16 thoughts on “5 | Trauma, Testimony and Silence”
Jie Fang
I have often wondered what constitutes truth, which I once defined as the representation of an objective statement of fact. However, in the complexity of reality, the truth we see as listeners is not entirely complete, and the truth is sometimes intentionally obscured, distorted, or even disappears entirely. This means that we need to simultaneously analyze what is the truth from a subjective perspective, combined with an understanding of facts. In history, there are many periods of violent past, which not only cause permanent damage to the victims, but also irreversible psychological and physical damage to the survivors. I particularly agree with Laub (1993) and Strejilevich (2006) who argue that through the traumatic testimonies of the survivors is an important element that makes up the memory. What impressed me deeply and profoundly was that what Laub analyzes as true is different from what I believe to be objectively true, in cases where the testimony is not entirely accurate, it rather adds to the authenticity of the trauma. When I substituted myself into Laub’s argument, my perception of the truth was completely different because a piece of trauma affects the victim’s perception of the facts. This does not mean that it is a fake truth, but rather that the trauma they have suffered causes their memory of the truth to change, and this adds to the authenticity of this history. This has given me more insight into the understanding of truth, especially when it comes to trauma and violence, where emotions often take precedence over objective facts.
I next read articles by Ross (2010) and Kent (2016), which made me realize that testimony does not have a positive effect on victims in all contexts. Silence, as another form of testimony, does not emphasize verbal statements of fact, but rather serves as an agency to protect women’s vulnerability in the face of sexual violence. Kent (2016) indicates that silence in the framework of social repair is a way to protect individuals, families, and communities as past traumas have an impact on their future lives, which gives deeper thought to the phenomenon of gender injustice in contemporary society. When the victim has suffered the first trauma, they have to receive the secondary trauma of social marginalization.
When silence is used more as a survival mechanism to protect oneself, then who should bring them justice?
Across all the readings I noticed a recurring theme that always pops up: how inadequate the conventional frameworks are to fully capture the complexities of victim testimonies, trauma, and justice after atrocities. These works collectively challenge the dominant assumptions about truth-telling, the victim-perpetrator binary, and the role of silence in post-conflict societies. In more pop culture terms it challenged the trope of the “perfect victim” narrative, if they don’t check off certain boxes then they are not a “star” victim of a conflict and – in journalism – won’t be put on the front page.
Kent’s exploration of silence in Timor-Leste reframes it not as an absence of testimony but as an active, strategic choice—a form of agency used to maintain social cohesion and personal safety. This idea resonates with Laub’s assertion that trauma often resists articulation because it “has not yet come into existence” until it is spoken aloud. Just like abuse will often go unnoticed even when spoken about, in the judicial system for example. Often for the first time in the act of testimony, it is the case. Either way, it argues that silence is not a void but a meaningful, context-driven response to the aftermath of violence. On the other hand, I wonder how can we interpret silence. It is valid but in a legal framework cannot be the basis of anything.
Strejilevich adds another layer by arguing that testimony should not be judged solely on factual accuracy (again depending of the framework, journalism, and the legal system would heavily disagree with that). Instead, it functions more like literature, using fragmented, metaphorical language to convey the emotional truth of trauma. This challenges the transitional justice model critiqued by Shaw and Waldorf, which often prioritizes legalistic truth over the subjective realities of survivors. They argue that transitional justice mechanisms, grounded in international norms, frequently overlook local practices and the nuanced ways communities engage with justice, memory, and reconciliation.
What ties these readings together is the recognition that both silence and speech can serve as forms of resistance, healing, or even protection. Silence is in my opinion the absence of action, but rather just another type of it. Whether through Kent’s analysis of pragmatic silence, Laub’s focus on the co-creation of testimony between speaker and listener, or Shaw and Waldorf’s critique of imposing universal justice models on diverse local contexts, the central question is: Whose truths are recognized, and under what conditions? what constitutes someone’s truth? Is it by comparing different narratives or established definitions?
Current events, such as the genocide in Gaza or the transitional justice processes in Colombia, highlight these tensions. Survivors often navigate between the global demand for visible, coherent narratives and the personal need for selective silence to preserve dignity and community ties. Most of the time if these atrocities do not resemble the framework we imagine for them, they are often ignored and neglected, which birthed the entire discussion of “can we call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide”.
Discussion Question:
How can we (concretely) push transitional justice frameworks to evolve to trust both the spoken and unspoken forms of testimonies?
I really value Laub’s approach to listening – how silences can fill in gaps and how time, patience, and empathy are crucial for allowing narratives about trauma to be unearthed. For example, in Laub’s piece, we are confronted with the historian’s reductive approach to a Holocaust survivor’s testimony. The historian deemed the survivor’s memory inaccurate due to a supposed ‘mistake’ in the number of chimneys she recalled. She failed to recognize that trauma reshapes perception and memory. As Laub stated, “[the woman] testified to the breakage of a framework. That was historical truth.” The historian, however, could not hear how the survivor’s silence was an essential part of her testimony, an undeniable part of historical truth. In doing so, the historian was not only witnessing but also, in a way, co-owning a sacred memory while simultaneously dismissing it as untrue. This raises a crucial question: what are the implications of co-owning a memory while deeming it untrue/inaccurate?
In journalism school, we are taught to push interviewees, challenge them, question, and step outside our ‘comfort zones,’ whatever that means. At the same time, we are expected to remain ‘objective.’ I often question the dangers of treating objectivity as an attainable goal in journalism. The same applies to testimony—why are we so obsessed with objectivity, particularly when language itself has limits? People process and remember trauma differently. Some respond with silence, using the absence of speech as a form of resistance and healing. As Ross notes, silence for many women is “a means to protect the self and others.” Thinking about testimonies beyond the act of ‘retelling’ through words reminds me of the ways art continues to serve as a form of testimonies for people because language can only do so much and sometimes art just speaks for itself (the way silence does).
Every time I reflect on the complexities of testimonies and how gender shapes the ways people ‘testify,’ I think about how journalists approach cases of sexual violence. It is crucial to avoid sensationalizing but also revictimizing survivors by reducing them solely to their assault. As Sunder Rajan (1993) and Mulla (2005) point out, “there is a tendency in current discourses to assume that rape and sexual violence are limit-less experiences, that there is no life (or no life worthy of being called lived) beyond them.” This passage made me think more about silence as a response to trauma, particularly how they’re reported. For example, unlike print media, audio journalism has the unique power to feature moments of silence, allowing them to speak for themselves. Kent’s passage on the juxtaposition of silence and speech made me reflect on how different forms of communication challenge the individualized, confessional model of healing prescribed by transitional justice mechanisms. Throughout my time in the journalism school, I have come to understand the power of audio journalism in giving more meaning to testimonies, highlighting the importance of understanding testimonies through a multifaceted lens.
I want to reiterate the question I wrote above – what are the implications of co-owning a memory while deeming it untrue/inaccurate?
The readings from this week highlight the complex and multi-layered role of testimony in seeking transitional justice. Together, the scholars make clear the institutional limits for testimony to support healing and movement towards a more dignified every day for victims and survivors following mass atrocity. They suggest an urgent need for testimonial reform that moves away from fact-finding and linear storytelling, instead validating and creating space for silences, rituals, relationship reconstruction, and other forms of expression and processing that supersede language.
As a journalist, I’ve always been drawn to narrative storytelling as a means to achieve gender and social justice – but I’ve also noticed how certain stories get more visibility and coverage than others. When I think of public testimonies, for example, it’s easy to fall into thinking about the #MeToo movement, or the testimonies of Anita Hill, Christine Blasey-Ford, Ally Raisman, and Chanel Miller. While important, the stories that commonly provoke a lot of public discourse involve high-profile judges, politicians, actors, and professional or Division One athletes from the global North. There are other testimonies from the global south, such as from Nadia Murad and Sonita Alizadeh, that have gained international attention after being the subject of documentaries made by filmmakers based in the West and for North American audiences.
When it comes to my own reporting, in addition to wanting to tell stories that cover underreported issues and communities, I’ve been cautious about crafting stories in a way that gives agency and respect to those in a story. Laub offers a good framework for engaging with testimony in a self-reflective, empathetic, and co-participatory way and Ross implies a strong need for testimonies to go beyond “simple numeric accounting of gross violations” (Ross, 75), urging for testimony to be contextualized within the larger power structures that continue to suppress marginalized populations and perpetuate cycles of violence.
In thinking about how trauma alters the accuracy of memory as well as how silence and ritual can be a form of resistance and survival, I’m left thinking about the ways journalists and other storytellers can cover and make room for these alternate models of expression. I think about the tapestry from the memory project we discussed last semester and the complementing video as an example of publicizing testimony in a creative and respectful way that simultaneously combats the limitlessness of victimhood. Perhaps these are the kinds of stories that require more attention.
At the same time, I’m left wondering:
Even when anonymity and safety can be guaranteed, are certain expressions of testimony better kept private? Does testimony always require a witness?
