Witnessing, Trauma, and Autobiography
In Stacey Schlau's "The Use of the Word," she suggests that by looking at "the matrix within which women, politics, and narrative intermingle" we can understand how "[w]itnessing has played a vital role in defining that configuration" in Spanish America.
As Daniela points out, through alternative and subversive writing strategies--most notably through the construct of silence--women writers have, and continue, to create narratives of resistance that often allow us to see "the collective in the private." But it is not just within the narratives that women writers have challenged masculinist writing norms. As Schlau suggests, "Latin American women writers of narrative forms have stretched the boundaries of genre, creating a multiplicity of hybird genres. The nexus of politics and narrative, the urgent need to remember and disclose, has made possible a vital, thriving literary tradition." Schlau's focus on witnessing, collectivity, and genre hybridity places this piece in dialogue with Leigh Gilmore's "The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony," which then brings us back to Kozameh's Steps Under Water.
Gilmore's essay begins by placing the autobiographical form squarely within western Enlightenment ideals, a genre with a "rational and representative 'I' at its center," but similarly to Schlau, Gilmore quickly moves to suggest how this form has been successfully challenged, coopted, and appropriated by writers who seek to critique and resist the central claims of the genre; namely, its "truth" value, its reliance on a coherent 'I', and the inadequacy of language for representing memory and trauma. Although Gilmore is not solely focusing on women writers, it is important to note what a central role they play in the extended analyses her book is comprised of, as well as in her short citations and examples. Central to Gilmore's discuss is the role of trauma in contemporary autobiographies, and she explicitly cites the testimonial as a genre that "insist[s] on the centrality of speaking of pain" (2), even at the same time that it "takes trauma as the unrepresentable to assert that trauma is beyond language in some central way" (6). This paradox is central to Kozameh's work, not only in the tension between the telling and not telling in the narrative, but also in how the narrator explicitly calls attention to the inadequacy of language even as she continues to narrate. Alongside the notion that trauma exceeds language, Gilmore argues that "language is pressed forward as that which can heal the survivor of trauma" (6).
To go back to Schlau's suggestion that the "matrix within which women, politics, and narrative intermingle" allows us to understand the central role of witnessing in Spanish America, Kozameh's Steps Under Water appears to do just this. As a testimonio, witnessing--and witnessing and experiencing trauma specifically--is central to her project. But as her preface suggests, it is not only from the position of the coherent western "I" that she speaks. Purposely disrupting the space between the individual and the community, Kozameh's "I" encompasses a "we," a narrative move that allows us to "see the collective in the private" (via Schlau), and fundamentally challenges autobiography. But what does it mean to bear witness? Why write on trauma in this genre when the narrative's veracity stands to come under attack as in Menchu's case? Especially since as Schlau states, "[w]hen women use mainstream genres to articulate a different kind of standpoint, they run the risk of cooptation or imitation." Clearly, as Spivak and other postcolonial thinkers have articulated, despite this inherent risk--and even to a degree because of it--the testimonial has use value "as a mode in which to represent oneself as a speaking subject" (13). And, as Gilmore begins to articulate, there is the possibility of healing through narrative (6-7). In Kozameh's case, and in the case of testimonios more generally, does such healing extend from the writer to the reader? Does Kozameh's encompassing "I" really expand to include the voices of those she experienced such trauma with? And can they heal through the reading of the text to the extent with which Kozameh possibly experienced healing as result of writing it?