When Wounds and Corpses Fail to Speak: Narratives of Violence and Rape in Congo (DRC)

Elaine Scarry affirms, in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, that the language of pain is incommensurable, inexpressible, and unshareable. The medical field has had to use the linguistic register of its patients to objectify internal pain. Human rights discourse and literature equally experience difficulties recording pain, yet to eradicate torture and depict human suffering, these discourses must enable readers and viewers of documentaries to understand the "aversiveness being experienced inside the body of someone whose country may be far away, whose name can be barely pronounced, and whose ordinary life is unknown except that it is known that the ordinary life has ceased to exist."¹ To successfully elicit reader or viewer identification and empathy, the language narrating violence must sustain tonal stability and convey a sense of immediacy. Human rights discourse, according to Scarry, diminishes pain in its very act of expressing it; it can speak for the pain of the other solely on the basis of its international authority and credibility, acquired through the veracity and accuracy of its statements.

While physical pain can be conveyed by fragmentary means of verbalization, its ability to assault language into inexpressibility seems oftentimes inevitable; therefore human rights organizations have at their disposal a small number of verbal strategies, revolving around what Scarry terms "the language of agency," to represent assaults. This language remains so unstable that it needs to be controlled lest it should be enlisted for other agendas and "invoked not to coax pain into visibility but to push it into further invisibility, invoked not to assist in the elimination of pain but to assist in its infliction" (13). Human rights discourse experiences the additional challenge of making pain visible through the verbal objectification of its characteristics and referents other than the human body, or what Scarry calls "analogical verification," for those who doubt the existence of this pain by way of hearing or seeing (14). She also contends that failure to express pain or to refer the attributes of pain "to their original site in the human body—will always work to allow its appropriation and conflation with debased forms of power," whereas the right "expression of pain will always work to expose and make impossible that appropriation and conflation" (14). Human rights discourse is, hence, fraught with the danger of perpetually resulting in political and perceptual complications.

Numerous articles, such as Stanley Cohen's "Government Responses to Human Rights Reports: Claims, Denials, and Counterclaims," speak to the selectivity of human rights reports, which do not target all countries in a similar manner, so the claim that human rights are "objectively" constructed cannot be supported.² In his article, Cohen claims that, with the existing proliferation of forms, profusion of images, and blurring of genres, human rights organizations have difficulties expressing violations; accordingly, there is a need to better explain the principles behind human rights laws and to reexamine the style, format, and genre of human rights reports. Tony Evans's "International Human Rights Law as Power/Knowledge" also examines human rights discourse and the limitations resulting from its reliance on legal discourse, which he considers a barrier to the investigation of human rights violations, often attributable to market discipline. "International law, institutions, and regulations associated with human rights, which provide the main focus for the human rights discourse, transmit," Evans states, "a set of ideas associated with notions of freedom and a set of ideas that reflect relations of power and dominance. . . . the dominance of the international legal discourse on human rights, which supports a particular conception of rights, acts to mask power relations and stifles the possibility of engaging in critiques."³ Human rights discourse, according to Evans, is thus problematic, for since rights are increasingly defined by market discipline, it fails to convey and protect the social and economic aspirations and values of all people and states.

Likewise, Talal Asad reiterates in "What Do Human Rights Do? An Anthropological Enquiry" that human rights are given more attention in developing countries than in some developed countries. He points to the...