The Ethics of Storytelling. A Nation's Role in Victim/Survivor Storytelling

The Ethics of Storytelling:
A Nations Role
in
Victim/Survivor Storytelling
Teresa Phelps
American University, Washington College of Law, USA
ABSTRACT. Victim/survivor stories have become one of the primary means for
conveying human rights abuses. Even as these kinds of stories have captured
our collective imagination, we do not know much about how they operate in a
transitional democracy: whether they are transformative and contribute to the
peacemaking process, or disruptive and can thwart the process. This article
discusses the value of such stories and asks, first, whether an emerging democ-
racy has an ethical obligation to provide spaces for victims and survivors to tell
their stories of the harms that befell them under the former regime.
It concludes that victim/survivor storytelling can assist former victims in finding
and building of voice that enables them to become contributing citizens in the
new country. It enables them to become less alienated from and suspicious of
the state, and to become empowered enough to participate in governance. It is
thus in a countrys best interest to encourage storytelling activities. Second, the
article attempts to provide a framework by which we might recognize different
kinds of stories and begin to distinguish between those that a country should
support and those that it should discourage.
KEYWORDS. Transitional democracy, human rights, narrative, peacemaking,

building voice
There is a sense in which the whole of peacebuilding could be summed

up as finding and building voice [] how to help people find that
voice that sustains and makes change possible (Lederach 2005, 169).
I. INTRODUCTION
T he world is awash with stories. Personal narratives, have become

one of the primary means of conveying human rights abuses. It is
not difficult to understand why. A personal narrative1 cuts through
ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES 18, no. 2(2011): 169-195.

2011 by Centre for Ethics, K.U.Leuven. All rights reserved. doi: 10.2143/EP.18.2.2116809
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ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES JUNE 2011
busy-ness and indifference, makes us listen, and sometimes respond.

These ubiquitous personal narratives about human rights abuses are
appearing in multiple and diverse forms: testimonies, truth reports, non-
fiction accounts, novels, dramas, art, even museums. They are attracting
attention and some are widely read or viewed, becoming bestsellers or
award-winning documentaries.2 Powerful stories are making the world
more aware of human rights abuses and even encouraging activism, or
at least the donation of some money toward a cause.
Yet even as we have come to recognize and celebrate the power of
stories, both as tellers of them and as their audience, there is much we do
not understand about these kinds of narratives. In many ways, we have
unquestioningly accepted them as a positive force. This unquestioning
acceptance gives rise to some unsettling and unsettled questions: What are
the ethical implications of all this storytelling? Is storytelling always a good
thing? Are some stories better than others? Do stories, in the final analy-
sis, bring about real change? Do they help in any way to build more just
and peaceful societies? And if they do, do countries, or should countries
aspire to building more just societies that have an ethical responsibility to
provide storytelling venues for victims of human rights abuses?
In this article I address the last of these ethical and practical concerns
about stories, particularly in the context of international human rights and
in the context of peacemaking. I focus on whether a country has any
ethical responsibility to engage its citizens, especially those who have been
victims of political violence and human rights violations, in storytelling
activities, and if so, what does this responsibility entail? If there are crit-
ical differences in kinds of stories, how can nations encourage the kind
of storytelling activities that further the building of more just societies?
We know intuitively that some stories tend to bring about a degree of
reconciliation, however uneasy, and others tend to perpetuate cycles of
violence. Can we tease out the differences so that we can encourage and
support positive storytelling and discourage, or at least not actively sup-
port, divisive storytelling?
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Ethical Perspectives 18 (2011) 2

PHELPS THE ETHICS OF STORYTELLING
Before tackling these difficult yet critical questions, however, it is

worth engaging in a brief discussion about how narrative became so pre-
eminent as a means of conveying human rights abuses. Perhaps an under-
standing of this development will help us to see the multiple layers of
narrative more clearly and to understand their potentiality for transforma-
tion as well as their potentiality for disruption.
II. THE EMERGENCE OF NARRATIVE TO EXPOSE HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES
Before the mid-twentieth century, there was little accounting, in both

senses of the word, of human rights abuses that occurred during war or
internal conflict. Horrific human rights abuses occurred, of course, but
no stories were told because no survivors remained to tell the tale, or
those involved decided to put the past behind them and move on, or
survivors were terrified into silence. In fact, the very term human rights
is anachronistic as there was no consensus as to what these were or if
they existed.3
The particular horrors of World War II changed all that: the deliber-
ate, technologically-sophisticated extermination of millions of people
because of their identity demanded a response and some specific naming
and consequent categorical condemning of the harm. Thus, in addition
to the later establishment of the United Nations and its human rights
agreements4, the victorious allies instituted the Nuremberg trials that
marked the first official international accounting of human rights harms
of the past. But these trials were not marked by narratives, in that the
victims stories did not receive much notice. Those involved in the search
for justice following World War II understood the importance of personal
narratives to some extent, yet arguably missed the opportunity. The enabling
charter of the International Military Tribunal stated that the trial would
not be bound by technical rules of evidence, thus allowing for the testi-
mony of many witnesses and for atypical (and extralegal) moments such
as the showing of the George Stevens film, Nazi Concentration Camps, which
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offered no proof of anything needed at the trials (Douglas 2001, 16). Yet
instead of forefronting victims stories, the prosecution strategy chose to
play down the personal testimonies of the surviving victims and instead
to use documents as the primary evidence of guilt (Douglas 2001, 17).5
For the most part, the Nuremberg prosecutors relied on the more than
100,000 captured German documents to prove their case. The accounting,
in this instance, involved little verbal recounting of harms from the victims.
Perhaps sensing that the trials, while giving a reasonably accurate
historical picture of the events, marginalized the experiences of the vic-
tims, Hartley Shawcross, the British chief prosecutor, dedicated much of
his summation to personalizing the catastrophe. He quoted from the
affidavit of Hermann Grbe, a German engineer who had headed a con-
struction firm working in the Ukraine. Grbe had witnessed Aktionen
against the Jewish people. Shawcross read what Grbe recounted:
Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around

