Shattered Voices. Teresa Godwin Phelps
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perpetuates revenge cycles.
At the same time, violence for violence has not always been the norm, and the notion of what retribution means has not always focused exclusively on what the perpetrator deserves (“has coming”). People have been seemingly satisfied (as “satisfied” as one can be under such circumstances) by a payment of money (or even a parade)4. While there seems to be a human drive for getting something back, what that “something” is may not be self-evident. What, then, constitutes appropriate retribution that is emotionally satisfying to the victims, fair to the perpetrators, and not destructive to the society that enacts it in situations in which violent retribution by the state is not possible or wise? What does it mean to say “I don’t want revenge, I want justice.” What is wanted? Is justice necessarily a proportional act of violence? What is Paulina’s “good”? The importance of this question should by now be clear, as should its difficulty.
This chapter examines the role that language plays in initial harms in an attempt to discover whether the recent plethora of truth commissions that substitute language for state violence have any chance for long-term success as adequate retribution. Leaving aside the distracting question of what perpetrators deserve, I want instead to analyze whether truth commissions can give something adequate back to the victims. I will proceed by examining the misuse, manipulation, and perversion of language that occurs with initial harms on three levels: personal, familial, and societal. If one of the significant things that victims lose in oppression is the ability to use language, then language as retribution begins to make sense.
Language and Violence
The harms that may be visited upon a population by an oppressive regime and the victims such a regime can create are limited only by the regime’s creativity and malice. For the purposes of this study, however, I want to focus on three kinds of victims: (1) victims such as Paulina who were kidnapped and tortured and desire personal retribution; (2) relatives, such as Orestes, Electra, and Hamlet, of victims who have disappeared or been murdered; (3) society itself, which has been terrorized and “polluted” by the activities of the oppressors. And my primary interest resides in the way that language functions in the harms perpetrated against these victims.
Personal Harms
In her brilliant study of torture and war, Elaine Scarry establishes several principles about the relationship of language and pain that can help in the quest to understand the role that language plays in a situation involving a surviving victim. Scarry first lays bare the inarticulability of physical pain: when in pain we cannot accurately describe it to another nor can we fully understand another’s pain. The closest we can get to communicating the reality of pain is metaphor: the pain feels like a burning, a piercing, a hammering, a vice. A primary attribute of pain is its ultimate unsharability because it cannot accurately be represented in language. Eventually, physical pain can become so extreme that its ceases to be articulable even as metaphor. The ability to speak words disappears: “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it; bringing about an immediate reversion to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”5
The language-destroying nature of pain is linked to the political use of pain in torture: “physical pain is difficult to express, and … this inexpressibility has political consequences.”6 The torture victim is reduced to prelanguage screams and moans that are not heard or acknowledged by anyone.7 Torture becomes the visible manifestation of power; it shatters the person’s voice and makes language itself ineffective. Scarry’s theories are buttressed by the testimony of actual victims. In describing his imprisonment and torture, Jacobo Timerman writes that the pain a tortured person experiences “is a pain without points of reference, revelatory symbols, or clues to serve as indicators…. It is impossible to shout—you howl.”8 Other Argentinian victims remember pain “so excruciating that one couldn’t even scream or groan or move”9 and the use of a high voltage device that caused the tongue to contract and thus prevented screaming.10
The political consequences of pain’s ultimate inexpressibility can explain, at least in part, why the gratuitous infliction of pain is such a common and effective political tool, particularly for new and unstable political regimes.11 The intense physical suffering that torture produces makes the invisible regime visible; it “converts the vision of suffering into the wholly illusory but, to the torturers and the regime they represent, wholly convincing spectacle of power.”12 The writers of Nunca Más, the Argentinian truth report, in apologizing for the “encyclopedia of horror” that the section on torture becomes, assert that avoiding the horror was impossible: “After all, what else were these tortures but an immense display of the most degrading and indescribable acts of degradation, which the military government, lacking all legitimacy in power, used to secure power over a whole nation?”13
Interrogation often accompanies torture even when, as is often the case, the prisoner has no meaningful knowledge to communicate to the torturers. The purpose of torture and its concomitant interrogation is not the elicitation of confessions or information from the victims, but to “deconstruct the prisoner’s voice…. The prolonged interrogation … graphically objectifies the step-by-step backward movement along the path by which language comes into being and which here is being reversed or uncreated or deconstructed.”14 The intense pain the prisoners experience destroys their connection to their world and makes both questions and answers insignificant because links to friends, family, and country disappear in the all-encompassing world-destroying presence of pain. Torture is a primary means of “destroying … [any] sense of solidarity with an organization or community.”15 Pain annihilates everything but itself:
World, self, and voice are lost, or nearly lost, through the intense pain of torture and not through the confession as is wrongly suggested by its connotation of betrayal. The prisoner’s confession merely objectifies the fact of their being almost lost, makes their invisible absence, or nearly absence, visible to the torturers. To assent to words through the thick agony of the body can only be dimly heard, or to reach aimlessly for the name of a person or place that has barely enough cohesion to hold its shape as a word and none to bond it to its worldly referent, is a way of saying, yes, all is almost gone now, there is nothing left now, even this voice, the sounds I am making, no longer form my words but the words of another.16
The forced betrayal serves to degrade the victim, and the very degradation (making into “filth”) of the enemy serves the state: “Torturers humiliate the victim, exploit his human weakness through the mechanism of pain, until he does take on the role of filth, confessing his lowliness and betraying cause, comrades, family, and friends.”17
The victim’s ability to speak is first, through the device of interrogation, appropriated by the regime: “The victims are made to speak the words of the regime, to replace their own reality with that of the state, to double the voice of the state.”18 The victim’s voice is then destroyed as the pain intensifies and the victim reverts to a prelanguage state of being. Torture reduces the victim to a voiceless body as the torturer becomes a disembodied voice. “Although the torturer dominates the prisoner both in physical and verbal acts, ultimate domination requires that the prisoner’s ground become increasingly physical and the torturer’s increasingly verbal, that the prisoner become a colossal body with no voice, and the torturer a colossal voice … with no body.”19 Torture, perhaps more than any other wrong, is designed to denote superiority over the victim, a superiority that becomes an essential insignia of the corrupt regime: “They [the torturers] would say: ‘You’re dirt…. You don’t exist…. We are everything for you. We are justice. We are God.’”20
In addition to the inversion of a victim’s language, other ordinary meanings become appropriated into the structure of torture. In the same way that words become a “confession” and a “betrayal” that manifest only the destruction of the victim’s world and become appropriated by the enemy to objectify this destruction, commonplace objects associated with normal living frequently are used as instruments of torture and death—bathtubs, beds, chairs, refrigerators, brown bags, ovens, showers, radiators.21 The infamous wet bag used in torture