Before these readings, I had never thought about or placed any importance on silence other than “awkward silence”. However, these readings have really made me reflect on the silence I have witnessed. Laub (1992) discusses the intricacies of listening to testimony, emphasizing that a listener must hear both speech and silence, recognizing and respecting the pauses as much as the words themselves. Testimonies of trauma are complex, deeply personal, and often difficult for listeners to fully comprehend due to conscious or unconscious biases. This highlights the perseverance required to rebuild life after trauma, with healing always tied to the violence experienced. Laub also recounts a Holocaust survivor whose testimony was questioned because she could not recall the exact number of chimneys that exploded at Auschwitz, asserting that testimony should be valued for its subjective depth rather than strict legal accuracy. Strejilevich (2006) echoes this sentiment, emphasizing that testimony serves as a bridge between personal memory and collective history rather than simply a repository of factual precision. As she reflects, “My search for meaning had been painful but successful. I was not looking for conclusions but to decipher my own echoes.” This statement resonates deeply, reminding us that our ability to understand others is directly tied to how deeply we explore and understand ourselves. Only by working through our own perceptions and meanings can we truly grasp the experiences of others. Ross (2010) explores the intersection of gender and testimony, arguing that women’s silences are often misinterpreted as personal failures rather than reflections of institutional shortcomings. She asserts that if society expects women to voice their experiences, structures must be in place to protect them from the consequences of speaking out against gendered violence. Kent (2016) examines silence not as repression but as a strategy for social healing, connecting this to Laub’s discussion of testimony. She highlights how silence, rather than restricting justice, can function as a meaningful response to violence. Also in many Western contexts, heavy emphasis is placed on written documentation as the primary mode of communication, with meaning often tied to formalized records. However, different cultures and societies perceive communication in varied ways, and silence is not necessarily an obstacle to justice but rather a nuanced and significant response to violence and collective healing. My question to the class is other than deep listening, patience, cultural sensitivity and protection from external pressure, how can we create safe spaces where the speaker would feel comfortable with sharing their testimonies with moments of silence for the healing and storytelling process?
The readings this week challenge conventional understandings of truth and testimony. They remind us that truth is not just about facts but about interpretation, emotion, and the ways trauma shapes memory.
Testimony, as discussed in the readings, differs from legal and historical frameworks. A witness may not remember all the details, yet their account can still hold a deeper truth about their experience. The truth of testimony lies not just in the facts but in its emotional and subjective reality—how the event was felt, processed, and lived through. Laub emphasizes that truth is not a fixed entity but something that emerges through the process of telling and listening. This reminds me that the significance of an event is not determined by its details alone but by how it is felt, processed, and understood, offering a more holistic perspective on lived experience.
Strejilevich notes that memories can be fragmented, filled with gaps, silences, and ambiguities, and trauma disrupts the ability to form coherent narratives. This is where silence comes in. Silence is not simply the absence of testimony but an integral part of it. It can be an intentional choice, a protective measure, or even a form of communication. Survivors often create their own way of expressing trauma when words fall short, fearing they will not be heard or will be dismissed. Ross’s critique of the TRC highlights this issue: women who suffered sexual violence often remained silent, not because they had nothing to say, but because speaking out carried risks. This underscores the point that healing and justice should not be based solely on the assumption that speaking out is the only path forward. Silence, too, can be a significant part of the process, offering its own form of truth.
Testimony serves a multifaceted role in both personal and collective contexts. It is not only about recounting events but also a means of healing, recognition, and asserting dignity for individuals, while simultaneously shaping the broader social narrative. Testimony may also conflict with official narratives and challenge power structures, making it risky. In Timor-Leste, Kent demonstrates how silence contributes to social repair through reburial rituals, returning displaced persons, and supporting women in coerced relationships. This suggests that, in certain contexts, relational and embodied aspects of healing may carry just as much—if not more—weight than the spoken word.
Question:
How can healing and justice systems be adjusted to respect the different ways survivors of trauma choose to share or keep their experiences?
This week’s readings provoke a deeper understanding of testimony’s complex role in transnational justice. The struggles of South African women during and after apartheid highlight the dangers of truth-telling mechanisms that fail to account for sociocultural drivers of gender-based violence. It was jarring to read that at the time of the hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Rape Crisis reported that a woman was raped every thirty-six seconds.
Similar to the South African landscape, in South Asian cultures, the stigmatisation of rape is a major driver of the underreporting of gender-based violence. Victims of rape often face humiliation from community and derogatory victim-blaming. In many instances, these fears come true and families actually silence victims from speaking up to save ‘family honor’; because the conception of honour is loosely tied to women’s bodies in certain societies. This is a reproduction of years of institutional sexism, patriarchy, and blindness to women’s needs. In a sexual assault case in Bangladesh in 2020, perpetrators felt audacious enough to release a video striping and severely beating a woman on social media. It feels unfair that a society can make space for men’s loud violences; but not offer safe spaces to unravel women’s silences.
The Ross reading speaks of how women’s silences compound into them being treated as the problem and the event being perceived as “individual moral failures rather than as institutional failures”. In her book, Know my Name, Chanel Miller details her experience of being sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, a Stanford University athlete, in January 2015. At Brock’s conviction she read out a letter to her attacker and this speech was later read by the US Congress to campaign for the voices of sexual abuse victims to be amplified. In her speech, Miller says, “Sometimes I think, if I hadn’t gone, then this never would’ve happened. But then I realised it would have happened, just to somebody else.” This for me captures the consequence that Ross mentions. Miller’s story is also a tribute to what happens when women do provide testimonies and have access to legal, financial, and community safety nets to rely on. Chanel Miller’s story drove state legislators in California to approve two new bills to expand its definition of rape and add new mandatory-minimum sentences for sexual assaults.
Parting thought from this week’s readings is from Strejilevich (2006), ‘A truthful way of giving testimony should allow for disruptive memories, discontinuities, blanks, silences, and ambiguity; it should become literary.’ While this sounds extremely idealistic to capture the nuances of women’s lives and experiences in conflict, current institutions and justice systems are not equipped to witness truths in this way. In the dire need for reconciliation when it comes to women’s justice, it is in our best interests to work with these holes in the legal fabric by aspiring to be culturally sensitive researchers, journalists, and policy practitioners. Now that we are aware of the tensions between silence and testimony, how can we implement it in practical ways in research and project management, for our future work?
What stood out to me in this week’s readings were the many descriptions of the structural barriers that prevent people from sharing testimonies about their experiences and hinder opportunities to move towards justice through testimony. In particular, Strejilevich’s discussion of how testimony is “often seen as a commodity that must provide practical use” (p. 703), which leads to a discounting of testimonies that are perceived as ‘non-factual’ or ‘too subjective’, was especially thought-provoking. This made me reflect on the question of what and for whom the different purposes of testimony are, and I wondered if the concentrated focus placed on the use of testimony to uncover and delineate the details of traumatic historical events has distracted us from the other purposes of testimony. Kent’s descriptions of how people in East Timor remembered and processed the losses they experienced in ways that did not necessarily involve verbal communication about them is an excellent example of how testimony can serve other purposes towards justice. At times, testimony might be more about recovering a sense of dignity, reconnecting and reasserting social ties, or enabling individual and community-level recognition of traumatic events towards healing. In some cases, testimony might serve a purpose mostly for the individual who is testifying – Strejilevich explains that testimony is a way to work through loss. Thus, I think that testimony can have many purposes, and not all of them are meant for an entire nation or world to directly benefit from. Moreover, I think that while the use of testimony for the purpose of historiography is one way in which testimony can support the exposition of erased or silenced truths, as well as ensuring that accountability is taken by perpetrators of oppression or violence, other purposes of testimony can support those goals as well.
Perhaps, widening our perspective of what testimony can do for different people can support us in valuing it as more than a commodity – perhaps we may view it more relationally, as a form of engagement or an opportunity for connection… etc. When I look up the word ‘testimony’ online, the resulting definition emphasizes it as a formal statement and its purpose being that it provides evidence for something. I wonder if we need to reinvent and expand our widely accepted definition of what testimony is to break down those barriers that do not make space for testimony be heard and held.
Q: How would you define testimony? How can this definition help to break down the barriers that prevent people from sharing their testimonies?
In Sounds of Silence: Everyday Strategies of Social Repair in Timor-Leste by Lia Kent, there is a passage that reads, “the privileging of speech, moreover, ‘blinds us’ to other forms of non-verbal expression or communication” (49-50). This idea echoes through other readings as well: in An Acknowledged Failure, Fiona C. Ross points out that women weren’t always safe or comfortable speaking at the Truth and Reconciliation commission in South Africa, and even when they did speak, they often spoke less directly than human rights workers had hoped. Ross unpacks the idea of silence, revealing that at times what has been labelled as silence may in fact be an inability or unwillingness to hear: “Women experienced the violences of colonialism, capitalism, and apartheid and their aftermaths differently from men, but when they spoke in forms that the Commission was not legally enabled to hear, it assumed that women had not spoken, had not offered of their experience, had failed as witnesses, or had not been as affected by apartheid’s violence as had men” (74-75).
