Grand national narratives and the project of truth commissions:
A comparative analysis
Paper presented at "Narrative, trauma and memory : Working through the Southern African armed conflicts of the 20th century" University of Cape Town, South Africa. 3-5 July 2002. Also to appear in Media, Culture and Society in a forthcoming special issue on Cultural Memory.
This paper will compare the narrative projects of nation building and dismantling as represented in the truth commissions of South Africa and East Germany. One of the most important aspects of truth commissions is that personal suffering on a wide-scale is publicly acknowledged and written into the national fabric. The relationship between individual and collective memory is a powerful one; through the 22,000 individual testimonies which it has documented, the TRC has created the possibility for South African citizens to participate in the writing of a new official version of South Africa’s recent bloody history. In this process, the TRC has helped to establish a break with the past, so that the country as a whole can begin to move forward.
In contrast with South Africa, the truth commission set up in East Germany had a very different role to play. While the TRC was critical to the building of a new South Africa, and revitalizing South African national identity, East Germany’s Enquete Kommission was important in the dismantling of that country. While most truth commissions cover a relatively limited period of time, the truth commission of East Germany was unusual if not unique in that it extended to the whole of that country’s history (forty years). However, unlike South Africa and other countries, where truth commissions function as a pivotal bridge between past and future, in East Germany, the truth commission marked the completion of the national narrative.
Forgiveness and the narrative project of truth commissions
Paper given at the Twenty-fifth Annual Scientific Meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, Berlin, Germaby 16-19 July 2002.
This paper examines the potential of truth commissions to be a facilitating mechanism for forgiveness between victims and perpetrators of human rights abuses. In line with my previous research, I argue that forgiveness requires the participation of the forgiver and the forgiven, in dialogue with one another. Victims are only able to forgive if they know who and what they are forgiving, and if they can begin to comprehend - but not condone - the reasoning behind a particular action or behaviour. Many victims who come to truth commissions explicitly state that what they desire above all else is to find out the facts relating to their loved ones. As one widow explains
"I don't know where he was thrown because we were never even showed the place where he was thrown out. I am asking can be given an indication where he was killed and where he is today. Because our tradition you will forgive after having realized what happened. Even his hands, I have to identify his hands."
Truth commissions are ‘narrative projects’ in that they help to establish the facts of the ‘story’: who did what, where, when and why. In so doing, they help to create conditions in which forgiveness may emerge as a possibility. This paper explores the possible contributions as well as the limitations of truth commissions to assist individuals, and communities, in the long journey to forgiveness and reconciliation.
“Narrative Analysis”
Authors: Molly Andrews, Shelley Day Sclater, Corinne Squire and Maria Tamboukou, Co-directors, Centre for Narrative Research, University of East London
Chapter to appear in Qualitative Research Practice, edited by Clive Seale, David Silverman, Jay Gubrium and Giampetro Gobo, Sage Publications. Estimated publication date August 2003.
This chaptercontextualises the ‘turn to narrative’ in the social sciences in disciplinary, institutional, social and historical terms, and reviews the range of possibilitiesfor narrative analysis. This research includes work on written biographical and autobiographical texts, and their relations to social identities, social change movements, and social theory. Another strand of narrative research, derived from conversation analysis and discourse analysis, focuses on the structure of individual and dialogic spoken narratives. Narrative analysis encompassesstudies of spoken, written and visual narrative genres; and work on ‘lived narratives’, the ‘stories’ that are constituted by individual and social behaviour. Much narrative work, too, focuses on life histories, assuming that ‘we are storied selves’ (Sarbin 1986), we are ‘the stories we live by’ (McAdams 1993), that‘the self is a story which is being forever rewritten’ (Bruner 1994). Finally, narrative analysis is increasingly being used to examine the construction and living out of conscious and unconscious subjectivities, an endeavour which foregrounds new possibilities and limitations of this perspective.
The chapter presents four accounts of narrative analysis in action, with reference to recent research carried out by each of the four co-authors. Each account includes a reflexive autobiographical element. Maria Tamboukou considers the encounter of feminisms, Foucauldian genealogies and auto/biographical writings, exploring ways in which women’s auto/biographical texts can inform the writing of feminist genealogies. Foucault’s genealogies, as alternative methods for social and historical research, have opened paths for the exploration of the complex and multifarious ways that the female subject has been historically and culturally constructed and his ‘technologies of the self’ have sketched lines of analysis that, as Probyn (1993) has suggested, can be bent towards gendered selves.
Corinne Squire examines the cultural shape of narratives of HIV, drawing on interviews from South Africa. She investigates the structure of stories in relation to self, and the stories' connections with narrative genres of, for instance, religious conversion, self-actualisation and African healing. She also looks at how these stories are part of wider institutional, local, national and transnational lived narratives of HIV.
Molly Andrews focuses on the role of narrative in the construction of ‘life histories, ’ drawing on three examples of herown work in this area: a life history project with fifteen British women and men between the ages of seventy-five and ninety, who had been politically active on the left for fifty years or longer; a study of ten anti-war activists who regarded their actions as ‘patriotic’ in the United States during the Gulf War; and a study, conducted three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, of the psychological challenges faced by forty East Germans who had been leaders in the citizen’s movements of 1989. Through examining in detail a small selection of stories she explores the potential of narrative to function as a cornerstone of identity formation and maintenance over time.
Finally, Shelley Day Sclater explores the relations between narrative and subjectivity and considers what narrative approaches might contribute towards psychological knowledge. She critically examines the proposition that selves are narratively constructed and, with reference to personal narratives of separating and divorcing people, she considers the ways in which subjectivities and identities are negotiated in stories, without losing sight of the fact that subjectivities are embodied and performative, and of the importance of material social practice. The use of psychological and psychoanalytic theory in narrative work is discussed.
Bruner, J. (1994) 'The 'remembered' self' in U. Neisser and R. Fivush, (eds) The remembering self: Construction and accuracy in the self-narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McAdams, D. (1993) The stories we live by: Personal myths and the making of the self London: The Guilford Press.
Probyn, E. (1993) Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies, London, Routledge.
Sarbin, T. (1986) 'The narrative as root metaphor for psychology,' in T. Sarbin, (ed.) Narrative psychology: The storied nature of human conduct, London: Praeger.
Widdershoven, G. (1993) 'The story of life: hermeneutic perspectives on the relationship between narrative and life history,' in R. Josselson and A. Lieblich, (eds) The narrative study of lives Volume 1, London: Sage.
Memories of mother: Narrative reconstructions of early maternal influence
Article to appear in forthcoming special issue on “Counter-narratives” in Narrative Inquiry.
One of the most dominant cultural narratives is ‘the story of mothering’ but as many researchers have documented, there is a large chasm between this cultural product and individuals’ lived experiences of mothering and being mothered. When individuals talk about their relationships with their mothers, they locate themselves – knowingly or not - politically, economically, and historically. This article analyses data based on in-depth interviews with four men and women between the ages of seventy-five and ninety, and explores the stories they tell about the role of their mothers in relation to the children they were and the adults they became. Of the four cases presented, two involve child beating, in one the mother is absent from the time of the speaker’s early childhood, and one is an account of maternal depression. However, as these individuals recount their early memories of their mothers, they do so as people who have developed significantly since that time. Implicitly challenging the deterministic mother-blaming which lies at the heart of key cultural narratives, these men and women reveal a deep level of understanding – both personal and political - of the difficult circumstances which form the context of many peoples’ experiences of mothering and being mothered.