in family groups, kissed each other, said farewells, and waited for a sign
from another SS man, who stood near the pit, also with a whip in hand.
During the 15 minutes that I stood near I heard no complaint or plea
for mercy. I watched a family of about eight persons []. An old
woman with snow-white hair was holding the one-year-old child in her
arms and singing to it and tickling it. The child was cooing with delight.
The couple was looking on with tears in their eyes. The father was hold-
ing the hand of a boy about 10 years old and speaking to him softly;
the boy was fighting his tears. The father pointed to the sky, stroked
his head, and seemed to explain something to him. At that moment the
SS man shouted something to his colleague. The latter counted off
about 20 persons and instructed them to go behind the earth mound.
Among them was the family I have mentioned (Douglas 2001, 93).6
Despite the mountain of evidentiary material that preceded the telling of

this story, something was missing: the realization that tragedy had befallen
not only a People, but also individual, ordinary people, people like you
and me. Somehow the simple stories of a father pointing to the sky,
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a grandmother singing to and tickling her doomed grandchild, captured

the horror more profoundly than any generalities, any numbers.
Paradoxically, the unspeakable phenomenon of the Holocaust led to
much theorizing about how best (or properly) to speak the unspeakable.
Saul Friedlander, for example, asks, Can the extermination of the Jews
of Europe be the object of theoretical discussions? Is it not unacceptable to
debate formal and abstract issues in relation to this catastrophe? (1992, 1).
Paul Ricoeur offers an approach to the aporia of having to speak about the
unspeakable. In grappling with how one writes a history of horror, he
observes: Either one counts the cadavers or one tells the stories of the
victims (1984, 188). An event as horrifically monumental as the Holo-
caust escapes the boundaries of discourse and cannot be accounted for in
ordinary language. One cannot give an accounting neither a master nar-
rative nor a rationale. What is left are statistics over 6 million Jews died
or the individual stories of those who suffered. Numbers or Anne Frank:
The Diary of a Young Girl and Night.
Two of the most renowned Holocaust survivors who wrote about
their own experiences, Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, demanded particular
attention to personal stories, but for slightly different reasons. In the first
pages of Night, Elie Wiesels memoir of the Holocaust, Wiesel relates the
story of Moch the Beadle, the likeable jack-of all-trades at the Hasidic
synagogue in Sighet, a tiny, isolated town in Eastern Europe, where the
young Wiesel studied the Talmud. Moch, the simple wise man, the poor
barefoot of Sighet, was among the foreign Jews who were one day
rounded up, crammed into cattle trains, and expelled from Sighet by the
Hungarian police. After some months, Moch reappeared in Sighet and
told the story of what happened to the expelled:
The train full of deportees had crossed the Hungarian frontier and on
Polish territory had been taken in charge by the Gestapo. There it had
stopped. The Jews had to get out and climb into lorries. The lorries
drove toward a forest. The Jews were made to get out. They were made
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to dig huge graves. And when they finished their work, the Gestapo
began theirs. Without passion, without haste, they slaughtered their
prisoners. Each one had to go up to the hole and present his neck.
Babies were thrown into the air and machine gunners used them for
targets. This was in the forest of Galicia, near Kolomaye (1960, 15).
Moch was present among these prisoners, but he was mistaken for dead
and managed to escape, securing refuge in Jewish houses, telling his story,
determined to return to Sighet to warn its inhabitants. Once he arrived back
in Sighet late in 1942, however, no one believed him; in fact, no one even
wanted to listen to him. His story was just too preposterous and the Jewish
inhabitants of Sighet, seeing how strange he was, took him for a madman.
It was true: Moch was changed, no longer prayerful and joyous, constantly
speaking of God and the cabbala. He was obsessive and only wanted to tell
his story of the slaughter of those earlier expelled. In 1942 and 1943, it was
still possible for the Jews of Sighet to emigrate, but not believing Moch,
they felt no need. In 1944, the Germans arrived. On the seventh day of
Passover, they arrested the Jewish leaders. The rest is history.
There is a reason, of course, why Wiesel begins his memoir with the
tale of Moch, the Beadle. The book itself, Night, is a similar cautionary
tale, and we readers are immediately alerted to the danger of not listening,
of failing to recognize and act upon the story of another, in this case the
young Wiesel. These first pages begin to cultivate the ideal reader, you
and me, who will not refuse to listen as did the doomed citizens of Sighet.
Personal stories, like Moches and Wiesels in Night, can alert us to danger
and compel us to action that may save us.
Another Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi, begins his final book,
The Drowned and the Saved, with a similar story about not listening but with
a different intent. In this heartbreaking book, Levi writes of a nightmare
common among those who had survived the concentration camps:
Strangely enough, this same thought (even if we were to tell it, we would
not be believed) arose in the form of nocturnal dreams produced by the
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prisoners despair. Almost all of the survivors, orally or in their written

memoirs, remember a dream which frequently recurred during the nights
of imprisonment, varied in its detail but uniform in its substance: they
had returned home and with passion and relief were describing their past
sufferings, addressing themselves to a loved one, and were not believed,
indeed were not even listened to. In the most typical (and cruelest) form,
the interlocutor turned and left in silence (1989, 12).
Levi uses this ubiquitous nightmare to buttress his argument in The Drowned
and the Saved that telling the story of the Holocaust is necessary not merely
for the psychic well-being of the survivors. Nor is it only important because,
like Moche the Beadles story, it alerts us to imminent danger. The telling
of the victims stories is a political necessity as well: the telling of the
stories helps to defeat the Nazis, who thought that no one would survive
to tell, or if some stories were told, they would not be believed. Telling
the story is a form of political action; to be silent becomes a form of col-
laboration. Yet telling alone will not suffice: there must be an engaged and
responsive interlocutor. In both Wiesels and Levis examples, a story is
compellingly told, but the listener fails to comprehend, to acknowledge, to
act. To fail to listen may not only be fatal, it may also be collaboration. It
allows tragic things to happen as in Wiesels Night; it leads to a refusal to
acknowledge and act as in Levis The Drowned and the Saved.
But the story of the Holocaust is a difficult story to tell and, even more,
a difficult one to hear. When Theodor Adorno wrote (his often misquoted
and misunderstood dictum) that To write poetry after Auschwitz is bar-
baric (Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch [1967,
19]), he gave us a glimpse of his core belief: the event of the Holocaust
informs us that humanism has failed to avert barbarism. The world after
Auschwitz is a fractured universe in which the promise of the Enlighten-
ment has been shown to be a fraud. Our usual means of doing culture,
having failed, must be re-examined. In light of the Holocaust (or perhaps,
better, in the shadow of it), how do we do science? How do we write what
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we have understood as history? Philosophy? Poetry? Yet forgetting, put-