At the risk of coming across as pedantic, I’d like to point out that the irony that, even in Kent’s statement above, there is an example of the privileging of some forms of testimony over others. Even though Kent is talking about speech, which one would hear, she uses the word “blinds.” I hadn’t noticed this use of language until returning to my notes later, but I think it draws a significant parallel. In a society that privileges sight over all the other senses, “blinds” is a more commonly used metaphor that “deafens” when denoting the obscuration of something. It is more significant to see than to hear in Western societies. Written histories are given more weight than oral histories.
Coming back to testimony, this begs the question, what forms of testimony are overlooked?
I’ll be presenting this week with Paula on Chilean arpilleras, which played a significant role in alerting the world to the human rights abuses that were taking place during Pinochet’s rule. Arpilleras are handmade colourful textiles depicting scenes from a person’s life or memory. Because this form of art and testimonial, as well as the women who made them, were not taken seriously as art, testimonial, and artists, they initially escaped the attention of the Chilean government and were able to be smuggled out of the country and distributed worldwide.
Arpilleras aren’t speech or text. They aren’t precise. They often blend the remembered with the imagined. They can’t be asked follow-up questions. Oftentimes their creators are not known to those who possess them. They don’t scream “fact” upon first glance. They leave a lot of questions to their viewers and I think there is a strength in that. There is no objective truth despite what histories, national identities, inquiries and reports might convey. But arpilleras force those viewing them to engage with them to answer their questions.
I think taking responsibility, engaging, taking an active role in being a witness is what it means to truly witness. So in that sense, forms of testimony that call us to engage with them might make us better witnesses if we’re willing.
Questions:
1. How do those who have suffered through violence and/or trauma want to be heard?
2. How can we engage with those testimonies as they are (rather than expecting those who are telling their truth to tell it in a format that we are prepared to listen to)?
The readings this week have me thinking about the role of trauma and testimony as it pertains to the limits of justice. In its most conventional sense, justice is often synonymous with legal punishment—trials, convictions, and sentences. However, I’m interested in thinking more about what this might look like when it comes to sexual violence. The expectation that justice follows a linear path, from disclosure to investigation to punishment, ignores the profoundly personal and non-linear nature of trauma. Survivors often find that the criminal justice system is not only inadequate but also harmful, retraumatizing them through invasive procedures.
Testimony plays a central role in this struggle for justice. As Strejilevich discusses, trauma resists easy articulation; survivors’ narratives are often fragmented. The legal system, however, demands coherence, often invalidating testimonies that do not conform to evidentiary standards. This creates a fundamental tension: survivors must translate their experiences into language that the legal system recognizes.
Kent’s analysis of silence in post-conflict Timor-Leste complicates the assumption that speaking out is always the best or only path to healing. As Kent explains, silence is not repression but a deliberate strategy of self-protection.
In thinking about justice for survivors, I ask: does the demand for testimony truly serve survivors, or does it reinforce systems that privilege certain forms of knowledge while excluding others? Further, how do these conversations shape our understanding of what it means to “bear witness” to violence?
As someone who has read about trauma, learned about it through others, witnessed its impact, and experienced it firsthand, I have come to appreciate the complexities of trauma and silence but haven’t yet explored the complexities of testimony. From my experiences and through these readings, I’ve learned that trauma cannot be fully captured by language; it’s an experience that leaves scars challenging to speak on and articulate. These readings have shown me that testimony is profoundly transformative, not just for those telling the story but for those listening. It requires emotional investment and active care that fosters spaces of psychological safety and healing.
Laub illustrates how trauma impacts memory and language, usually lending to testimonies being fragmented or seemingly incomplete. We also saw in Strejilevich’s work that truth in trauma is not always linear or easy to grasp, “testimony should stress just truthfulness, not objectivity” (p. 709). Testimony isn’t and shouldn’t be able to do precise factual recounting; it should be about conveying the emotional weight of the experience. It is a way of giving a voice to trauma where language may fail. Silence also plays a role in the context of trauma and truth-telling, with Ross demonstrating that silence isn’t simply the absence of speech but is an active form of agency. Silence is a way for survivors to protect themselves and withhold their stories from the processes of justice that are not built to capture the reality of their experiences. Whether testimony is used as a form of resistance or collective refusal to participate in harmful systems, it can inform the process of healing and justice.
I resonated with Kent’s suggestion that communities can heal outside formal systems of justice through everyday practices. While language and silence tend to go against each other, working together in these spaces can help individuals and communities heal from trauma together. They provide the space for both spoken and unspoken forms of truth-telling, allowing resilience to emerge in unique and specific ways. Ultimately, considering testimony within transitional justice processes manifests itself by creating space for truths that do not neatly fit into expectations laid by formal justice systems. Whether this is done through speech, silence, or deliberate acts, testimony has a right to be recognized in any and all forms.
So with this, I wonder:
• What would it take for society to accept silence as a tool for justice?
• Is this sufficient for the world we live in, and how can we make it work?
It has been an emotionally exhaustive few days. As probably many of you saw, last week an airplane accident took the lives of many young figure skaters, coaches and their families. While to most outsiders, in which I am including myself in that category, the accident has done nothing but highlight the ways in which Trump is failing the American people, it took a whole different meaning to me once I learned there were figure skaters on the plane. It became almost unreal, when I realized I trained with one of the coaches that were on the plane years ago during a figure skating summer camp. And that is the word I kept telling my therapist when she asked how I felt about it. “It doesn’t feel real”. And though she tried to make say something more, to name the feeling, I felt unable to do so because to speak it out loud meant it was real. Even writing this is making my throat close up; I don’t want it to be real and if I don’t speak about it then it’s not real.
The readings this week highlighted perfectly the very complex and nuance relationship between being a witness and bearing witness to trauma; how, not knowing or not wanting to know is not a weakness of the witness but can be a sign of strength. Laub put it beautifully when he says his job as a listener was “to respect —not to upset, not to trespass—the subtle balance between what the woman knew and what she did not, or could not, know.” However, as evidenced by the historians hearing the woman’s testimony, or what Strejilevich mentions in the article, sometimes people simply do not want to listen. And how can we reconcile the trauma of those who have survived mass violence and other atrocities with the listener’s desire to not listen because it’s too much, or because the feeling is too much, or because being confronted to that level of trauma is ‘too much’. I think about how in undergrad I had the privilege of listening to Robbie Weissman, a Holocaust survivor, when he came to talk to us during an undergrad course. One of the things he said, and that I was reminded by this week’s readings, was that he only started speaking out about the Holocaust and his experiences when a Canadian professor whose name I’ve forgotten and who frankly doesn’t deserve to be mentioned, started spewing Holocaust-denial talking points. For him, before this moment, speaking about the Holocaust reliving all the trauma he suffered. It was only in the negation/invalidation of his experiences that he was able to speak out.
The second thing I thought about was in terms of sexual violence and all the cases who have gone without any punishment to the perpetrators, is because during the trials the victims have been questioned about the recollection of events. If something does not add up, then how can the defense be sure what they are saying is true? The mind is a very powerful thing, and forgetting, or staying silent, is one of the ways the body and the minds know how to protect themselves.
Questions:
How can we be better listeners to the testimonies of trauma and violence?
Why is/has the memory of mass violence events become so inextricably linked to testimonies? What happens when those who were witnesses, those who were the narrators, are no longer here to share their testimonies?
Testimony, as Laub argues, is an act of survival that is shaped as much by what is forgotten or unspeakable as by what is remembered. Trauma fractures the ability to fully witness an event, leaving survivors in a liminal space where memory and silence intertwine. What struck me most in *Bearing Witness* is the idea that trauma survivors, even when they do testify, are not merely reporting but reliving and in doing so, they shape a truth that is often dismissed for its subjectivity. The demand for historical precision in testimony, as Laub shows through the Auschwitz uprising account, can be a form of erasure itself. This tension between empirical truth and emotional truth is critical in understanding how power dictates whose testimony is valid and whose suffering is recognized.
Kent’s argument about silence as a form of social repair complicates this further. Silence is often perceived as repression or absence, yet for many, it is the only viable means of endurance. Nowhere is this clearer than in Palestine today, where collective silence in the face of relentless violence is not just avoidance but also a resistance to being consumed by an external narrative that seeks to define their suffering. Silence here is not passive; it is an assertion of what cannot be contained in words. It is, as Kent suggests, an act of reclaiming dignity in the face of a world that often refuses to listen.
What does it mean to listen ethically? Both Laub and Kent reveal that listening is not passive; it is an act of creation, of making space for the unspeakable. In Palestine, as in Holocaust testimonies or the silences of Kashmiri mothers whose sons have been disappeared, speech often fails to capture the totality of loss. In Tigray, Ethiopia for instance, where war crimes have led to mass disappearances and systemic violence, survivors often find themselves silenced, not only by the weight of trauma but by the knowledge that their suffering might never be acknowledged in global narratives. The act of testimony becomes fraught with power who gets to speak, and who is believed?
Perhaps this is why poetry, art, dance and embodied practices become the true sites of testimony because linear storytelling, bound by Western legal and historical frameworks, demands coherence from experiences that exist in rupture.
Questions: 1. Can testimony ever be free of the structures of power that shape who is heard and who is disbelieved?
