"Can Only the Dead Speak?" Terror, Trauma and the Witness Traveller. (September 2017)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Salgado, Minoli
• Other Names: Mendes Ana Cristina guest-editor.; Wesley Charlie guest-editor.
• Is Part Of: Journal of Commonwealth literature. Volume 52:Number 3(2017)
• Page Start: 467
• Page End: 483
• Publication Date: 2017-09
• Subjects: bearing witness -- Joseph Conrad -- Ariel Dorfman -- Jean Arasanayagam -- double agency -- exile -- Felman and Laub -- Salman Rushdie -- terror -- trauma; English literature -- Periodicals; Commonwealth literature (English) -- Periodicals; Littérature anglaise -- Périodiques; 820.05
• DOI: 10.1177/0021989416678283
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0021-9894

Abstract

My article considers Dori Felman and Shoshana Laub's configuration of the witness traveller in relation to narrative witnessing across a range of texts by exilic writers. Framed and informed by Salman Rushdie's rhetorical question in Shame, "Can only the dead speak?" — a question that foregrounds the politics of bearing witness to trauma from an exilic perspective — the paper considers the narrative mediation of secondary witnessing across the "threshold" (Agamben, 1998) that separates the primary and secondary witness. In so doing, it follows the hermeneutic logic of boundary-crossing by travelling across a range of literary registers in its consideration of the witness as insider and outsider, a mobile subject that moves across the boundaries of national and cultural affiliation. It shows how exilic writing can place a high premium on the value of a writer's ruptured double agency and divided loyalty, which is offered as the alternative (and alter-native) discursive space in the absence of the voices of those who have been "disappeared" from the official record.