Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader

The Metrics of Authenticity

In the wake of three decades of personal witnessing to conditions of extremity, activists, publishers, and readers now identify several distinguishing features of first-person testimony. Such narratives chronicle conditions of oppression, assemble experiential histories of psychic degradation and bodily assault, register the aftereffects of survival and mourning, and commemorate victims who cannot give testimony. Circulating as “transnational artefacts” (Hesford 105) en route to reading publics around the globe, they lodge charges of rights violations and stake claims to recognition and redress.

It is imperative that people intervene in global asymmetries of power and privilege by bearing witness to their experiential histories of violence and suffering. Their narratives are mobilized as potent political weapons to wield against agents of a state, political factions, and the threat of national forgetting. As acts of witnessing, such narratives generate an archive of suffering that is critical to the efforts of activists and rights lawyers to document conditions of extremity before human rights institutions (see Cvetkovich 8). Such acts also call larger publics to attention and enlist them in the project of redressing harms. Witness narratives thus intensify the stakes of reading in the circuits of production, circulation, and reception through which they travel the globe.

To understand fully why the taint of the hoax haunts witness narratives, and how controversies and scandals regularly erupt around them, we need to recognize how authenticity effects are projected by and attached to them. If an “I”’s narration is to serve the purposes of testimonial life writing, it must promote an identity whose authenticity is sufficiently persuasive, compelling, and transformative to make its truth manifest and credible to readers. Unlike in the novel, in the referential world of written or filmic autobiographical testimony, questions of reliability are linked to two issues: whether the speaker’s factual claims are documentable; and whether his or her asserted identity can be verified as what is called “authentic.” Indeed, “authenticity” is often invoked in evaluating witness narratives as both a criterion and a test of their transparency, validity, and efficacy in campaigns for redress of injustice. But how does a narrative convince readers of its authenticity? How does it “communicate” authenticity?

Derived in part from the past narrative practices of ethnography, and in part from conventions of accuracy, validity, and propriety that have gained consensus in extra-legal jurisdictions as discourses of witnessing, several features have come to typify witness narratives circulating in the context of human rights campaigns. Adopting Hua Hsu’s phrase, we call these features “the metrics of authenticity” (42). These metrics are produced internally at the intersection of the witness’s singular experiential history and the shared communal discourses and narrative rhetorics through which that experiential history unfolds, and externally through the production, marketing, and circulation of witness narratives for transnational publics.

The following five metrics through which witness narratives project an aura of authenticity will be recognizable to many readers of first-person testimony.

The “you-are-there” sense of immediacy. Witness narratives communicate the immediacy and urgency of a conflict or situation to the reader. Through discursive positioning as a first-person witness, the narrator speaks as a first-hand actor in and observer of disastrous, violent, and degrading conditions of existence. He or she often speaks as a subject in danger, emphasizing a harmed self and body while chronicling a narrow escape from greater danger and death. In other words, the narrator adopts the subject position of both the victim of human rights violations and the survivor. As readers imaginatively share the vulnerable protagonist’s struggle to survive, their empathetic identification is awakened. They are transported “there” by a narrator’s rhetorical shifts into the simple present tense.

The invocation of rights discourse. The narrating “I,” and/or an editorial commentator or advocate on the narrator’s behalf, makes explicit reference to a recognized, violated identity that is compelling and shocking, such as “child soldier” or “comfort woman,” and/or to human rights violations such as honor killing, persecution of indigenous groups, or the practice of torture or genocide. The narrator challenges established authority by naming powerful adversaries or, in the discourse of rights, positioning such people or institutions as “perpetrators.” (The formations represented as reviled in rights discourse over the past decade have included “Islam,” “Islamic patriarchy,” “Socialist authoritarianism,” and practices labeled as devastating to entire groups, such as “apartheid,” “genocide,” and “honor killing.”) In so doing, the narrative functions ideologically as a kind of manifesto for the rights of the subordinated. By establishing conversancy in an arena of human rights activism, the witness links an individual story to available scripts of injustice circulating in the global flows of rights advocacy. Through the moral grammar of rights discourse, the witness experience is rendered more readily comprehensible, and the terms of judgment regarding innocence and culpability made seemingly unproblematic.

