Witnessing

In “Why I Write: Making No Become Yes,” Elie Wiesel succinctly expresses the philosophy of witnessing that has governed much of his major writing and public speaking for the past fifty years. As a survivor of the Holocaust, he says, “I believed that, having survived by chance, I was duty-bound to give meaning to my survival, to justify each moment of my life. I knew the story had to be told. Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.” Survivors, concludes Wiesel, “bear witness” by giving voice to the victims: “Why do I write? To wrench those victims from oblivion. To help the dead vanquish death” (23, 27). Wiesel’s mandate is likewise embodied in the life of Nelson Mandela, whose autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom (1994), bears witness to the struggles of the African National Congress to end apartheid in South Africa, including his twenty-four years of hard labor on Robben Island, which culminated not in despair but in a victory Mandela interprets as a mandate to continue “the long walk” to equality (625). Also bearing witness—and thereby leading resistance against political oppression and a myriad of evils embedded in that banal term—are the inspiring examples of Aung San Suu Kyi, under house arrest in Myanmar for twelve of the past eighteen years; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., often jailed and ultimately assassinated; and the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, exiled from Tibet for fifty years. All of these people are Nobel Prize-winners—exalted and iconic. Distant, unattainable in the magnitude of their principled suffering, fortitude, and almost transcendence of mortality, they become history even as they make it.

I used to think that only such world-class incarnations of resolution, courage, and risk-taking had the right to tell their stories, the right to bear witness. But after years of telling and interpreting other people’s stories as a literary critic, as the biographer of Dr. Benjamin Spock (pediatrician turned peace and civil rights activist in the 60s), and as a teacher of fiction and especially autobiography, I have changed my mind. Most of us play bit parts on the stage of history, most of the time; even our great roles, our acts of heroism or intense suffering, are more likely to be accidental than planned. Although many of us cannot claim credit for initiating these actions, we were there and thus we have lived not only to tell these tales but also to interpret them, because their meaning changes over time. That the decade of the 1960s, for instance, was radically disruptive, beset and ultimately blessed by major social upheavals, loses its razor edge as the distance widens between then and now. To remain silent is to discount the value of one’s own experiences, allowing the media and the historians, who may or may not have been there, to interpret these most significant events according to their own agendas. To tell our stories our own way remains a persistent obligation for all who have lived through times of turmoil and trouble. Whether we have experienced lives of privilege or privation, ease or exigency, in the mainstream or on the margins of society, we learn that to tell is to reflect, to interpret, to understand before our voices fade to whispers. We must all bear witness.

Our natural audience, if we are academics, is each other. And so I tell you here what I also tell my students—a particularly significant, if captive, target audience. Anything that occurred before they were born—say, 1988—is ancient history. We who embody that history have an ethical and moral obligation to convey it to students who otherwise might not distinguish between, for example, the Korean and the Vietnam wars, or who may have forgotten that the US waged an earlier war in, yes, Iraq in 1990–1991. Whether these events matter to them at the outset of whatever courses we teach, by making history come alive we can remind them that they have a stake in their past, as well as their future—which for better and worse threatens to repeat the history we already...