ting the past behind, is not an option. Silence is not an option. So what
does one do? Ricoeurs remark comes to mind: one tells the stories of
the victims.
Holocaust storytelling did not happen immediately the decade after
World War II saw few victims stories but once the floodgates were
opened, victim storytelling became omnipresent, necessary to warn of
harm that was, in the minds of many, always imminent; necessary to
defeat the perpetrators, who hoped for silence and shame; necessary as a
kind of political action.
This storytelling came in many forms. One striking and perhaps sur-
prising instance is in museums that are not typical colections of interest-
ing and beautiful artefacts, a celebration of the achievements of culture.
Instead these new museums are narratives that tell a story of a horrific
event or time. In some instances, the museums even create engaged inter-
locutors. On entering the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington D.C., for example, visitors may take an Identification Card
and in so doing are compelled to focus not only on the overwhelming
statistics with which they will soon be confronted, but also on an indi-
vidual. On my most recent visit, I had the card for Erzsebet Markovics
Katz, born in Sarospatak, Hungary in 1904, who, the card informed me,
died during a typhus epidemic at the Bergen-Belsen camp sometime late
in the war. The story that the museum proceeds to tell is thus not only
about a massive disaster (a holocaust) but also about an individual expe-
rience of harm, of what happened to Erzsebet. Once armed with the
identification card, visitors are taken by elevator to the top floor and work
their way through the story; there are no choices just one way through
the largely linear narrative, contained within the gloomy maze-like interior
of the museum. The chronology, however, is initially reversed as visitors
are first confronted with large pictures and films entitled Americans Encoun-
ter the Camps. There is little text; indeed, words cannot capture the truly
unspeakable horror depicted here, scenes that then General Eisenhower
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accurately said, beggar description.7 Having laid bare the end result, the
museum reverts to a chronology: the Nazi rise to power (top floor, Nazi
Assault 1933 to 1939); the evolution of Nazi policy toward the Jews,
from the oppression of the Nuremberg Laws to the camps and gas cham-
bers (middle floor, The Final Solution 1940-1945); the liberation of the
camps and the Allied victory (first floor, The Last Chapter). On the middle
floor, one actually enters a simulated concentration camp containing bar-
racks from Auschwitz; at the midpoint of the museum, one enters a
railcar used to transport Jews to the camps. It is difficult, if not impossible,
to be Levis indifferent interlocutor who walks away.8 In fact, a point is
made throughout the museum about the harm caused by bystanders
those who did not actually collaborate with the Nazis, but neither did they
protest their activities nor aid persecuted Jews. Getting to tell the story is
not enough if the hearers are bystanders. Knowing the story demands
response, requires action.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the many other
holocaust museums that exist around the world, have been emulated by
other post-conflict societies that have built similar museums as narratives:
The South African Apartheid Museum at Freedom Park in Johannesburg,
the Liberation War Museum in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the Museum of Free
Derry in Northern Ireland are some examples. All of these are largely
private enterprises9, with perhaps some state involvement, but certainly
not state initiation or sponsorship. The state passively permits the story-
telling, but does not actively initiate it or support it.
A notable and innovative use of personal narratives to expose human
rights abuses of the past that is usually state-initiated, sponsored, and
funded has more recently appeared in the form of truth reports. A late
twentieth century phenomenon, truth reports are written by truth com-
missions that are established by transitional democracies in the wake of
internal oppression and violence. The commissions, usually created by
presidential decree or legislative ruling, are charged with writing a report
about human rights abuses in a circumscribed past. The commissions
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generally operate by inviting victims, and sometimes perpetrators, to

come before the commission and tell their stories of what happened to
them and their loved ones. The commissioners then use the stories, in
addition to other evidentiary material, to write an official report that gives
an overall accounting of what occurred in the past. The victims stories
provide content and often structure to the final report and are sometimes
even salient portions of the text. In addition to writing a report, the com-
missions provide an official venue, either public (South Africa) or private
(Chile, Argentina) in which the victims stories are told, heard, and
acknowledged. In most instances, the commissions also recommend
some action in response to the stories: reparations and the establishment
of institutions to serve the people such as schools and medical centres.
Along with truth reports, many other forms of victims storytelling
have emerged that effectively merge the realms of politics, literature, and
art: non-fiction accounts like those of Levi and Wiesel, along with Anne
Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (book, play, and movie), to name just a
few of hundreds of Holocaust memoirs, as well as memoirs of other
conflicts, such as Jacobo Timermans Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without
a Number (about his imprisonment and torture during the dirty war in
Argentina). Documentaries such as Rape in the Congo use the stories of
victims to portray the horror of sexual violence. Fiction, such as Isabel
Allendes Of Love and Shadows, serves a useful role in informing people of
the harms of the past. Dramas like Ariel Dorfmans Death and the Maiden
(Chile) and Lynn Nottages Ruined (Congo) capture the lasting damage of
torture. Photography exhibits, quilt exhibitions, museums, public demon-
strations that become a kind of performance art (such as the Mothers of
the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina) all offer innovative and creative ways of
presenting narratives of harm. Many, perhaps most, of these endeavours
are not state-sponsored or even supported or encouraged by the state.
For multiple reasons, the use of personal stories to publicize human
rights abuses gained momentum at the end of the twentieth century and
the beginning of the twenty-first. There was, of course, a turn to narrative
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occurring in many disciplines anthropology, history, medicine, law, and

others which may well have influenced the dominance of personal nar-
ratives in the human rights arena. Personal narratives, however, seem to
be a particularly effective way of informing diverse people about human
rights. In their book discussing several sites of human rights storytelling,
Schaffer and Smith write, As people meet together and tell stories, or
read stories across cultures, they begin to voice, recognize and bear wit-
ness to a diversity of values, experiences, and ways of imagining a just
social world and of responding to injustice, inequality and human suf-
fering. Indeed, over the last twenty years, life narratives have become
one of the most potent vehicles for advancing human rights claims
(2004, 1).
In all of these public spaces, in this burgeoning industry of human
rights narratives, a story does get told: stories that alert us to danger and
aspire to be a form of personal witness and political action. What is less
clear, however, is whether there is a willing interlocutor, one who listens,
recognizes, engages, and acts in response to the stories: an interlocutor
who can act in conjunction with the storyteller to insure never again and
build and sustain peace. The human rights claims might be advanced, but
are they understood and, more importantly, do they catalyze change in
any significant and lasting way? The audience members, viewers, or read-
ers may gasp and even weep, but go away thinking that they understand,
or worse, that the problem has somehow been solved and thus no action
is required. Or, the story may be told in such a way that the audience
must play the role of other. Or, the imagined audience includes only
those on our side and any opportunity for fruitful dialogue becomes
closed off.
It is also less clear whether the states in which the human rights
abuses occurred have any ethical responsibility to sponsor such storytell-
ing. A transitional democracys citizenry comprises many survivors whose
stories will not be told even with an energetic private storytelling regime.
And if the stories are told in some private manner, who will hear them
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and respond? Who will acknowledge that a harm befell the storyteller?
Such storytelling can become the nightmare version of Levis holocaust
survivor, whose story of pain falls on deaf and unwilling ears. If such a
scenario is possible, even likely, that many victims of harm are compelled
to remain silent for lack of space or opportunity, should a transitional
democracy step into the breach and provide opportunities for storytelling?
III. NATIONS RESPONSIBILITY
International legal scholars have largely agreed that transitional democra-