The affirmation of the duty to narrate a collective story. The narrator positions her- or himself as a representative subject, affirming the urgency of telling an experiential history that stands in for the unspoken narratives of other victims of the same rights violation. The obligation to narrate involves several rhetorical acts: documenting the fates of the dead, speaking for those who cannot speak, registering the difficulty of remembering a traumatic past, and memorializing the dead by producing a counter-history to official narratives of an event or everyday conditions of life.

The normative shape of victim experience and identity. Witness narratives differ according to the particular rights abuse referenced, but within a category of narrative a consensus emerges as individual iterations of the experience common to a group accumulate. It forms around the normative shape of a victim experience and the normative identity of the rights victim (as “sex prisoner,” “child soldier,” “stolen child,” for instance). These stereotypical characterizations and typicalized experiences conform the story of the witness to a legible model of a particular violation. Actors are positioned as victims, perpetrators, and, sometimes, beneficiaries (Schaffer and Smith), and differences within a collectivity of victimized people are eliminated or harmonized.

The ethno-documentation of cultural specificity. The narrative projects a voice steeped in specific cultural practices and memories associated with the community of endangered people and attentive to the need to explain cultural contexts and political circumstances to readers. That is, the narrating “I” asserts and marks his or her locality and its difference from the locations of a predominantly Western readership. Often the narrative foregrounds markers of alternative and culturally specific forms of storytelling—for example, by incorporating cultural myths, or by shifting to the language of an oral storytelling tradition. In other words, the narrative’s authenticity is asserted and marked as “local” and thus different from the reader’s frame of reference.

To sum up, the aura of authenticity projected by first-person testimony to violence, atrocity, and degradation is the cumulative effect of several features internal to witness narratives. Witness narratives consolidate a composite figure of “the victim” with iconic features of vulnerability: for instance, a child, a woman under patriarchy, a persecuted ethnic or religious or sexual group, or most often, a lone individual mounting a heroic struggle against pervasive obstacles or powerful oppressors. The narrative of an event or conditions of duress evolves into a kind of “official” story employing a recognizable template accepted within local, national, or international communities as credible and retroactively binding. Finally, the narrative projects the witness as representative not of personal, idiosyncratic experience, but of the larger community of those who remain silent, but whose silence calls out for ethical redress. Cumulatively, these metrics generate the contours of, and project the truth effects of, a coherent and intelligible story of witness, and an “I” witness whose reliability seems guaranteed as “authentic.”

Authentification: Paratexts and Epitexts

Additional features of the production and circulation of narratives of witness contribute to their aura of authenticity. Activists who organize to gain attention to and redress for people victimized by particular histories of violence invest in the authenticity of the witness and the story. Such activists seek to ensure that the cause is not jeopardized or undermined, as do the editors and publishers responsible for publishing, marketing, and selling the narrative. Through various means, these activists attempt to mediate troubling aspects of a narrative or its conditions of production, forestall potential resistance to the credibility of the witness and the narrative, and shore up the kinds of authenticity valued as evidentiary corroboration by Western readers, to whom witness narratives are most frequently addressed and marketed.

Paratexts, including forewords, introductions, and afterwords, are often attached to witness narratives, providing sites for activists and representatives with professional bona fides to attest to the veracity of the story and the integrity of the witness. As acts of secondary witnessing, these paratexts embed the individual story in the larger story of a group or movement, linking personal experience to known historical events. Professionals may also address absences, lacunae, or incoherence in the narration by providing an explanatory framework to guide reader response.

Introductions, which may explain the genesis of the story and offer “first readings,” not only project an ideal reader, but seek to route the response of flesh-and-blood readers in particular ways. The sympathetic reader is asked to suspend critical judgment and instead respond with uncritical empathy, as he or she identifies with those positioned as victims. In such paratexts, reading itself becomes preparation for an act of rescue, and readers become potential rescuers—if not in fact, then vicariously, and often financially. Similarly, afterwords often provide information on how to become an activist in response to a rights violation, and how to donate to a cause. Such summative words return readers to the larger project of human rights campaigns, often by attaching the authority of a recognized United Nations, national, or nongovernmental organization. In effect, afterwords insert the individual story into the larger story of the group, affirming the intersection of personal experience with known historical events.

