Testimony and Complicity
“And so, if part of my task here is to do justice, not only to my topic, but to the person I am sketching for you, the person around whom so much has been said, the person whose self-description and whose decisions have become the basis for so much … theorizing, I must be careful in presenting these words. For these words can give you only something of the person I am trying to understand, some part of that person’s verbal instance. Since I cannot truly understand this person, since I do not know this person, and have no access to this person, I am left to be a reader of a selected number of words, words that I did not fully select, ones that were selected for me, recorded from interviews and then chosen by those who decided to write their articles on this person for journals (…). So we might say that I am given fragments of this person, linguistic fragments of something called a person; what might it mean to do justice to someone under these circumstances? Can we?”
“I do not know how to judge that question here, and I am not sure it can be mine to judge. Does justice demand that I decide? Or does justice demand that I wait to decide, that I practice a certain deferral in the face of a situation in which too many have rushed to judgement?”
- Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, p.68, p.71
“It is also extremely pleasurable to be the object of Guatemalan solidarity work: to be the addressee of testimonial (…). Being hailed, or called out in this way functions like a seal of approval in these days of intense critique of the white first-world I-eye. Recourse to the politics of solidarity can offer a space of innocence for the gringa, a site cleansed by good intentions and activist “politics”, from which we can still speak unproblematically of the Other”.
- Diane Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala, p.57