cies have at least a quasi-legal obligation to discover the truth of past
human rights abuses (Mndez 1998, 263).10 What this truth is, however,
how it should be discovered and told, and to what ends, are less agreed
upon. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for
example, distinguished between four kinds of truth: factual or forensic,
personal or narrative,social or dialogic, and healing and restorative
(1998. Vol. I, 111). Each of these overlapping kinds of truth, if diligently
sought by the renewed state, serves not only to inform the victims of
what occurred (although the importance of knowing the truth should not
be minimized); it can also serve to inform the victims that the country
acknowledges that bad things happened to them and that the country
assumes some responsibility to account for these harms. But it is not easy
to find ways to allow for this four-fold truth; most methods of discover-
ing the truth allow for only the factual and forensic kind.
Methods of discovering the factual and forensic version of truth are
many: trials, investigatory bodies, exhumations, disclosure of secret
documents, and the victims (and perhaps perpetrators) own testimony.
The testimony can be proscribed by rules of procedure and limited to
relevant evidence-like material. Thus, not every way of meeting the legal
requirement for discovering the truth of the past serves the victims and
survivors in the same ways. Trials, for example, can exclude the victims
180

stories (the Nuremberg trials) and even exclude the victims entirely.
They reveal a legal truth something that convinces a judge or jury, but
may or may not parallel what a victim actually experienced. An abstract
kind of justice might be served in which the harm is named and a per-
petrator punished, but after a regime in which many, many human rights
abuses occurred, many victims do not receive even this kind of justice,
which largely serves the state itself; many perpetrators go unpunished and
many victims stories go untold and unheard. But if the means for dis-
covering the truth is more open-ended and expansive, as in, for example,
the South African Truth Commission hearings, it can allow for more than
forensic truth, in that the truth revealed is personal and social and can be
dialogic.
My focus, therefore, is not on a legal requirement that nations have to
discover the truth11, which can be realized in perfunctory as well as profound
ways. My focus is on attempting to discover whether nations might have an
ethical responsibility to provide dedicated space in which victims stories can
be heard and acknowledged. Their stories, under the proper circumstances,
can yield a four-fold truth that moves from being merely factual to being
restorative, and may even contribute to the rebuilding of the country. Nations
clearly do not have a legal obligation to discover the truth in this complicated
manner. But should there be another kind of obligation, one that I am calling
an ethical responsibility? I am substituting the word responsibility for the
word obligation because I want to emphasize its relationship to response,
as in how one (or a nation) responds to a story of harm.
In his recent book Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique,
David Couzens Hoy defines critical resistance as resistance to domination
that is not reactionary but emancipatory. I will return to the idea of critical
resistance later, but for now I want to focus on Hoys definition of ethics in
the context of critical resistance as an unenforceable obligation (2004, 149).
The ethical resistance of the powerless others to our capacity to exert

power over them is therefore what imposes unenforceable obligations
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on us. The obligations are unenforceable precisely because of the oth-

ers lack of power. That actions are at once obligatory and at the same
time unenforceable is what puts them in the category of the ethical
(2004, 185).
Hoys view seems particularly relevant because it focuses on what the

powerful (the state for our purposes) should do for the powerless, the
typical condition of former victims. A states ethical responsibility might
be seen as something that is necessary for a state to do, but is in no way
legally enforceable. An ethical responsibility can fill the gap between what
is legal and what is just, between what must be done and what should be
done. After violence and oppression, a state is legally obliged to end the
violence and oppression and to honour basic human rights. But to work
toward building a just and peaceful society, a state should do more to
create a robust, vocal, participatory citizenry, a citizenry capable of offer-
ing critical resistance to the unrelenting progression of domination, even
in a renewed and better state. Actions that a powerful state takes to
create such a citizenry from formerly powerless victims instantiate its
commitment to a more just future: necessary but not legally enforceable.
But that does not answer why states might have an ethical responsi-
bility to provide former victims with venues for open-ended storytelling.
In the terms established by Hoy, why should a country sponsor such
venues? The list of shoulds in the wake of an oppressive regime is expan-
sive: reparations, schools, hospitals, just legal institutions and much more.
Why storytelling in particular?
I and others have written about the multiple benefits (as well as the
pitfalls) of storytelling in transitional democracies, which include therapy
for the victims and the discovery of truth (Phelps 2004; Minow 1998;
Sanders 2007, Hayner 2001). Most of these benefits, however, may be
achieved in fashions other than state-sponsored storytelling. None neces-
sarily establishes an ethical responsibility on the part of the state. More-
over, in the final analysis, Ricoeurs one tells the stories of the victims
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can be hopelessly vague in terms of forming any national policy or action.