Witness narratives thus circulate in a global field where metrics of authenticity, modes of appeal, and paratextual cues to interpretation have been encoded in print, online, and oral venues. The work of affirming the authenticity of the witness and the narrative can continue in post-publication activities such as book tours and interviews—what Whitlock terms “the epitextual conditions” of a witness narrative’s circulation and reception (Soft Weapons 61–62). In the United States, cultural brokers such as Oprah Winfrey add their imprimatur to a narrative, increasing both readership and publisher profits. Receiving the Nobel Peace Prize may enhance world knowledge about the cause, the status of the activist witness, and international sales of the book, as it did for Aung San Sui Kyi in 1991, Rigoberta Menchú in 1992, Shirin Ebadi in 2003, Wangari Maathai in 2004, Liu Xiaobo in 2010, and Leymah Gbowee in 2011. The multiple roles of commentators as secondary witnesses and readers as agents of rescue in vouching for authenticity in testimonial narrative suggest that this process is now a transnational one, requiring that many agents work on behalf of an apparently singular “I.” These secondary witnesses manage the reputation of the witness and try to negotiate effectively the “doxa of globalization” (Whitlock, Soft Weapons 7): they are the neoliberal discourses, transactions, and transnational entities that distribute world views, subject positions, funds, influence, and benefits across the world.

Suspicious Reading

For activists, survivors, publishers, and readers, the current appeal of narratives of witness is bound up with forces that make them vulnerable to suspicious readings. But on what grounds do readers become suspicious? How does the authenticity of a testimonial narrative come under suspicion and the taint of the hoax get attached to a particular witness narrative? And who are the suspicious readers?

Testimonial narratives share several vulnerabilities with autobiographical discourse generally—vulnerabilities that prompt suspicion. The use of dialogue as verbatim recall of experience inevitably invites skepticism because of its improbability. And, most acutely in testimony, the status of recalled or recovered memory is psychologically complicated, both because of the difficulty of recounting horrific repressed experience and because, in the meantime, another narrative has become dominant as the “official” version of an experience, as with some Holocaust and child soldier narratives. When a testimony is written or recorded long after the event, the memory may be shaped by the “prosthetic memory” that a nation or group constructs around the past, or the postmemory of a generation born after the event. Additional complications may arise when a paratextual commentator, attempting to flesh out the narrator’s vagaries of memory and to acknowledge the difficult struggle to tell a story, introduces material that raises concerns about “interested” remembering and false memory.

Features internal to witness narratives may also catch the attention of skeptics whose critiques undermine confidence in a narrative’s truth claims and the narrator’s authenticity. For example, evidentiary referents and signposts such as dates and place names may be sketchy at best, sometimes nonexistent. Often absent too are independent sources documenting the kinds and extent of harm done, such as footnotes to historical accounts; referenced archives of notes, letters, or journals; and the visual evidence of photographs and maps. In such first-person testimony, the voices of corroborating witnesses who persuasively attest to a history of violence through verbatim stories, photos, and other narratives are rare or absent. As the story of harm unfolds, conflicting or contradictory plot strands, which introduce jarring or distracting details that could invite alternative interpretations, can be suppressed because they would project a less coherent past of victimization. As the narrative focalization is on victim experience, it is also unusual to find an unheroic portrayal of the survivor-subject that would disrupt the story template of victimization.