2. And if silence is a form of witnessing, how do we ensure it is not mistaken for indifference?
I learned years ago that the Gitxaała and lots of BC north coast Nations conceptualize silence as the strongest form of dissent. Culturally, the understanding is that if what you have to say is received with silence, it means that the listener is so dissatisfied that they are not even willing to indulge a conversation. If the listener thought what you said had any merit, they would express their disagreement or assent. This differs so significantly from Canadian colonial imaginings of silence where we call for objections on meeting agendas, marriages and mining projects and, hearing none, assume unanimous consent. When Ross wrote that the “conundrum is, of course, that silence may offer legitimacy to violence,” I thought of this conversation bout the Gitxaała Nation, and thought: “yeah, because we let it!” As if we could re-make the decision about whether silence means assent or dissent. That kneejerk was not my more-evolved conclusion a few minutes later. The presumption that silence in a full room is indicative of assent is not an incidental cultural difference, but a tool of oppression. I want to say that it ignores the reasons for silence outlined by Ross and Kent, but I think it moreso capitalizes on the reasons for silence outlined by Ross and Kent. If the hegemonic expectation is that a woman harmed by sexual abuse will speak at a commission, and she does not, the conclusion is that she was not abused, because she did not speak about it. We can see the gaps here, when it’s written out that way, but I don’t think we always feel them when they are happening. In my own memory, the TRC of Canada bears relevance. We know not every story was told in the testimonials, and we know some of them were told elsewhere for a reason, but I don’t think we spend a lot of time wondering what we the untold stories were. I think we mostly accept the TRC as the almost-whole-truth or the as-true-as-it’s-going-to-get-truth.
Ross’ discussion of circumlocution versus straight talk dovetails nicely with Laub (and Strejilevich)’s discussion of what witnesses do when they are at their best. I am sure lots of us were frustrated with the revelation that human rights workers in Guatemala had peasant women reformulate their assertions that “he went away” or “I was hurt” into “he was murdered” or “he raped me.” I am sure such aid workers did not enjoy this task, but that it was seen as necessary for some such reason. Laub would say that the listener should be well-informed enough to pick up on cues but not so imposing that they hinder listening with foregone conclusions or block out new information, because “knowledge in the testimony is, in other words, not not simply a factual given that is reproduced and replicated by the testifier, but a genuine advent, an event in its own right” (62). I’ve read a few other students refer to Laub saying that the job of a listener is to “respect–not to upset, not to trespass” the balance of knowing and not-knowing. A listener who has the testifier translate “he went away” into “he was disappeared” is perhaps so well-informed they are trespassing, and hindering listening, because, as Ross goes on to discuss, the statement “he went away” has its own set of knowledges and truths nested within it. Sometimes the circumlocution is protective from retribution, but sometimes it conveys its own meanings. Reading this, I thought of my own little circumlocutions; sometimes, instead of referring to someone who has died as such, I will just refer to them in the past tense and hope everyone else captures two truths: that they are dead, and that I do not want to discuss it. I hope they are astute listeners open to “empathetic unsettlement,” because if I were to “straight-talk,” the listener would only get the first truth.
I feel like someone needs to disable my keyboard after 500 words, but I also loved Laub’s “hazards of listening” list, all of which I could recall doing or seeing. Some of them are undesirable and harmful, but they all have a reason.
How do we hear what silence is telling us? What are we looking for when we listen to silence?
This week’s readings reminded me of two deeply disturbing instances of mass sexual violence in India – the Kunan Poshpora mass rapes of 1990 and the gendered violence during India’s partition in 1947. In both cases, survivors faced social erasure, and their testimonies led to ostracization, societal stigma and silence. Many women raped during pre-independence India’s partition were either murdered by their own families in the name of “honour” or forced into silence, their experiences erased from collective memory. Similarly, in Kunan Poshpora, survivors’ testimonies were dismissed as “terrorist propaganda”, and justice was never served. These cases complicated my earlier notion of testimony as a means of justice. Strejilevich and Laub’s idea of truth helped reconcile this to an extent. The authors argue that testimony is not about factual accuracy or creating knowledge that can be used as evidence. They exist in the realm of the subjective and it seeks to reconstruct meaning in trauma by viewing the event in new dimensions.
The purpose of testimony varies depending on the perspective of the trauma witness, the witness to the trauma witness, and the broader social context. Besides being a way to work through historical trauma, testimony is also social and cultural resistance. However, as Fiona Ross and Lia Kent highlight, it can also expose survivors to further harm. The Zuma trial in South Africa demonstrated that, even in a country making progress on addressing sexual violence, women who spoke out faced character assassination and exile. Similarly, in Timor-Leste, South Africa, Kunan Poshpora, and during partition in India, women often chose silence as a strategy of survival rather than as a refusal to remember. Ross argues that silence is not necessarily a failure to testify but can be an act of self-preservation and resistance.
Laub emphasizes that the witness to the trauma witness is a co-owner of the traumatic event as they become the first blank canvas on which the event is inscribed/recorded for the first time. Justice is not ensured by merely providing space for survivors to speak, but it also comes from ensuring that their voices are truly heard. Survivors of genocide and atrocities may have contradictory memories, making testimony a process of reliving and reinterpreting events and bearing witness to that trauma. In some cases, this means recognizing silence itself as a form of testimony. Kent’s reading also highlighted how communities in Timor-Leste engaged in non-verbal, embodied, and relational forms of social repair rather than formal institutional justice mechanisms.
Question: How can truth and justice systems better incorporate subjective and non-verbal or relational forms of testimony?
This week’s readings sparked a lot of reflection for me with regards to how I view the “listener” of testimony. I think I often look upon people who listen with judgement, because there are so many moments where listening feels selfish, egotistical, transactional, performative, extractive, self-indulgent… the list goes on. I often find myself second guessing the intentions of both other listeners and myself (as a listener), constantly searching through their feelings and mine to find hidden agendas or ways that the listener is seeking to gain something for themself through proximity to someone else’s trauma. I partially knew, but didn’t fully realize the depth of the disdain or judgement I had for the listener, but while reading, I felt myself noticing areas where I need to let go of some judgement, and soften into empathy.
Both Laub and Strejilevich’s pieces brought my attention to what role the listener plays in testimony. Strjilevich outlines how testimony can provide an opportunity to work through traumatic memories, support the dignity of survivors, and contribute to ethical recovery. These texts, however, directed my focus to the ways in which I’ve been selling the relationality of the process of listening short. Testimony requires a listener. The listener needs to “[open themselves] to empathetic unsettlement” (Strejilevich, 711), and in participating in testimony by listening, they become a “party to the creation of knowledge” (Laub, 57). While they don’t become the victim, they overlap with them, because if they are really, truly, “unobtrusively” present, they come to know the experience of the survivor with great intimacy. Of course, there’s an art to it, and the process demands that the listener be very aware and honest with themselves about the landscape of thoughts and feelings they are having. However, the listening comes from the desire to create space to respect a person’s narrative and silence as it unfolds, in however shape it unfolds in. This does not necessarily require the listener to know it all about the context, but to pay deep attention to the experience and testimony of the survivor.
The testimony depends on the “bonding, the intimate and total presence of the other” (Laub, 70), and I think this is the part that I’ve been underselling. It’s possible to be mindful of “internal hazards” that these authors warn about, and still extend compassion to the listener for the labour done, for the emotional and ethical work of bearing witness, the “hazards of listening.” As Laub argues, as one comes to know the survivor, one really comes to know oneself, and that is not an easy task” (72). Even writing this now, extending warmth and gentleness to the listener feels illegal to me, and it pulls out my Prairies Dad instinct to suppress feelings and have a stiff upper lip (note, I have never once in my life had a stiff upper lip). I wonder if part of the resistance to recognizing the listener comes from an inability to fully connect with my own emotional responses to difficult knowledge, or if it comes from viewing trauma as a zero-sum game, with some mythical hierarchy of trauma ruling the game. It definitely prevents recognition of the essential role the listener plays in testimony, and it definitely undervalues the value of bearing witness.
I think part of my judgement came from watching people across fields– community services, academics, policy makers, journalists, counsellors & social workers– gloriously butcher listening. Part of my judgement also comes from gloriously butchering listening myself. I do think that there are grains of truth and validity in this judgement, because there are very real risks to poorly handled listening. Laub talks extensively about the risks of re-traumatizing the survivor, or failing to truly see and listen. I take particular note of Laub’s warnings about the different kinds of defensive feelings listeners may encounter in their task, including hyperemotionality. Additionally, a lot of Strejilevich’s discussion about making space for the “disruptive memories, discontinuities, blanks, silences, and ambiguities” (Strejilevich, 704) made a ton of sense to me, and fit my critiques of a lot of “listening”. At the same time, I think I tend to land quite far on the critical end of the spectrum here, and I think some course correction is in order to land at a place where listening can be done more effectively, and even be honoured. Roxani Krystalli says that critique is not just fault finding, but envisioning, and so I will need to do some envisioning of ways to be a better “hearer” (to borrow Strejilevich’s word).
Questions:
How can I be a good hearer?