John Paul Lederachs position, which forms the epigraph to this article,
gives us some more direction. He describes peacebuilding as finding and
building voice. How might a country do that?
Nearly every country, at least in theory and at least to some extent, guar-
antees its citizens the right to speak. Guaranteeing this right is what a country
must do its legal obligation.12 Restoring the right to speak freely is indeed
a critical step in rebuilding a country and restoring the rule of law in a transi-
tional democracy. But more may be required if a country is to work toward
building a just and peaceful society. The right to speak is a negative liberty in
which the state agrees not to interfere, and it can be an empty right if the
people have been terrorized into silence or if, as we learned from Wiesel and
Levi, no one listens. What role should a nation play, therefore, in finding and
building voice and in providing or becoming an engaged interlocutor?
First, finding voice. Formerly oppressed people have lost voice for
at least two reasons: (i) they have been silenced by terror and oppression,
and (ii) they do not have a vocabulary in which they can articulate the
harms that occurred to them. Silencing, as one of the primary technolo-
gies of oppression, has been widely used to control the people and to
manipulate whatever story has been told about events that have trans-
pired in the country. The agents of the state have had the microphone
and have shaped a false narrative about necessary violence to fight Com-
munism or isolated incidents. Moreover, the human rights violations
that have occurred have often been at the hands of the state or of its
agents, acknowledged or not. The people do not trust the state and they
do not trust language. Isolated, alienated individuals terrified into silence
and passivity, forced by the state to endure not only physical harms but
also to hear false narratives, must somehow be transformed into an active
and vocal citizenry. Part of this transformation should include an official
invitation to break the silence, to speak about the harms of the past, and
to be officially acknowledged by the new state. To engage its citizens and
to gain their trust, the country must publically signal its break from the past.
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The country should play a role in assisting its citizens in finding the voice
that was silenced by terror and oppression by providing official venues
in which they can tell their stories, in their own words, without manipula-
tion, about what happened to them and their loved ones.
But merely having voice is not enough, just merely responding with
sympathy is not enough. People must also have a vocabulary in which they
can state their harms. Victims must not only be heard and recognized, they
must also be provided with a means of stating their harms if they are to be
transformed from victims into participating citizens. Jean-Franois Lyotard
defines victimhood in this way: It is in the nature of a victim not to be
able to prove that one has been done a wrong. One becomes a victim
[] when no presentation is possible of the wrong he or she says he or
she has suffered (1988, 8). In perhaps his most important book, The
Differend: Phrases in Dispute, Lyotard discusses how language can give rise
to injustice. A differend occurs when parties conflict, but the means of
judging the conflict belongs to the discourse of just one of them. A
victims harm cannot be represented in the ruling discourse. The victim
has no power to present the wrong either because of silencing, or
because the wrong cannot be presented in the hegemonic language.
[T]he perfect crime [] consist[s] in obtaining the silence of the wit-
nesses, the deafness of the judges, and the inconsistency (insanity) of the
testimony (Lyotard 1988, 8). It represents an ultimate powerlessness:
the regulation of the conflict [is] in the idiom of one of the parties
while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom
(1988, 9). Victims of apartheid in South Africa, for example, had no legal
language in which they could express the harm done to them by that
system. Everything was perfectly lawful. The language of law offered
them no recourse. Any attempt at a legal claim was insane. Telling a
personal story, however, of being forcibly moved from ones home to
an outlying township, as occurred to the residents of District Six in
Cape Town (narrated by the District Six Museum), provides a lexicon.
A personal story opens the way to understanding that transcends the
184

limits of legalistic language; it provides space for deliberation that can

expose the differend and catalyze change. It can even change the law.13
Restoring the right to speak, permitting the silence resulting from terror
to be broken and encouraging a way of speaking about harm that dismantles
the differend are but the initial steps in building a just society. Finding and
encouraging voice are just part of the peacebuilding equation.
A nation should also build voice. Building voice differs from finding and
encouraging voice in that it is more than merely allowing or encouraging
storytelling. It requires more than just a sympathetic listening ear. Building
voice takes the next steps in helping former victims to transform into not
just storytellers of past harms, but rather into a participatory citizenry.
Ongoing repetition of stories of past harms does not enable a country to
move forward; it mires it in its past. It creates a pathology of memory
[] Collective memories are threatened with being taken up by what
Freud called the impulse to repeat instead of remembering. Psychoanalysis
assigns to hidden resistances this pathology of memory which has its cul-
tural and political expression in the claim of traditional accounts of past
sufferings to shape collective memory in terms of war between narrative
identities (Ricoeur 2007, 20). The cacophony of narrative identities that
can emerge from storytelling activities can be divisive and counter-produc-
tive in peacebuilding if all they do is empower atomistic selves. Rather, a
country needs a way to build voice and encourage narratives that produce
what I want to call participatory selves that not only speak, but also hear,
acknowledge and respond to the other selves that emerge from the story-
telling.
A nation that emerges from a violent past has not only that past for
which it must account. It also has a future to create. If the past patterns
of domination and control are actually (rather than just on paper) to give
way to the rule of law and participatory democracy, citizens need a posi-
tive sense of self by which they can both participate in governance and
resist, if necessary, domination. The state needs to find ways to build such
a citizenry from a community of victims and survivors. In the recent past,
185

some, perhaps many, of its citizens have been degraded by torture and
imprisonment; many citizens have been deprived of rights. Victims of this
kind of mistreatment see themselves as insulted and degraded, denied
recognition, subject to a form of behavior which does not represent an
injustice solely because it constrains the subjects of their freedom for
action or does them harm. Rather, such behavior is injurious because it
impairs those persons in their positive understanding of self an under-
standing acquired by intersubjective means (Honneth 1994, 249).
People without a positive understanding of self cannot contribute to
building a peaceful society: they do not trust the state and they will not
engage in political life. They will resist any participation in community
building.
Because trust and engagement are necessary conditions for a just
society, a state must find a way to gain the trust and to engage its formerly
powerless citizens, to build their voice to create a positive right to speak
that contributes to a positive understanding of self. Using Amartya Sens
groundbreaking capabilities approach, with some elaboration from the
work of Martha Nussbaum, we can elevate the right to speak from a
negative liberty to a capability by which we can measure a countrys well-
being. Sens capabilities approach eschews the narrow view of human
beings taken by much economic theorizing that focuses on what people
have (their possessions) rather than what they are (their selfhood [1985,
4]). Sen argues that the well-being of a country should not be measured
by economic factors alone, such as average income or gross domestic
product. Instead, we should look to individuals capabilities. Capabilities
are substantive freedoms (as opposed to utilities and primary goods)
that enable one to choose a valuable life, to pursue ones own objectives
(1999, 74). Sens theory is based on a view of living as a combination of
various doings and beings (functionings) that include both elemen-
tary ones, such as being adequately nourished or free from disease, and
also more complex functionings, such achieving self-respect, being
socially integrated, and being able to take part in the life of a community.
186