As a subject position, the survivor/witness is itself vulnerable. In both juridical and alternative venues, the status of the witness has long been crucial for the credibility of the narrative. If the witness speaks from a marginalized position as “uneducated,” “poor,” “indigenous,” or a “child,” the credibility of the testimony is more easily called into question, however unjustifiably. Witnesses who cannot draw on expertise and knowledge gained by education, social position, and elite status, or who do not have the literacy to tell their narratives in a dominant world language, may be subject to dismissal or heightened suspicion. Furthermore, for some readers, the relative homogeneity of plots, rhetorical conventions, and audience appeals in testifying to particular rights violations can make testimonial accounts seem formulaic rather than individually inflected. Suspicions thus arise that the witness may be reproducing an expected narration of events at the behest of activists or sponsors who are in control of shaping the story and making it public. In effect, precisely because they are regarded as subalterns, rights claimants are often held to exacting standards of verification by commentators and scholars.

In some instances, witness accounts may come across to readers as too literary because they incorporate language, tropes, plots, and characterizations identified with literary fiction. As Anne Cubilié observes, “approaches to collecting, analyzing, and performing testimony all rely on the ‘knowability,’ if not transparency, of what is being said: plain language conveying ‘the truth’ of horrific experience is one of the authenticating aspects of testimonial in whatever form.” When those witnessing to experiences of extremity and atrocity incorporate metaphorical language, or organize the narrative through ready-made plots of quest, conversion, or collective empowerment, or stage scenes in dialogue, or reflect too often on the process of composing the testimony itself, readers become “uncomfortable” to the degree that “these literary devices seem to contravene and destabilize the authenticity of the bodily experience being recounted through the embodied vehicles of text and speech” (222). Literary rhetoric, the craft of shaping a story, can make readers suspicious about the “authentic” expression of pain, as so often happened with the narratives of American slaves.

The environment of suspicion in which witness narratives circulate and detectives of verification lodge their claims intensifies with every scandal that occurs after a fabricated act of witnessing is exposed. The convergence of global crises, expanded global markets, and the capacious appetite for “real” stories about “real” people creates conditions ripe for exploitation that digital media rapidly convey. In this context, the set of rhetorical and generic conventions associated with narratives of witness and the paratextual apparatuses that surround many of them can be mobilized regardless of whether the experience has been lived or imagined.

Hoaxes thrive on the markets that publishing houses pursue in their efforts to find stories that will generate large profits. Such currents bear the hoax commingled with testimonies and other kinds of life writing to reading publics hungry for the next story. Such first-person narratives of harm and violation promise readers gripping affective attachments: fantasies of identification, opportunities to feel good, or promises of cross-cultural exchange in a dangerous, fast-transforming world. The myriad routes of print, visual, and digital circulation that carry stories to new reading publics also increase the potential that a hoax may be exposed in the circuits of surveillance and information-exchange that spark readers’ demands for authenticity, sincerity, and truthfulness. When we consider this accelerated circulation through multiple media, we may begin to grasp why a fascinating and varied array of autobiographical hoaxes—the fabrications of Gay Girl and Khouri, the exaggerations of Mortenson, among others—have rippled across markets to command attention in the last decade, creating crises within reading publics, the publishing world, and communities of writers.

In this contemporary environment of suspicion, digital technologies turn archives, documents, and data into sites to mine for those with an investigatory drive justified by an ethic of verification. And social media enable such detectives of authenticity to communicate suspicious readings to transnational networks of readers like never before. Who are these agents of suspicion turning a desire to “out” false witnessing into a demand for verification?

As witness narratives lodge rights claims through the discourse of “victim” and “perpetrator” to enlist reader sympathy and call for international intervention, they are situated within the contemporary politics of naming, shaming, redress, and reconciliation. Some in positions of authority and power—for example, heads of governments, their militaries, and police—have considerable investments in defending their nations against the shaming force of human rights narratives in the court of public opinion. Three groups of people stand out among the interested parties raising suspicion: those who would deny or deflect charges of rights violations that identify them or their group as “perpetrators”; those who have refused to acknowledge particular conditions of rights violations in the past—the “deniers”; and those beneficiaries who profit, financially or in reputation, from conditions of exploitation. These challengers can and do allege that witness narratives are self-interested, self-deluded, and/or manipulated by activists. They raise suspicions about the reliability of the story and the authenticity of the teller to discredit testimonial acts, deflect attention away from questions of perpetrator culpability, repulse international censure, counter media images, and effectively justify inaction.

