Shattered Voices. Teresa Godwin Phelps
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is systematically destroyed, and the oppressors’ story becomes the dominant and only narrative.22 The writers of Nunca Más echo this disintegration as they describe the function of the secret detention centers: “To be admitted to these centres meant to cease to exist. In order to achieve this end, attempts were made to break down the captives’ identity; their spatio-temporal points of reference were disrupted, and their minds and bodies tortured beyond imagination.”23
We can isolate these elements and perhaps better understand them if we reflect for a moment on Paulina’s situation. The purpose of Paulina’s torture and interrogation was to unmake her world. The play provides only later accounts of the torture itself, but it is clear that Paulina has lost the ability to articulate her pain. She doesn’t like to talk about what happened to her, and she has told her husband Gerardo only sketchy details about it. Meaning was inverted in that her favorite piece of music, Schubert’s Quartet in D Minor, became background music for her pain. An agent of healing, a doctor, became an agent of torture and pain.24 Her world became appropriated into the torturer’s arsenal of weapons: her medicine (she was a medical student) and her music. Not only is Paulina’s voice destroyed, the content of her world and eventually her self likewise disintegrate.
The “wild and fearless” Paulina who assisted in smuggling people out of the country has been destroyed or nearly destroyed. The student activist has become the woman who gave up her studies, who cries out “they’re coming for me” more than a decade after her kidnapping, and who huddles in a fetal-like position when she hears voices or sees strange cars outside her house.25 Through the technology of torture, the prior Paulina’s world, self, and voice are unmade and the new disempowered Paulina is transformed into the insignia of the regime. And this transformation does not cease with Paulina’s release or even with the downfall of her oppressors. Years later she remains disconnected to the world. She has been unable to reclaim the things that were appropriated into her torturer’s arsenal, and she cannot listen to her beloved Schubert. No rebalancing has occurred.
In addition to Scarry’s compelling delineation of the language transference intrinsic in pain and torture, political injuries have a symbolic and communicative dimension that can help to explain why torture victims such as Paulina cannot heal themselves after their release. In a theory that extends Scarry’s sense of pain and injury beyond the physical, Jeffrie Murphy argues that “One reason we so deeply resent moral injuries done to us is not simply that they hurt us in some tangible or sensible way; it is because such injuries are also messages—symbolic communications. They are ways a wrongdoer has of saying to us, T count but you do not,’ T can use you for my purposes’” (original italics).26 Political philosopher Jean Hampton puts forth an “expressive” theory of retribution that argues that “Those who commit such crimes essentially reason, T will hurt you in order to establish that your worth is less than mine,’”27 thus making a “false moral claim.”28 Hampton maintains that some kinds of wrongs are moral injuries that affect a person’s realization of his or her value. These wrongs “carry meanings that effect injuries to a person’s value in one of two ways: either they can damage … that person’s ‘realization of his value,’ or they can damage ‘the acknowledgement of his value.’”29 The person is diminished and treated as an object rather than as a person with, in the Kantian sense, intrinsic moral worth. Argentinian victims claim: “We were objects. And useless, troublesome objects at that.”30
The wrongs are committed in such a way as to denote the superiority of the wrongdoer over the victim, and our fury at the wrongdoer in part results from his posture of superiority over the victim, his treatment of the victim as worthless, less than human.31 He symbolizes “through his actions that he had the power as well as the authority to recognize their [the victims’] worthlessness and to decide their fate to the point of destroying them.”32 Or, as in Paulina’s case, letting them survive: “This bitch can take a bit more.”33 The wrongful action, therefore, affects not only the victim’s sense of worth but also the community’s sense of the inherent value of all its citizens: “We care about what people say by their actions because we care about whether our own value, and the value of others, will continue to be respected in our society. The misrepresentation of value implicit in moral injuries not only violates the entitlements generated by their value, but also threatens to reinforce belief in the wrong theory of value by the community.”34 If a state does nothing, it tacitly acquiesces to the mistreatment,35 by joining in the communication of superiority that says that the victim is worth little.36
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