Capabilities are related to rights in that capabilities enable one to exercise

rights: a starving person has little use for the right to vote; a person
afflicted with an untreated disease probably cares little for the right to
speak. Nourishment and health put us in a position to participate in the
community by voting, speaking, or otherwise.
Beyond these basic needs (food and health care), people who have
been silenced also need active encouragement to re-engage in the political
life of the community: people [] dont really have an effective right to
political participation [] simply because this language exists on paper:
they really have been given a right only if there are effective measures to
make people truly capable of political exercise (Nussbaum 2003, 36).
Thus the negative liberty of being free of state interference in the right
to speak must be accompanied by some positive liberty that provides
opportunity to speak.
Paul Ricoeur, using Sens work, adds some additional understanding
of how a capability might be related to a right and what a states role
might be. Ricoeur subordinates the two terms capabilities, which he sees
as deriving from philosophical anthropology, and rights, derived from
the philosophy of law, under the encompassing term recognition, which
Ricoeur defines as identification of any item as being itself and not any-
thing else (2007, 17). Recognition exists on three levels: recognition as
identification; recognition of ones self, ones uniqueness and value (self-
recognition); and recognition of the other, the uniqueness and value of
the other (mutual recognition). Capabilities and rights are submerged
under the latter two aspects of recognition: capabilities lead to self-recog-
nition; rights to mutual recognition.
Ricoeur specifically defines capabilities as the kind of power that
we claim to be able to exercise [] the power to cause something to happen,
deeply aligned to the expression I can (2007, 17-18, italics original).
He describes a series of basic capabilities in a hierarchical order: the capac-
ity to speak, the capacity to act, and the capacity to tell. The first basic
capability is the capacity to speak: I can speak (2007, 18, italics original).
187

The capacity to act, to make things happen, follows from the capability to
speak: I did it; I am the one who did it (2007, 19, italics original). In the third
place is the capacity to tell, to tell stories about ones life. To a large
extent, what we call personal identity is linked to this capacity and may be
characterized as narrative identity (2007, 19). Thus storytelling, speaking
about ones life, particularly speaking about times in ones life when one
was silenced, oppressed, and harmed manifests a capability that is an
essential part of a broader and richer sense of what it means to be human.
In addition, the self-recognition that can result from storytelling makes a
person accountable: to I can is added I can hold myself as account-
able. Forming a narrative about ones life enables one to be accountable
to oneself and others. According to Ricoeur, It adds the ability to bear
the consequences of ones own acts (2007, 20).
The freedom to speak, the negative freedom in which a state says it
will not prevent people from speaking, allows for self-recognition, but in
an isolated, atomistic way. For freedom and flourishing, more than self-
assertion is required: mutual recognition is necessary. Self-recognition
(I can, I am able, I speak) lays the foundation for mutual recognition
(I recognize transformed to I am recognized), as a connecting link
between capabilities and rights. Every utterance of I speak requires, as
Ricoeur puts it, an ear to receive it (2007, 18). People are not only
personally accountable, they are accountable to each other. Dedicated
public space for storytelling gives formerly disempowered people a way
to speak about harms of the past and serves as a form of state acknowl-
edgment that these harms occurred. It can also provide encouragement
of critical resistance, emancipatory speaking, to counter the domination
of the potentially oppressive state.
Rights and just institutions are the ways that we become mutually
accountable; peoples capabilities are mutually recognized, respected, and
supported. To achieve a society characterized by mutual recognition, a
state must act in a positive way; it must create the institutional spaces that
support mutual recognition. Because mutual recognition requires engaged
188

interlocutors, the state also must create institutions that act in response
to the stories that are told.
After violence and oppression, a state is legally obliged to end the
violence and oppression, to honour basic human rights. But to work
toward building a just and peaceful society, a state should do more to
create a robust, vocal, participatory citizenry. By supporting a variety of
venues truth commissions, theatre, memory groups, museums, and any-
thing else that provides space for personal narratives a state can help
its citizens find and build voice that can make change possible.
Yet, if nations have an ethical responsibility to provide opportuni-
ties and venues for victim storytelling, not only to remedy the past but
also to work toward building a peaceful future, any old storytelling will
not do. Both tellers and listeners have some additional responsibilities.
We should be haunted by the spectre of Levis indifferent, unlistening
interlocutor. If we invite victims to tell their stories, we must also be will-
ing to respond. At the same time, if victims tell their stories, they should
be encouraged to leave space for understanding and dialogue. Ethical
storytelling should have three aspects: participation, in which the victims
participate in the process of creating the historical memory and in build-
ing the new country; mutual recognition, in which those who have suf-
fered on opposing sides of the violence can hear and acknowledge the
other; and deliberation, in which common citizens, policymakers, and
nation-builders can speak together, think about the past, and together
build a new future. If any of these three aspects is missing participation,
mutual recognition, and deliberation then the storytelling activities fall
short of leading to positive change.
Let me provide two examples of storytelling activities that I think
fall near the opposite ends of this spectrum. The first The Quilts of
Belfast represents storytelling that makes mutual recognition difficult
and fails to make space for deliberation. The quilts relate a story of past
violence, but do not connect in any positive way to a new future. The
quilt stories have the potentiality for reifying the past, rather than using
189

the past as a way to understand and transform the future. The second
the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa represents
museum space that tells a tragic story of past oppression, but uses the
space and the narrative to create a better future. Neither of these endeav-
ours is state-sponsored, yet I discuss them, from among many possibili-
ties, to provide models for what a state can do.
IV. THE QUILTS OF BELFAST
July, 2004, St. Patricks Church, Belfast
I am helping John and JJ dismantle a quilt installation of over half a

dozen quilts that have been displayed in St. Patricks Church during
the remembrance service sponsored by Relatives for Justice. Over a
decade ago, John and JJ, in their mid-thirties, would have carried guns
instead of quilts. They would have been (perhaps were) fervent IRA
soldiers, killing and maiming for revenge and for their longed-for
republic. Now they carry these quilts around, each patch made by
relatives of someone killed during the Troubles. Patches adorned with
pictures, constructed of pieces of now-unused clothing, embroidered
with names, dates, and loving words.
This is a brief excerpt from a journal I kept the summer I was researching
the diverse storytelling/memory projects that were taking place in North-
ern Ireland. At first, as my journal shows, I was quite taken by the quilts
and felt they represented a partial answer to the question I was doggedly
pursuing: Could narratives, in all their diverse forms, in some way replace
violence? In these quilts, I saw an exciting example of storytelling through
art replacing violent conflict. Each patch told a brief story of a loved
one killed in the conflict and the stories were pieced together (quite liter-
ally) into these beautiful art objects, the quilts, which captured the painful
memories of the past. Northern Ireland, in 2004 and since, is replete with
storytelling projects and many people there are fully committed to finding
190