Suspicious readings can also be generated by parties without a direct investment in a rights campaign, or by journalists and lay people, including rights activists, professional debunkers, cultural commentators, and culture warriors. All these parties can mobilize the vast archives of the internet to fact-check details such as dates, place names, and chronologies, and may assemble an inventory of inaccurate or problematic details to discredit the truth claims of a narrative. For example, interested parties can seize on a few lapses in accuracy in a text as synecdochic evidence that undermines the entire narrative, as occurred with David Stoll’s attack on I, Rigoberta Menchú.[3] Readers may assert an ethic of verification in a virtual public sphere, as a motive for launching their own online investigations by comparing sources and writing or contributing to blogs on which they question the veracity of a particular text, as Janice Harayda does in her “Review” blog on Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone.

When testimonial narratives incorporating metrics of authenticity encounter the suspicions of inauthenticity and false witnessing that their use gives rise to, their truth status often becomes, and remains, indeterminate: potent for some, tainted for others, and ambiguous for more than a few. Ultimately, the uneasy equilibrium between attestations to the authenticity of witness narratives and denunciations alleging false witness plays out across networks of invested advocacy that focus on the use of such narratives in redressing situations of harm.

Configurations of the “I” Witness: Who Speaks as “I” in Testimony?

We have explored a set of metrics that ground the aura of authenticity in contemporary narratives of witness, and inquired into how the ethic of verification and detectives of reference may intervene to challenge the reception of these narratives as credible. We turn now to the kinds of “I”s that often occupy the subject position of witness, and consider what implications certain I-formations have for the politics of authenticity. Although the witnessing “I” is normally understood as a singular, if internally conflicted subject, testimonial “I”s, to a greater or lesser extent, claim to represent larger groups in order to tell stories of collective injury or suffering. While testimonies may not use a “we,” they speak on behalf of, and at times through, multiple voices. Thus, as G. Thomas Couser and Mark Sanders have observed, the witness “I” is rightly understood as collaborative. But not all collective “I”s are generated through the same kind of interaction with the groups they represent. We need, therefore, to parse further the practices of collective I-witnessing.

Though more may well exist, four rhetorical configurations of witness narratives are prominent in currently circulating texts: the composite “I”, the coalitional “I”, the translated “I”, and the negotiable “I”. In the remainder of this essay we explore these “I”-formations through readings of exemplary texts, and consider the implications of how each situates its “I” in acts of witnessing.

The composite “I” is a figure often conflated with the genre of testimony itself, because the speaking subject is often collectively produced by numerous actors positioned across asymmetries of power. These include the witness and the witness’s community of affiliation; the intended audience within the narrative; the coaxer or interlocutor, if there is one, usually with another affiliation and access to some means of redress; a group of others including the editor, publisher, and translator of the text; and activist groups, marketers, and the persons, organizations, and forums who have solicited, facilitated, and circulated the act of witnessing. Within this ensemble production, the narrating “I” at once occupies, and is assigned, the subject position of a victim to be rescued. Because this “I”’s apparently coherent narration is often in fact produced by collective “manufacture,” it is vulnerable to suspicion, and has frequently been denounced in this digital age as a performance of false witnessing. In Burned Alive by “Souad,” the story of a subaltern Middle Eastern woman abused in a harshly patriarchal system is narrated in such a way that the consolidation of a composite “I” becomes visible.

Not all witness narratives, however, claim to create a unified subject. Not all are edited and circulated through comparable processes by their publishers. And indeed, not all collective “I”s seek to insert themselves within existing frameworks of testimony and the asymmetrical social relations it establishes. Some radically revise the norms and templates of testimony to forge new genres and structures of witnessing that configure subject positions and discursive strategies differently. When performing these alternative modes of witnessing, they often harness authenticating practices to other ends: they set up complex texts that challenge rescue reading, and they invite readers to engage in structural analysis of the larger conditions that underlie violence, oppression, and suffering. When we turn to the other three formations—the coalitional “I,” the translated “I,” and the negotiable “I”—further alternative versions of the witnessing “I” emerge signaling that different relationships have been set up between the subject of the story and those positioned as “rescuers” and professionals bringing it to a transnational public.