What does it mean to think beyond the language of truth?
I have often wondered what constitutes truth, which I once defined as the representation of an objective statement of fact. However, in the complexity of reality, the truth we see as listeners is not entirely complete, and the truth is sometimes intentionally obscured, distorted, or even disappears entirely. This means that we need to simultaneously analyze what is the truth from a subjective perspective, combined with an understanding of facts. In history, there are many periods of violent past, which not only cause permanent damage to the victims, but also irreversible psychological and physical damage to the survivors. I particularly agree with Laub (1993) and Strejilevich (2006) who argue that through the traumatic testimonies of the survivors is an important element that makes up the memory. What impressed me deeply and profoundly was that what Laub analyzes as true is different from what I believe to be objectively true, in cases where the testimony is not entirely accurate, it rather adds to the authenticity of the trauma. When I substituted myself into Laub’s argument, my perception of the truth was completely different because a piece of trauma affects the victim’s perception of the facts. This does not mean that it is a fake truth, but rather that the trauma they have suffered causes their memory of the truth to change, and this adds to the authenticity of this history. This has given me more insight into the understanding of truth, especially when it comes to trauma and violence, where emotions often take precedence over objective facts.
I next read articles by Ross (2010) and Kent (2016), which made me realize that testimony does not have a positive effect on victims in all contexts. Silence, as another form of testimony, does not emphasize verbal statements of fact, but rather serves as an agency to protect women’s vulnerability in the face of sexual violence. Kent (2016) indicates that silence in the framework of social repair is a way to protect individuals, families, and communities as past traumas have an impact on their future lives, which gives deeper thought to the phenomenon of gender injustice in contemporary society. When the victim has suffered the first trauma, they have to receive the secondary trauma of social marginalization.
When silence is used more as a survival mechanism to protect oneself, then who should bring them justice?
Across all the readings I noticed a recurring theme that always pops up: how inadequate the conventional frameworks are to fully capture the complexities of victim testimonies, trauma, and justice after atrocities. These works collectively challenge the dominant assumptions about truth-telling, the victim-perpetrator binary, and the role of silence in post-conflict societies. In more pop culture terms it challenged the trope of the “perfect victim” narrative, if they don’t check off certain boxes then they are not a “star” victim of a conflict and – in journalism – won’t be put on the front page.
Kent’s exploration of silence in Timor-Leste reframes it not as an absence of testimony but as an active, strategic choice—a form of agency used to maintain social cohesion and personal safety. This idea resonates with Laub’s assertion that trauma often resists articulation because it “has not yet come into existence” until it is spoken aloud. Just like abuse will often go unnoticed even when spoken about, in the judicial system for example. Often for the first time in the act of testimony, it is the case. Either way, it argues that silence is not a void but a meaningful, context-driven response to the aftermath of violence. On the other hand, I wonder how can we interpret silence. It is valid but in a legal framework cannot be the basis of anything.
Strejilevich adds another layer by arguing that testimony should not be judged solely on factual accuracy (again depending of the framework, journalism, and the legal system would heavily disagree with that). Instead, it functions more like literature, using fragmented, metaphorical language to convey the emotional truth of trauma. This challenges the transitional justice model critiqued by Shaw and Waldorf, which often prioritizes legalistic truth over the subjective realities of survivors. They argue that transitional justice mechanisms, grounded in international norms, frequently overlook local practices and the nuanced ways communities engage with justice, memory, and reconciliation.
What ties these readings together is the recognition that both silence and speech can serve as forms of resistance, healing, or even protection. Silence is in my opinion the absence of action, but rather just another type of it. Whether through Kent’s analysis of pragmatic silence, Laub’s focus on the co-creation of testimony between speaker and listener, or Shaw and Waldorf’s critique of imposing universal justice models on diverse local contexts, the central question is: Whose truths are recognized, and under what conditions? what constitutes someone’s truth? Is it by comparing different narratives or established definitions?
Current events, such as the genocide in Gaza or the transitional justice processes in Colombia, highlight these tensions. Survivors often navigate between the global demand for visible, coherent narratives and the personal need for selective silence to preserve dignity and community ties. Most of the time if these atrocities do not resemble the framework we imagine for them, they are often ignored and neglected, which birthed the entire discussion of “can we call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide”.
Discussion Question:
How can we (concretely) push transitional justice frameworks to evolve to trust both the spoken and unspoken forms of testimonies?
I really value Laub’s approach to listening – how silences can fill in gaps and how time, patience, and empathy are crucial for allowing narratives about trauma to be unearthed. For example, in Laub’s piece, we are confronted with the historian’s reductive approach to a Holocaust survivor’s testimony. The historian deemed the survivor’s memory inaccurate due to a supposed ‘mistake’ in the number of chimneys she recalled. She failed to recognize that trauma reshapes perception and memory. As Laub stated, “[the woman] testified to the breakage of a framework. That was historical truth.” The historian, however, could not hear how the survivor’s silence was an essential part of her testimony, an undeniable part of historical truth. In doing so, the historian was not only witnessing but also, in a way, co-owning a sacred memory while simultaneously dismissing it as untrue. This raises a crucial question: what are the implications of co-owning a memory while deeming it untrue/inaccurate?
In journalism school, we are taught to push interviewees, challenge them, question, and step outside our ‘comfort zones,’ whatever that means. At the same time, we are expected to remain ‘objective.’ I often question the dangers of treating objectivity as an attainable goal in journalism. The same applies to testimony—why are we so obsessed with objectivity, particularly when language itself has limits? People process and remember trauma differently. Some respond with silence, using the absence of speech as a form of resistance and healing. As Ross notes, silence for many women is “a means to protect the self and others.” Thinking about testimonies beyond the act of ‘retelling’ through words reminds me of the ways art continues to serve as a form of testimonies for people because language can only do so much and sometimes art just speaks for itself (the way silence does).
Every time I reflect on the complexities of testimonies and how gender shapes the ways people ‘testify,’ I think about how journalists approach cases of sexual violence. It is crucial to avoid sensationalizing but also revictimizing survivors by reducing them solely to their assault. As Sunder Rajan (1993) and Mulla (2005) point out, “there is a tendency in current discourses to assume that rape and sexual violence are limit-less experiences, that there is no life (or no life worthy of being called lived) beyond them.” This passage made me think more about silence as a response to trauma, particularly how they’re reported. For example, unlike print media, audio journalism has the unique power to feature moments of silence, allowing them to speak for themselves. Kent’s passage on the juxtaposition of silence and speech made me reflect on how different forms of communication challenge the individualized, confessional model of healing prescribed by transitional justice mechanisms. Throughout my time in the journalism school, I have come to understand the power of audio journalism in giving more meaning to testimonies, highlighting the importance of understanding testimonies through a multifaceted lens.
I want to reiterate the question I wrote above – what are the implications of co-owning a memory while deeming it untrue/inaccurate?
The readings from this week highlight the complex and multi-layered role of testimony in seeking transitional justice. Together, the scholars make clear the institutional limits for testimony to support healing and movement towards a more dignified every day for victims and survivors following mass atrocity. They suggest an urgent need for testimonial reform that moves away from fact-finding and linear storytelling, instead validating and creating space for silences, rituals, relationship reconstruction, and other forms of expression and processing that supersede language.
As a journalist, I’ve always been drawn to narrative storytelling as a means to achieve gender and social justice – but I’ve also noticed how certain stories get more visibility and coverage than others. When I think of public testimonies, for example, it’s easy to fall into thinking about the #MeToo movement, or the testimonies of Anita Hill, Christine Blasey-Ford, Ally Raisman, and Chanel Miller. While important, the stories that commonly provoke a lot of public discourse involve high-profile judges, politicians, actors, and professional or Division One athletes from the global North. There are other testimonies from the global south, such as from Nadia Murad and Sonita Alizadeh, that have gained international attention after being the subject of documentaries made by filmmakers based in the West and for North American audiences.
When it comes to my own reporting, in addition to wanting to tell stories that cover underreported issues and communities, I’ve been cautious about crafting stories in a way that gives agency and respect to those in a story. Laub offers a good framework for engaging with testimony in a self-reflective, empathetic, and co-participatory way and Ross implies a strong need for testimonies to go beyond “simple numeric accounting of gross violations” (Ross, 75), urging for testimony to be contextualized within the larger power structures that continue to suppress marginalized populations and perpetuate cycles of violence.
In thinking about how trauma alters the accuracy of memory as well as how silence and ritual can be a form of resistance and survival, I’m left thinking about the ways journalists and other storytellers can cover and make room for these alternate models of expression. I think about the tapestry from the memory project we discussed last semester and the complementing video as an example of publicizing testimony in a creative and respectful way that simultaneously combats the limitlessness of victimhood. Perhaps these are the kinds of stories that require more attention.
At the same time, I’m left wondering:
Even when anonymity and safety can be guaranteed, are certain expressions of testimony better kept private? Does testimony always require a witness?