a peaceful way forward. Yet as I continued to read the quilts (captured

in photographs I had taken that night), I experienced the story they told
to be as divisive as it was conciliatory. Many, perhaps most of the patches
were memorials: pictures of the deceased loved one, drawings of Celtic
crosses, shamrocks, soccer balls, drums, flowers things associated with
the life of the person remembered: one a broken red heart on a stark
white background with the words 13 years old stitched in black across
the two parts of the heart. Interrupting these poignant memorials, how-
ever, were more accusatory patches: Micky Gs, for example, a carpenter,
judging by the hammer and awl depicted on his kelly-green patch, was,
we are informed by stitching at the bottom of the square, MURDERED
BY U.F.F. G. M. was MURDERED. Danny M., dead just after his
twentieth birthday: They robbed me of my son, but not of my memo-
ries. The viewer (reader) of the quilts is jarred by the setting up of the
They, and unless part of a privileged inner circle, must assume the
stance of the Other.
These quilts, at least on one reading, exemplify a misuse of the capa-
bility to tell. The confrontational nature of the language used in the quilts
sets out only one side of the debate about the Troubles without leaving
rhetorical space for dialogue. What can one say to Murdered by the Brit-
ish? Any language becomes reduced to playground taunts and denials
Did not! Did so! One may sympathize with the grief depicted, but sym-
pathy is not the same as mutual recognition. The quilts leave no space for
deliberation, no way forward to a different politically unified future that
is not made up of us and them.
A state cannot, and should not, control the stories that people tell
about the past. And people who have been mistreated may well fall victim
of a pathology of memory, an endless repeating of the story of victim-
hood. One need only look to the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda for
chilling contemporary examples of the consequences of this kind of sto-
rytelling that is mired in repetition. If, however, the state plays an active
role in encouraging people to speak about the past in spaces that do allow
191

for participation, mutual recognition and deliberation, it provides an alter-

native way to think about the past.
V. THE DISTRICT SIX MUSEUM
District Six was a vibrant mixed community in Cape Town, South Africa,
that was originally populated by freed slaves, merchants, immigrants, and
others black, coloured, white all the various racial designations of apart-
heid South Africa. In 1901, the blacks were displaced; in 1966 the area was
officially declared white under the National Partys Group Areas Act of
1950. Consequently, over 60,000 people were forcibly moved to Cape Flats,
a barren outlying township. Most of the homes and structures were razed.
The District Six Museum, housed in a church, one of the few struc-
tures that was not destroyed after 1966, chronicles this oppression. But it
also chronicles the vibrant life that existed in District Six prior to the
forced removal. Many of the exhibits are the results of archaeological digs
that have unearthed the original residents personal belongings. The Dis-
trict Six Museum is described as a living memorial and [] more than
just a static display. Through this space we have created an arena, which
enables us to reaffirm our identity, celebrate our heritage, and confront
the complexities of our history.14
In many ways, the District Six Museum is as much movement as
museum. The museums website reveals a wealth of activities connected
to the future of South Africa: advocating for social justice, creating a
space for contemplation of and reflection on the past, facilitating differ-
ent interpretations of the past through its collections, exhibitions, and
educational programmes, opening up debate about the future of South
Africa, participating in the remaking of Cape Town, and involving former
District Six and other Cape Town citizens in their evolving role in the
future of their country. The people participate in the making of the history
of District Six and the apartheid state, they recognize competing versions
192

of that history, and they engage in deliberation about the future. With their
personal stories as the foundation, the formerly dispossessed can offer
both participation in and critical resistance to the emerging state.
VI. CONCLUSION
I began by insisting on the importance of acknowledgement, of any story

having an engaged interlocutor, and ended up by celebrating participation as
exemplified by the activities of the District Six Museum. State action in the
form of ethical responsibility can be the link between the two. If the state
provides venues for victim storytelling such as the District Six Museum and
the multiple other possibilities that this article does not discuss, it acts as the
ideal interlocutor, the one who does not turn and walk away, but instead
listens, engages, and acts. And in turn, the storytellers themselves do not
engage in an endless repetition about their past harms that can prevent them
from moving forward as participating, and, yes, resisting citizens.
WORKS CITED
Adorno, Theodor W. 1967. An Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society. In Prisms.

Translated by Samuel and Sherry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Douglas, Lawrence. 2001. The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of
the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Friedlander, Saul, ed. 1992. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solu-
tion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hayner, Priscilla. 2001. Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity. New York:
Routledge.
Honneth, Axel. 1995. The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy.
Edited by Charles W. Wright. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Hoy, David Couzens. 2004. Critical Resistance from Poststructuralism to Post-Critique. Boston,
MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.
Lederach, John Paul. 2005. The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Levi, Primo. 1989. The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Vintage.
Lyotard, Jean-Franois. 1988. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Translated by Georges Van
Den Abbeele. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
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Mndez, Juan E. 1998. The Right to Truth. In Reining in Impunity for International Crimes
and Serious Violations of Fundamental Human Rights: Proceedings of the Siracusa Conference
17-21 September 1998. Nouvelles tudes Pnales, edited by Christopher C. Joyner,
255-278. Toulouse: Ers.
Minow, Martha. 1998. Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History After Genocide and
Mass Violence. Boston, MA: Beacon.
Nussbaum, Martha. 2003. Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social
Justice. Feminist Economics 9:2-3.
Peter, Julie Stone. 2005. Literature, the Rights of Man, and Narratives of Atrocity:
Historical Backgrounds to the Culture of Testimony. Yale Journal of Law & the
Humanities 17:249-278.
Phelps, Teresa. 2004. Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions.
Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Ricoeur, Paul. 2007. Capabilities and Rights. In Transforming Unjust Structures: The Capa-
bility Approach. Edited by Severin Deneulin, Mathias Nebel and Nicholas Sagovsky,
17-26. Dordrecht: Springer.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1984. Time and Narrative, Vols. 1-3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sanders, Mark. 2007. Ambiguities of Witnessing; Law and Literature in the Time of a Truth
Commission. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Schaffer, Kay and Sidonie Smith. 2004. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of
Recognition. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Sen, Amartya. 1985. Commodities and Capabilities. Oxford: Elsevier Science Publishers.
Sen, Amartya. 1999. Development As Freedom. New York: Random House.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission. 1998-2003. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of
South Africa Report, 7 vols. Cape Town: TRC.
Wiesel, Elie. 1960. Night. New York: Avon.
NOTES
1. I use a broad definition of narrative that encompasses anything that tells a story. It need
not even be language, per se; it can be pictorial as a photography exhibit, or visual and experien-
tial as a museum. Not all photography exhibits and museums are narratives, of course, but those
that tell a story of the past are included as narrative here.
2. For example, God Grew Tired of Us by John Bul Dau, one of the lost boys of the Sudan. It
was a bestselling book and a widely viewed film, which won the 2006 Sundance Film Festival Grand
Jury Prize and Audience Award in the Independent Film Competition: Documentary Category. The
book and film spawned the John Dau Foundation that provides healthcare to the South Sudan.
3. Discourse about rights had existed, of course, since at least the eighteenth century, in
which it became the primary means of asserting political claims. The Enlightenment claim was
that humans had rights that were independent of the sovereign, but there was no real consensus
as to what these rights were. See Julie Stone Peters (2005).
194

