the right context for non-indigenous Canadians to learn from. Instead he argues for broader structural changes. Noting, “Models of inclusion reflect models of colonialism” Robinson asks, “What would it mean not only to include an Indigenous work in your season, but to give over an entire season or [in the context of the classroom] an entire curriculum?”

Carla Melo looks to public performance interventions as a political vehicle through which to flip the script of the nation state’s percepticidal spin and its accompanying “ideology of amnesia.” Growing up, Melo was raised to believe that her country — Brazil — was a democracy free of the human rights violations and disappearances that were taking place in neighbouring Latin American countries. The first task of the TRC, Melo argues, is to break the spell of nationalism’s structural forgetfulness and “generate an acknowledgement that the crime has occurred.”

As an ongoing labour of refusing forgetfulness testimony necessarily takes place across bodies, geographies, and generations. In Argentina, together with las Madres and las Abuelas (the mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared); activists, writers, and scholars, like Strejilevich — a new generation are taking their testimonies to the streets. The children of the disappeared — H.I.J.O.S.— perform their testimony’s not before Truth commissions, but as acts of public shaming — escraches — theatrical guerrilla actions that “target criminals associated with the Dirty War” (Taylor 164).

As Findlay argues, “How the west was won, was intimately connected to how the west was spun” (219). The percepticidal spin of Canadian nationalism not only continues unabated in its fight for the national imaginary of settler consciousness (and conscience), it’s become increasingly adept at projecting its brand of Canadian exceptionalism onto the international stage. As with its exalted and dramatically mythologized predecessors — Canadian peacekeeping and Canada’s much vaunted “official multiculturalism” —Canada markets its role as the first Northern nation to engage in a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as further evidence of its position as a moral leader on the global stage (Henderson and Wakeham Reconciling Canada).

From within the blinding blizzard of settler nationalism the memory of the crime of residential schooling has irrupted onto the Canadian public sphere (Henderson and Wakeham “Colonial Reckoning” 5). Its status, as what Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham (after Ian Baucom) call a “truth event” produces “a paradoxically ‘representational anomaly’: an anomaly because its appearance has been controlled, up to recently, such that it has seemed to form an exception to the rule of Canada’s vaunted tolerance, it has seemed to form an exception to the rule of Canada’s vaunted tolerance, but at the same time it is representative in that residential schooling condenses in itself the truth of a whole colonial system” (5).

But Canada’s colonial system cannot be contained in either a single truth event, or within our national borders. Bringing Canada’s TRC into a panamerican dialogue serves to not only disrupt the tired trope of Canadian exceptionalism, but also to open important avenues for the ongoing projects of strategic negotiation, recall, and rehearsal. As the conversatorio comes to a close Taylor poignantly reminds us, “The first residential school for ‘Native Americans’ was introduced to the Americas in 1520.”

 

Works cited

Findlay, Len. “Redress Rehearsals: Legal Warrior, Cosmosquaw, and the National Aboriginal Achievement Awards.” Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. Ed. Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Print.

Henderson, Jennifer and Pauline Wakeham (eds). Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Print.

Henderson, Jennifer and Pauline Wakeham. “Colonial Reckoning, National Reconciliation?: Aboriginal Peoples and the Culture of Redress in Canada.” English Studies Canada 35 1 (2009). Print.

Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Print.

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