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The Accidental Witness: Indigenous Epistemologies and Spirituality as Resistance in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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69 THE ACCIDENTAL WITNESS Indigenous Epistemologies and Spirituality as Resistance in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach Julia Emberley The accident is known, in other words, both to the extent that it “pursues ” the witness and that the witness is, in turn, in pursuit of it … But if, in a still less expected manner, it is the witness who pursues the accident, it is perhaps because the witness, on the contrary, has understood that from the accident a liberation can proceed and that the accidenting, unexpectedly, is also in some ways a freeing. —Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis, or the Vicissitudes of Teaching” (1992) By their very nature, testimonies are unsettling. Produced in order to verify , supplement, or provide a subjective account of what are often traumatic and violent events, they disrupt any sense of normalcy in the continuum of life experience. The unsettling effects of testimonies, however, are often manufactured by the circumstances of their delivery. In our media-saturated manipulation of emotional intensities, the unsettling effects of testimonies are becoming less and less powerful. In addition, the pretense that testimony is a direct account of an event and as such more truthful or valuable to historical accountabilities belies the seemingly singular importance registered to the oral over the written, as if orality itself were not an unmediated practice, as if the narratives of oral delivery fell outside the realms of rhetoric, composition , and editorial decisions—even if they are self-imposed. Testimonies, today, are also in need of being unsettled, as in critically analyzed. They are 70 Julia Emberley discursive formations that include texts, narratives, physical sites, spaces, and even objects. In all their likely and unlikely forms, testimonial discourses unsettle our capacities to connect or relate to another person’s experience, and in the exchange between any given testimony and its audience trigger our analytical capacities to understand trauma and its trail of affect. In these multiple ways, I seek to comprehend how testimonial practices unsettle national and transnational histories, while also insisting that such practices be subject to critical examination themselves. Of significance to the latter is, I would argue, the need for an epistemic shift in the field of postcolonial testimonial studies influenced by the production, reception, and analysis of Indigenous storytelling knowledges and practices. This shift situates the need to recognize oneself as an “accidental witness,” a position that Felman affirms, in the passage cited above, emerges often in testimonial practices as the listener or reader pursues the truth of a traumatic event and then finds her or himself pursued by something else, a type of haunting, that urges the reader on yet is oftentimes something that the reader does not want to know, because the knowledge itself is painful and overwhelming. And yet, the story must be told and the truth must be known. As I discuss below, Eden Robinson’s novel Monkey Beach depicts a central character, Lisamarie, as one who is in pursuit of the knowledge of the death of her brother, and the structural organization of the novel, based on the Haisla Spirit Canoe journey, takes the reader on a journey into the history of residential school violence and its intergenerational consequences for Indigenous families and communities. With the rise of testimonio in Latin and South America during the 1970s and 1980s, testimonial discourses, concerned with narrating the historical realities of colonial and postcolonial political oppression, determined a set of practices that linked individual eyewitness accounts to collective struggles and, without conflating the distinction between the private and the public, substantiated their interwoven complexities and complicities. This literary or “anti-literary” movement, as John Beverley would have it, does bear, historically , on the epistemic shift I wish to talk about here, although the geopolitical context differs, given that I focus on a Canadian state initiative as well as on kinship relations between epistemic frameworks, the imaginary figure of the witness, and the interconnections of private and public spaces. Testimonial discourses have undergone significant theoretical challenges especially in the wake of several controversies, including, of course, that of the testimony of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú. The uses—perhaps especially because of the “abuses” to which these cultural technologies of the self have been put—open up many interesting questions not only about the limits of the text and its rhetorical undecidabilities, but also about the limits of [3.91.79.134] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:35 GMT) The Accidental Witness 71 epistemologies of truth and their investments...