Before these readings, I had never thought about or placed any importance on silence other than “awkward silence”. However, these readings have really made me reflect on the silence I have witnessed. Laub (1992) discusses the intricacies of listening to testimony, emphasizing that a listener must hear both speech and silence, recognizing and respecting the pauses as much as the words themselves. Testimonies of trauma are complex, deeply personal, and often difficult for listeners to fully comprehend due to conscious or unconscious biases. This highlights the perseverance required to rebuild life after trauma, with healing always tied to the violence experienced. Laub also recounts a Holocaust survivor whose testimony was questioned because she could not recall the exact number of chimneys that exploded at Auschwitz, asserting that testimony should be valued for its subjective depth rather than strict legal accuracy. Strejilevich (2006) echoes this sentiment, emphasizing that testimony serves as a bridge between personal memory and collective history rather than simply a repository of factual precision. As she reflects, “My search for meaning had been painful but successful. I was not looking for conclusions but to decipher my own echoes.” This statement resonates deeply, reminding us that our ability to understand others is directly tied to how deeply we explore and understand ourselves. Only by working through our own perceptions and meanings can we truly grasp the experiences of others. Ross (2010) explores the intersection of gender and testimony, arguing that women’s silences are often misinterpreted as personal failures rather than reflections of institutional shortcomings. She asserts that if society expects women to voice their experiences, structures must be in place to protect them from the consequences of speaking out against gendered violence. Kent (2016) examines silence not as repression but as a strategy for social healing, connecting this to Laub’s discussion of testimony. She highlights how silence, rather than restricting justice, can function as a meaningful response to violence. Also in many Western contexts, heavy emphasis is placed on written documentation as the primary mode of communication, with meaning often tied to formalized records. However, different cultures and societies perceive communication in varied ways, and silence is not necessarily an obstacle to justice but rather a nuanced and significant response to violence and collective healing. My question to the class is other than deep listening, patience, cultural sensitivity and protection from external pressure, how can we create safe spaces where the speaker would feel comfortable with sharing their testimonies with moments of silence for the healing and storytelling process?
The readings this week challenge conventional understandings of truth and testimony. They remind us that truth is not just about facts but about interpretation, emotion, and the ways trauma shapes memory.
Testimony, as discussed in the readings, differs from legal and historical frameworks. A witness may not remember all the details, yet their account can still hold a deeper truth about their experience. The truth of testimony lies not just in the facts but in its emotional and subjective reality—how the event was felt, processed, and lived through. Laub emphasizes that truth is not a fixed entity but something that emerges through the process of telling and listening. This reminds me that the significance of an event is not determined by its details alone but by how it is felt, processed, and understood, offering a more holistic perspective on lived experience.
Strejilevich notes that memories can be fragmented, filled with gaps, silences, and ambiguities, and trauma disrupts the ability to form coherent narratives. This is where silence comes in. Silence is not simply the absence of testimony but an integral part of it. It can be an intentional choice, a protective measure, or even a form of communication. Survivors often create their own way of expressing trauma when words fall short, fearing they will not be heard or will be dismissed. Ross’s critique of the TRC highlights this issue: women who suffered sexual violence often remained silent, not because they had nothing to say, but because speaking out carried risks. This underscores the point that healing and justice should not be based solely on the assumption that speaking out is the only path forward. Silence, too, can be a significant part of the process, offering its own form of truth.
Testimony serves a multifaceted role in both personal and collective contexts. It is not only about recounting events but also a means of healing, recognition, and asserting dignity for individuals, while simultaneously shaping the broader social narrative. Testimony may also conflict with official narratives and challenge power structures, making it risky. In Timor-Leste, Kent demonstrates how silence contributes to social repair through reburial rituals, returning displaced persons, and supporting women in coerced relationships. This suggests that, in certain contexts, relational and embodied aspects of healing may carry just as much—if not more—weight than the spoken word.
Question:
How can healing and justice systems be adjusted to respect the different ways survivors of trauma choose to share or keep their experiences?
This week’s readings provoke a deeper understanding of testimony’s complex role in transnational justice. The struggles of South African women during and after apartheid highlight the dangers of truth-telling mechanisms that fail to account for sociocultural drivers of gender-based violence. It was jarring to read that at the time of the hearings of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Rape Crisis reported that a woman was raped every thirty-six seconds.
Similar to the South African landscape, in South Asian cultures, the stigmatisation of rape is a major driver of the underreporting of gender-based violence. Victims of rape often face humiliation from community and derogatory victim-blaming. In many instances, these fears come true and families actually silence victims from speaking up to save ‘family honor’; because the conception of honour is loosely tied to women’s bodies in certain societies. This is a reproduction of years of institutional sexism, patriarchy, and blindness to women’s needs. In a sexual assault case in Bangladesh in 2020, perpetrators felt audacious enough to release a video striping and severely beating a woman on social media. It feels unfair that a society can make space for men’s loud violences; but not offer safe spaces to unravel women’s silences.
The Ross reading speaks of how women’s silences compound into them being treated as the problem and the event being perceived as “individual moral failures rather than as institutional failures”. In her book, Know my Name, Chanel Miller details her experience of being sexually assaulted by Brock Turner, a Stanford University athlete, in January 2015. At Brock’s conviction she read out a letter to her attacker and this speech was later read by the US Congress to campaign for the voices of sexual abuse victims to be amplified. In her speech, Miller says, “Sometimes I think, if I hadn’t gone, then this never would’ve happened. But then I realised it would have happened, just to somebody else.” This for me captures the consequence that Ross mentions. Miller’s story is also a tribute to what happens when women do provide testimonies and have access to legal, financial, and community safety nets to rely on. Chanel Miller’s story drove state legislators in California to approve two new bills to expand its definition of rape and add new mandatory-minimum sentences for sexual assaults.
Parting thought from this week’s readings is from Strejilevich (2006), ‘A truthful way of giving testimony should allow for disruptive memories, discontinuities, blanks, silences, and ambiguity; it should become literary.’ While this sounds extremely idealistic to capture the nuances of women’s lives and experiences in conflict, current institutions and justice systems are not equipped to witness truths in this way. In the dire need for reconciliation when it comes to women’s justice, it is in our best interests to work with these holes in the legal fabric by aspiring to be culturally sensitive researchers, journalists, and policy practitioners. Now that we are aware of the tensions between silence and testimony, how can we implement it in practical ways in research and project management, for our future work?
What stood out to me in this week’s readings were the many descriptions of the structural barriers that prevent people from sharing testimonies about their experiences and hinder opportunities to move towards justice through testimony. In particular, Strejilevich’s discussion of how testimony is “often seen as a commodity that must provide practical use” (p. 703), which leads to a discounting of testimonies that are perceived as ‘non-factual’ or ‘too subjective’, was especially thought-provoking. This made me reflect on the question of what and for whom the different purposes of testimony are, and I wondered if the concentrated focus placed on the use of testimony to uncover and delineate the details of traumatic historical events has distracted us from the other purposes of testimony. Kent’s descriptions of how people in East Timor remembered and processed the losses they experienced in ways that did not necessarily involve verbal communication about them is an excellent example of how testimony can serve other purposes towards justice. At times, testimony might be more about recovering a sense of dignity, reconnecting and reasserting social ties, or enabling individual and community-level recognition of traumatic events towards healing. In some cases, testimony might serve a purpose mostly for the individual who is testifying – Strejilevich explains that testimony is a way to work through loss. Thus, I think that testimony can have many purposes, and not all of them are meant for an entire nation or world to directly benefit from. Moreover, I think that while the use of testimony for the purpose of historiography is one way in which testimony can support the exposition of erased or silenced truths, as well as ensuring that accountability is taken by perpetrators of oppression or violence, other purposes of testimony can support those goals as well.
Perhaps, widening our perspective of what testimony can do for different people can support us in valuing it as more than a commodity – perhaps we may view it more relationally, as a form of engagement or an opportunity for connection… etc. When I look up the word ‘testimony’ online, the resulting definition emphasizes it as a formal statement and its purpose being that it provides evidence for something. I wonder if we need to reinvent and expand our widely accepted definition of what testimony is to break down those barriers that do not make space for testimony be heard and held.
Q: How would you define testimony? How can this definition help to break down the barriers that prevent people from sharing their testimonies?
In Sounds of Silence: Everyday Strategies of Social Repair in Timor-Leste by Lia Kent, there is a passage that reads, “the privileging of speech, moreover, ‘blinds us’ to other forms of non-verbal expression or communication” (49-50). This idea echoes through other readings as well: in An Acknowledged Failure, Fiona C. Ross points out that women weren’t always safe or comfortable speaking at the Truth and Reconciliation commission in South Africa, and even when they did speak, they often spoke less directly than human rights workers had hoped. Ross unpacks the idea of silence, revealing that at times what has been labelled as silence may in fact be an inability or unwillingness to hear: “Women experienced the violences of colonialism, capitalism, and apartheid and their aftermaths differently from men, but when they spoke in forms that the Commission was not legally enabled to hear, it assumed that women had not spoken, had not offered of their experience, had failed as witnesses, or had not been as affected by apartheid’s violence as had men” (74-75).
