Witnessing Torture: Perspectives of Torture Survivors and Human Rights Workers ed. by Alexandra S. Moore and Elizabeth Swanson (review)

Every now and then, a book comes along that forces you—quite uncomfortably—to shift: to shift your focus, to shift how you understand your field or your perspective, your practices, or even yourself. Witnessing Torture: Perspectives of Torture Survivors and Human Rights Workers, edited by Alexandra S. Moore and Elizabeth Swanson, was such a book for me.

I am not a survivor of torture, as some of the contributors to this volume are. I am a researcher of torture and, for nearly twenty years, have worked with survivors of this violence in a country other than my own to record and analyze their experiences. Accordingly, I have spent these two decades doing what most readers of this journal would recognize as the work of oral history. As oral historians—and indeed, as biographers and others who work with life narrative—we reflect deeply on our practices and our roles. An essential part of this practice is thinking about the positions from which we speak, how we collaborate with the people whose lives we come into, and how we co-construct and shape life narratives. Every life narrative researcher I have ever met, I believe, has thought long and hard about their practice and its ethical dimensions. We care sincerely about these matters, not to navel-gaze but because our work is always about our relationships with people and their stories, and so it matters how we respect those relationships.

Some of the chapters in this book shifted my understanding of what I am doing as an oral historian, and in particular as an oral historian who primarily works with torture survivors. More than that, some of these chapters broke apart the frames that I had drawn around myself, the roles that I perform, and the people into whose lives and stories I intrude. I felt uncomfortable and upset for much of the time reading this book. I was upset not so much because of the book's theme, though the content of all the chapters speaks to the issue of torture, and this is—and should always be—upsetting, decentering, and disturbing. I think my discomfort came mostly from having to shift my understanding not about the positions from which we speak, but the positions from which we listen.

I am far more used to (and comfortable with) a survivor sitting opposite me, telling a story. As a researcher, even though I feel as if the people whose stories I hear work with me in a collaborative way, I still have an authorial control over the shaping and analysis of those stories. To try to hear what the contributors of this volume were saying, however, I had to move sideways. Moving sideways was necessary to be able to hear someone speaking as a survivor and as a researcher, or as a teacher and a survivor, or as a survivor and an activist. I felt dismayed that I had—arrogantly, naively, foolishly—built some kind of invisible wall between someone who may speak as a survivor and as something else as well.

The core strength of this volume derives from its contributors, who are survivors and human rights or health care workers; some are both. One of the central aims of the volume is to pull down some of the walls between the speaking positions of survivors and those who often work with survivors. By this, I mean those positions often ascribed with well-meaning intention: there is a kind of reification of a survivor's position that must be respected, but a survivor can also inhabit many other powerful and meaningful roles. The walls that I had built around what position a survivor speaks from, perhaps, are best articulated by one of the authors in this volume, Laurie Ball Cooper, who talks about the distance she put between herself...