4. First was the Universal Declaration on Human Rights (UDHR) that was adopted by the
United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. The UDHR in turn gave rise to numer-
ous other human rights instruments.
5. The decision to forego using victims stories was a controversial one. The using docu-
ments side won the strategy argument largely because the prosecution team feared that the actual
witnesses credibility could be undermined on cross-examination. And the Germans had conve-
niently amassed thousands of documents.
6. Even this moving narrative, however, is not a victim/survivor story in that it is not told
by a survivor but by a person twice removed: Shawcross telling Grbes account of what he had
seen the victims do.
7. These words are quoted on the wall of this part of the Holocaust Museum.
8. The Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, is similarly designed. A visitor is
given an identity card with just the word Blanc or Non-Blanc (white or non-white in Afri-
kaans). One enters by one of two doors, depending on what card one has. I went with a friend
and we received different designations. After we entered through separate doors, we continued
to be separated by fencing along a long walkway into the museum. It seemed at first that we would
not be able to go through the museum together; my own psychological reaction to such arbitrary
separation was tellingly appropriate to prepare me to experience the story of apartheid (separate-
ness). I became necessarily more engaged in the story that was to unfold in the museum.
9. The United States Holocaust Museum was chartered by a unanimous act of Congress in
1980. The land adjacent to the National Mall was donated by the government, but all funds for
planning, constructing, and equipping the museum came from private donations, as required by law.
10. In this seminal 1998 article, Mndez describes the legal obligation to investigate the truth
as an emerging principle. The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) more recently
(April 20, 2005) passed (without a vote) Resolution 2006/66 entitled The Right to Truth, which
did not establish a legal obligation but instead said that the UNHRC recognizes the importance
of respecting and ensuring the right to truth so as to contribute to ending impunity and to pro-
mote and protect human rights.
11. Nations actually have four responsibilities under customary law: (i) to investigate and
make facts public (truth); (ii) to prosecute and punish perpetrators (justice); (iii) to make amends
for damage (reparations); and (iv) to remove from the security forces those known to have com-
mitted, ordered or tolerated abuses (Mndez 1998, 263). While this article discusses only the first
responsibility, truth, it acknowledges that the other obligations are likewise critical for peacebuilding.
12. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states in Article 19 that
everyone has the right of freedom of opinion and expression.
13. There are numerous instance of storytelling helping to change the law. One striking example
from American law involves the laws surrounding domestic violence. The laws and practices of the
legal system (police, prosecutors, and judges) offered little help to women who were victims of domes-
tic violence until the 1970s when dramatic changes occurred. These changes, in part at least, were
catalyzed by the appearance of books in which women who were victims of domestic violence told
their stories, broke the silence, and dismantled the mythology surrounding domestic violence.
14. Words of Vincent Kolbe, an ex-resident of District Six and a museum trustee.
http://www.districtsix.co.za/frames.htm [accessed: September 10, 2010].
195

The Ethics of Storytelling. A Nation&#39;s Role in Victim/Survivor Storytelling

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The Ethics of Storytelling:

KEYWORDS. Transitional democracy, human rights, narrative, peacemaking,

There is a sense in which the whole of peacebuilding could be summed

T he world is awash with stories. Personal narratives, have become

ETHICAL PERSPECTIVES 18, no. 2(2011): 169-195.

94545_Ethical_Persp_2011/2_02.indd 169 7/06/11 13:09

busy-ness and indifference, makes us listen, and sometimes respond.

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Before tackling these difficult yet critical questions, however, it is

II. THE EMERGENCE OF NARRATIVE TO EXPOSE HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES

Before the mid-twentieth century, there was little accounting, in both

94545_Ethical_Persp_2011/2_02.indd 171 7/06/11 13:09

Without screaming or weeping these people undressed, stood around

Despite the mountain of evidentiary material that preceded the telling of

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a grandmother singing to and tickling her doomed grandchild, captured

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prisoners despair. Almost all of the survivors, orally or in their written

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we have understood as history? Philosophy? Poetry? Yet forgetting, put-

94545_Ethical_Persp_2011/2_02.indd 176 7/06/11 13:09

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generally operate by inviting victims, and sometimes perpetrators, to

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occurring in many disciplines anthropology, history, medicine, law, and

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III. NATIONS RESPONSIBILITY

International legal scholars have largely agreed that transitional democra-

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The ethical resistance of the powerless others to our capacity to exert

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on us. The obligations are unenforceable precisely because of the oth-

Hoys view seems particularly relevant because it focuses on what the

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can be hopelessly vague in terms of forming any national policy or action.

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limits of legalistic language; it provides space for deliberation that can

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94545_Ethical_Persp_2011/2_02.indd 186 7/06/11 13:09

Capabilities are related to rights in that capabilities enable one to exercise

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IV. THE QUILTS OF BELFAST

July, 2004, St. Patricks Church, Belfast

I am helping John and JJ dismantle a quilt installation of over half a

94545_Ethical_Persp_2011/2_02.indd 190 7/06/11 13:09

a peaceful way forward. Yet as I continued to read the quilts (captured

94545_Ethical_Persp_2011/2_02.indd 191 7/06/11 13:09

for participation, mutual recognition and deliberation, it provides an alter-

V. THE DISTRICT SIX MUSEUM

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I began by insisting on the importance of acknowledgement, of any story

Adorno, Theodor W. 1967. An Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society. In Prisms.

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94545_Ethical_Persp_2011/2_02.indd 194 7/06/11 13:09

94545_Ethical_Persp_2011/2_02.indd 195 7/06/11 13:09

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