At the risk of coming across as pedantic, I’d like to point out that the irony that, even in Kent’s statement above, there is an example of the privileging of some forms of testimony over others. Even though Kent is talking about speech, which one would hear, she uses the word “blinds.” I hadn’t noticed this use of language until returning to my notes later, but I think it draws a significant parallel. In a society that privileges sight over all the other senses, “blinds” is a more commonly used metaphor that “deafens” when denoting the obscuration of something. It is more significant to see than to hear in Western societies. Written histories are given more weight than oral histories.
Coming back to testimony, this begs the question, what forms of testimony are overlooked?
I’ll be presenting this week with Paula on Chilean arpilleras, which played a significant role in alerting the world to the human rights abuses that were taking place during Pinochet’s rule. Arpilleras are handmade colourful textiles depicting scenes from a person’s life or memory. Because this form of art and testimonial, as well as the women who made them, were not taken seriously as art, testimonial, and artists, they initially escaped the attention of the Chilean government and were able to be smuggled out of the country and distributed worldwide.
Arpilleras aren’t speech or text. They aren’t precise. They often blend the remembered with the imagined. They can’t be asked follow-up questions. Oftentimes their creators are not known to those who possess them. They don’t scream “fact” upon first glance. They leave a lot of questions to their viewers and I think there is a strength in that. There is no objective truth despite what histories, national identities, inquiries and reports might convey. But arpilleras force those viewing them to engage with them to answer their questions.
I think taking responsibility, engaging, taking an active role in being a witness is what it means to truly witness. So in that sense, forms of testimony that call us to engage with them might make us better witnesses if we’re willing.
Questions:
1. How do those who have suffered through violence and/or trauma want to be heard?
2. How can we engage with those testimonies as they are (rather than expecting those who are telling their truth to tell it in a format that we are prepared to listen to)?
The readings this week have me thinking about the role of trauma and testimony as it pertains to the limits of justice. In its most conventional sense, justice is often synonymous with legal punishment—trials, convictions, and sentences. However, I’m interested in thinking more about what this might look like when it comes to sexual violence. The expectation that justice follows a linear path, from disclosure to investigation to punishment, ignores the profoundly personal and non-linear nature of trauma. Survivors often find that the criminal justice system is not only inadequate but also harmful, retraumatizing them through invasive procedures.
Testimony plays a central role in this struggle for justice. As Strejilevich discusses, trauma resists easy articulation; survivors’ narratives are often fragmented. The legal system, however, demands coherence, often invalidating testimonies that do not conform to evidentiary standards. This creates a fundamental tension: survivors must translate their experiences into language that the legal system recognizes.
Kent’s analysis of silence in post-conflict Timor-Leste complicates the assumption that speaking out is always the best or only path to healing. As Kent explains, silence is not repression but a deliberate strategy of self-protection.
In thinking about justice for survivors, I ask: does the demand for testimony truly serve survivors, or does it reinforce systems that privilege certain forms of knowledge while excluding others? Further, how do these conversations shape our understanding of what it means to “bear witness” to violence?
As someone who has read about trauma, learned about it through others, witnessed its impact, and experienced it firsthand, I have come to appreciate the complexities of trauma and silence but haven’t yet explored the complexities of testimony. From my experiences and through these readings, I’ve learned that trauma cannot be fully captured by language; it’s an experience that leaves scars challenging to speak on and articulate. These readings have shown me that testimony is profoundly transformative, not just for those telling the story but for those listening. It requires emotional investment and active care that fosters spaces of psychological safety and healing.
Laub illustrates how trauma impacts memory and language, usually lending to testimonies being fragmented or seemingly incomplete. We also saw in Strejilevich’s work that truth in trauma is not always linear or easy to grasp, “testimony should stress just truthfulness, not objectivity” (p. 709). Testimony isn’t and shouldn’t be able to do precise factual recounting; it should be about conveying the emotional weight of the experience. It is a way of giving a voice to trauma where language may fail. Silence also plays a role in the context of trauma and truth-telling, with Ross demonstrating that silence isn’t simply the absence of speech but is an active form of agency. Silence is a way for survivors to protect themselves and withhold their stories from the processes of justice that are not built to capture the reality of their experiences. Whether testimony is used as a form of resistance or collective refusal to participate in harmful systems, it can inform the process of healing and justice.
I resonated with Kent’s suggestion that communities can heal outside formal systems of justice through everyday practices. While language and silence tend to go against each other, working together in these spaces can help individuals and communities heal from trauma together. They provide the space for both spoken and unspoken forms of truth-telling, allowing resilience to emerge in unique and specific ways. Ultimately, considering testimony within transitional justice processes manifests itself by creating space for truths that do not neatly fit into expectations laid by formal justice systems. Whether this is done through speech, silence, or deliberate acts, testimony has a right to be recognized in any and all forms.
So with this, I wonder:
• What would it take for society to accept silence as a tool for justice?
• Is this sufficient for the world we live in, and how can we make it work?
It has been an emotionally exhaustive few days. As probably many of you saw, last week an airplane accident took the lives of many young figure skaters, coaches and their families. While to most outsiders, in which I am including myself in that category, the accident has done nothing but highlight the ways in which Trump is failing the American people, it took a whole different meaning to me once I learned there were figure skaters on the plane. It became almost unreal, when I realized I trained with one of the coaches that were on the plane years ago during a figure skating summer camp. And that is the word I kept telling my therapist when she asked how I felt about it. “It doesn’t feel real”. And though she tried to make say something more, to name the feeling, I felt unable to do so because to speak it out loud meant it was real. Even writing this is making my throat close up; I don’t want it to be real and if I don’t speak about it then it’s not real.
The readings this week highlighted perfectly the very complex and nuance relationship between being a witness and bearing witness to trauma; how, not knowing or not wanting to know is not a weakness of the witness but can be a sign of strength. Laub put it beautifully when he says his job as a listener was “to respect —not to upset, not to trespass—the subtle balance between what the woman knew and what she did not, or could not, know.” However, as evidenced by the historians hearing the woman’s testimony, or what Strejilevich mentions in the article, sometimes people simply do not want to listen. And how can we reconcile the trauma of those who have survived mass violence and other atrocities with the listener’s desire to not listen because it’s too much, or because the feeling is too much, or because being confronted to that level of trauma is ‘too much’. I think about how in undergrad I had the privilege of listening to Robbie Weissman, a Holocaust survivor, when he came to talk to us during an undergrad course. One of the things he said, and that I was reminded by this week’s readings, was that he only started speaking out about the Holocaust and his experiences when a Canadian professor whose name I’ve forgotten and who frankly doesn’t deserve to be mentioned, started spewing Holocaust-denial talking points. For him, before this moment, speaking about the Holocaust reliving all the trauma he suffered. It was only in the negation/invalidation of his experiences that he was able to speak out.
The second thing I thought about was in terms of sexual violence and all the cases who have gone without any punishment to the perpetrators, is because during the trials the victims have been questioned about the recollection of events. If something does not add up, then how can the defense be sure what they are saying is true? The mind is a very powerful thing, and forgetting, or staying silent, is one of the ways the body and the minds know how to protect themselves.
Questions:
How can we be better listeners to the testimonies of trauma and violence?
Why is/has the memory of mass violence events become so inextricably linked to testimonies? What happens when those who were witnesses, those who were the narrators, are no longer here to share their testimonies?
Testimony, as Laub argues, is an act of survival that is shaped as much by what is forgotten or unspeakable as by what is remembered. Trauma fractures the ability to fully witness an event, leaving survivors in a liminal space where memory and silence intertwine. What struck me most in *Bearing Witness* is the idea that trauma survivors, even when they do testify, are not merely reporting but reliving and in doing so, they shape a truth that is often dismissed for its subjectivity. The demand for historical precision in testimony, as Laub shows through the Auschwitz uprising account, can be a form of erasure itself. This tension between empirical truth and emotional truth is critical in understanding how power dictates whose testimony is valid and whose suffering is recognized.
Kent’s argument about silence as a form of social repair complicates this further. Silence is often perceived as repression or absence, yet for many, it is the only viable means of endurance. Nowhere is this clearer than in Palestine today, where collective silence in the face of relentless violence is not just avoidance but also a resistance to being consumed by an external narrative that seeks to define their suffering. Silence here is not passive; it is an assertion of what cannot be contained in words. It is, as Kent suggests, an act of reclaiming dignity in the face of a world that often refuses to listen.
What does it mean to listen ethically? Both Laub and Kent reveal that listening is not passive; it is an act of creation, of making space for the unspeakable. In Palestine, as in Holocaust testimonies or the silences of Kashmiri mothers whose sons have been disappeared, speech often fails to capture the totality of loss. In Tigray, Ethiopia for instance, where war crimes have led to mass disappearances and systemic violence, survivors often find themselves silenced, not only by the weight of trauma but by the knowledge that their suffering might never be acknowledged in global narratives. The act of testimony becomes fraught with power who gets to speak, and who is believed?
Perhaps this is why poetry, art, dance and embodied practices become the true sites of testimony because linear storytelling, bound by Western legal and historical frameworks, demands coherence from experiences that exist in rupture.
Questions: 1. Can testimony ever be free of the structures of power that shape who is heard and who is disbelieved?
