Shattered Voices. Teresa Godwin Phelps

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      Chapter Three

       Language, Violence, and Oppression

      It did not matter that they might die along the way; what really mattered was that they should not tell their story.

      —Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

      Physical pain … is language destroying.

      —Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

      The literary and philosophical traditions of many cultures reveal that the urge for revenge is an ancient, deep-rooted human need that has only tentatively been transferred to central authority in the form of state-sponsored retribution. If that need for revenge is not acknowledged by being in some way incorporated into formal systems of justice, as are the Furies by Athena in the Oresteia, it reemerges as private vengeance, as it does with Paulina in Death and the Maiden. It has the potentiality of “dripping poison over all the land,” as Athena fears the unsatisfied Furies will do in the Oresteia. If a state fails to enact retribution that is emotionally satisfying to victims, the victims will eventually take justice into their own hands in an attempt to reestablish a psychologically necessary balance. Like Paulina, those seeking revenge are not driven by ressentiment or by political expediency, but by personal passion, “from an elementary sense of injustice.”¹ Revenge-seekers do not see themselves as evil or cruel; they see themselves as setting the world back into its proper order. The original quest for revenge was less about excess (although excess certainly sometimes occurred) and more about balancing and reciprocity. The victims’ passion is not directed at getting something new or extra for themselves, but for getting something back. Any legal forum that enacts retribution should take this passion and this need for balancing into account. Criminal sanctions against revenge seekers, moral or religious pleas to turn the other cheek, or state-ordered “forgiveness” cannot quell this deeply rooted need and can be futile and dangerous.² In countries that “attempt to induce a national amnesia … [victims’] unanswered calls for retribution develop into hate,”³ often escalating into violence that 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, СКАЧАТЬ