2. And if silence is a form of witnessing, how do we ensure it is not mistaken for indifference?
I learned years ago that the Gitxaała and lots of BC north coast Nations conceptualize silence as the strongest form of dissent. Culturally, the understanding is that if what you have to say is received with silence, it means that the listener is so dissatisfied that they are not even willing to indulge a conversation. If the listener thought what you said had any merit, they would express their disagreement or assent. This differs so significantly from Canadian colonial imaginings of silence where we call for objections on meeting agendas, marriages and mining projects and, hearing none, assume unanimous consent. When Ross wrote that the “conundrum is, of course, that silence may offer legitimacy to violence,” I thought of this conversation bout the Gitxaała Nation, and thought: “yeah, because we let it!” As if we could re-make the decision about whether silence means assent or dissent. That kneejerk was not my more-evolved conclusion a few minutes later. The presumption that silence in a full room is indicative of assent is not an incidental cultural difference, but a tool of oppression. I want to say that it ignores the reasons for silence outlined by Ross and Kent, but I think it moreso capitalizes on the reasons for silence outlined by Ross and Kent. If the hegemonic expectation is that a woman harmed by sexual abuse will speak at a commission, and she does not, the conclusion is that she was not abused, because she did not speak about it. We can see the gaps here, when it’s written out that way, but I don’t think we always feel them when they are happening. In my own memory, the TRC of Canada bears relevance. We know not every story was told in the testimonials, and we know some of them were told elsewhere for a reason, but I don’t think we spend a lot of time wondering what we the untold stories were. I think we mostly accept the TRC as the almost-whole-truth or the as-true-as-it’s-going-to-get-truth.
Ross’ discussion of circumlocution versus straight talk dovetails nicely with Laub (and Strejilevich)’s discussion of what witnesses do when they are at their best. I am sure lots of us were frustrated with the revelation that human rights workers in Guatemala had peasant women reformulate their assertions that “he went away” or “I was hurt” into “he was murdered” or “he raped me.” I am sure such aid workers did not enjoy this task, but that it was seen as necessary for some such reason. Laub would say that the listener should be well-informed enough to pick up on cues but not so imposing that they hinder listening with foregone conclusions or block out new information, because “knowledge in the testimony is, in other words, not not simply a factual given that is reproduced and replicated by the testifier, but a genuine advent, an event in its own right” (62). I’ve read a few other students refer to Laub saying that the job of a listener is to “respect–not to upset, not to trespass” the balance of knowing and not-knowing. A listener who has the testifier translate “he went away” into “he was disappeared” is perhaps so well-informed they are trespassing, and hindering listening, because, as Ross goes on to discuss, the statement “he went away” has its own set of knowledges and truths nested within it. Sometimes the circumlocution is protective from retribution, but sometimes it conveys its own meanings. Reading this, I thought of my own little circumlocutions; sometimes, instead of referring to someone who has died as such, I will just refer to them in the past tense and hope everyone else captures two truths: that they are dead, and that I do not want to discuss it. I hope they are astute listeners open to “empathetic unsettlement,” because if I were to “straight-talk,” the listener would only get the first truth.
I feel like someone needs to disable my keyboard after 500 words, but I also loved Laub’s “hazards of listening” list, all of which I could recall doing or seeing. Some of them are undesirable and harmful, but they all have a reason.
How do we hear what silence is telling us? What are we looking for when we listen to silence?
This week’s readings reminded me of two deeply disturbing instances of mass sexual violence in India – the Kunan Poshpora mass rapes of 1990 and the gendered violence during India’s partition in 1947. In both cases, survivors faced social erasure, and their testimonies led to ostracization, societal stigma and silence. Many women raped during pre-independence India’s partition were either murdered by their own families in the name of “honour” or forced into silence, their experiences erased from collective memory. Similarly, in Kunan Poshpora, survivors’ testimonies were dismissed as “terrorist propaganda”, and justice was never served. These cases complicated my earlier notion of testimony as a means of justice. Strejilevich and Laub’s idea of truth helped reconcile this to an extent. The authors argue that testimony is not about factual accuracy or creating knowledge that can be used as evidence. They exist in the realm of the subjective and it seeks to reconstruct meaning in trauma by viewing the event in new dimensions.
The purpose of testimony varies depending on the perspective of the trauma witness, the witness to the trauma witness, and the broader social context. Besides being a way to work through historical trauma, testimony is also social and cultural resistance. However, as Fiona Ross and Lia Kent highlight, it can also expose survivors to further harm. The Zuma trial in South Africa demonstrated that, even in a country making progress on addressing sexual violence, women who spoke out faced character assassination and exile. Similarly, in Timor-Leste, South Africa, Kunan Poshpora, and during partition in India, women often chose silence as a strategy of survival rather than as a refusal to remember. Ross argues that silence is not necessarily a failure to testify but can be an act of self-preservation and resistance.
Laub emphasizes that the witness to the trauma witness is a co-owner of the traumatic event as they become the first blank canvas on which the event is inscribed/recorded for the first time. Justice is not ensured by merely providing space for survivors to speak, but it also comes from ensuring that their voices are truly heard. Survivors of genocide and atrocities may have contradictory memories, making testimony a process of reliving and reinterpreting events and bearing witness to that trauma. In some cases, this means recognizing silence itself as a form of testimony. Kent’s reading also highlighted how communities in Timor-Leste engaged in non-verbal, embodied, and relational forms of social repair rather than formal institutional justice mechanisms.
Question: How can truth and justice systems better incorporate subjective and non-verbal or relational forms of testimony?
This week’s readings sparked a lot of reflection for me with regards to how I view the “listener” of testimony. I think I often look upon people who listen with judgement, because there are so many moments where listening feels selfish, egotistical, transactional, performative, extractive, self-indulgent… the list goes on. I often find myself second guessing the intentions of both other listeners and myself (as a listener), constantly searching through their feelings and mine to find hidden agendas or ways that the listener is seeking to gain something for themself through proximity to someone else’s trauma. I partially knew, but didn’t fully realize the depth of the disdain or judgement I had for the listener, but while reading, I felt myself noticing areas where I need to let go of some judgement, and soften into empathy.
Both Laub and Strejilevich’s pieces brought my attention to what role the listener plays in testimony. Strjilevich outlines how testimony can provide an opportunity to work through traumatic memories, support the dignity of survivors, and contribute to ethical recovery. These texts, however, directed my focus to the ways in which I’ve been selling the relationality of the process of listening short. Testimony requires a listener. The listener needs to “[open themselves] to empathetic unsettlement” (Strejilevich, 711), and in participating in testimony by listening, they become a “party to the creation of knowledge” (Laub, 57). While they don’t become the victim, they overlap with them, because if they are really, truly, “unobtrusively” present, they come to know the experience of the survivor with great intimacy. Of course, there’s an art to it, and the process demands that the listener be very aware and honest with themselves about the landscape of thoughts and feelings they are having. However, the listening comes from the desire to create space to respect a person’s narrative and silence as it unfolds, in however shape it unfolds in. This does not necessarily require the listener to know it all about the context, but to pay deep attention to the experience and testimony of the survivor.
The testimony depends on the “bonding, the intimate and total presence of the other” (Laub, 70), and I think this is the part that I’ve been underselling. It’s possible to be mindful of “internal hazards” that these authors warn about, and still extend compassion to the listener for the labour done, for the emotional and ethical work of bearing witness, the “hazards of listening.” As Laub argues, as one comes to know the survivor, one really comes to know oneself, and that is not an easy task” (72). Even writing this now, extending warmth and gentleness to the listener feels illegal to me, and it pulls out my Prairies Dad instinct to suppress feelings and have a stiff upper lip (note, I have never once in my life had a stiff upper lip). I wonder if part of the resistance to recognizing the listener comes from an inability to fully connect with my own emotional responses to difficult knowledge, or if it comes from viewing trauma as a zero-sum game, with some mythical hierarchy of trauma ruling the game. It definitely prevents recognition of the essential role the listener plays in testimony, and it definitely undervalues the value of bearing witness.
I think part of my judgement came from watching people across fields– community services, academics, policy makers, journalists, counsellors & social workers– gloriously butcher listening. Part of my judgement also comes from gloriously butchering listening myself. I do think that there are grains of truth and validity in this judgement, because there are very real risks to poorly handled listening. Laub talks extensively about the risks of re-traumatizing the survivor, or failing to truly see and listen. I take particular note of Laub’s warnings about the different kinds of defensive feelings listeners may encounter in their task, including hyperemotionality. Additionally, a lot of Strejilevich’s discussion about making space for the “disruptive memories, discontinuities, blanks, silences, and ambiguities” (Strejilevich, 704) made a ton of sense to me, and fit my critiques of a lot of “listening”. At the same time, I think I tend to land quite far on the critical end of the spectrum here, and I think some course correction is in order to land at a place where listening can be done more effectively, and even be honoured. Roxani Krystalli says that critique is not just fault finding, but envisioning, and so I will need to do some envisioning of ways to be a better “hearer” (to borrow Strejilevich’s word).
Questions:
How can I be a good hearer?
What does it mean to think beyond the language of truth?