In this discussion of four kinds of “I”-witnessing, we foreground the range of possible subject positions that first-person collaborative narratives establish, and the range of cross cultural relations that join the subjects of storytelling to those engaged in producing and circulating the story. These subject positions affect how acts of witnessing attempt to forestall suspicious readings, incorporate various metrics of authenticity, and solicit readerly expectations of identification and empathy.

Conclusion: Reader Responses and Responsible Reading

As we have seen, questions of false witnessing need to be contextualized and complicated at this moment when the acts, practices, and production of testimonial narration circulate in contemporary cultures of suspicion. There is no question that fabricated narratives of witness can do harm in the world: they may undermine campaigns for social justice, commodify suffering for personal gain, or contribute to compassion fatigue among readers that fuels skepticism about the claims of victims. But, like testimony itself, the interrogation of false witnessing can also do important work in campaigns for human rights and social justice. As our introduction noted, in cases such as those of Khouri, Gay Girl, or Mortensen, allegations by advocacy groups or journalists of false identity or embellished experience became persuasive enough to undermine the validity, and the moral suasion, of those testimonial projects. Yet they did so in ways that served to validate the necessity of, respectively, women’s rights struggles in the Middle East, the rights of gays and lesbians, and the need to educate girls in Afghanistan. We could conclude that scandals around such hoax narratives can affirm that reader-consumers, the marketplace, and the media are alternative jurisdictions (Gilmore) for adjudicating autobiographical testimony, as they intervene on media forums to differentiate legitimate acts of witness and discredit false ones. In other words, an ethic of verification can serve to support the goal of social justice and work potently with the technologies that put vast resources at readers’ fingertips, and, through social media, connect communities of readers hunting for the verifiably factual.

We would argue, however, that reading through the lens of verification is ultimately inadequate to adjudicate the truth claims made in heterogeneous cultures and specific contexts of witness. In the name of verification, interested parties can mobilize campaigns that undermine the credibility and authority of witnesses, and thereby undermine urgent claims to expose conditions and experiences of violence and suffering. Furthermore, the tactical use of an ethics of verification to “police” first-person testimony is insufficient to account for the long-term reception of hoaxes, be they addiction narratives, fantasized Holocaust testimony, or rights claims.[15] Despite the protests of a Jordanian human rights group that her story was faked and was hurting their efforts, Khouri’s false witness narrative has gotten an afterlife in Australian filmmaker Anna Broinowski’s documentary Forbidden Lies that both interrogates and refuses to dismiss its claims (see Whitlock, “Remediating”). That is, a paradox at the heart of testimony is that surveilling the “truth” of first-person witness narratives to allay cultural anxieties can in turn exacerbate anxieties—referential, epistemological, and affective. As Jamie Hanneken argues of “minority literature” more broadly, “scandal offers a productive place to examine the economy of minority literature, not only for the starkness but also for the frequency with which it lays bare the expectations behind technologies of recognition and other First-World rituals of recognition” (50). What a call for an ethic of verification does not take into account is that scandals are productive, and not only of profits for their inventors, publishers, and distributors. They also stir public discussion, in forums from rights campaigns to media talk shows and weblogs to college classrooms; that is, they may enhance democratic discussion of complex issues in parts of the developing world, even as they may breed cynicism and propound stereotypes in the Global North.

In the economy and politics of reading, rescue, and rights, controversies about outright fabrication and questions of fact and reference in first-person witnessing can more usefully be approached as complicating our understanding of authenticity, truth claims, and the strategic conventions of first-person witness. As we have seen, the scandals that arise around hoaxes can be salutary in disrupting comfortable protocols of reading. If we consider why certain authenticity effects or metrics aimed at shoring up the demonstrably factual are so persuasive for readers, we can begin to think about the indeterminate status of subjective discourse differently. As our discussions of the “I” in several kinds of first-person testimony suggest, ethical reading practices need not be based primarily on verifying claims of authenticity. Rather, these complex examples deploy various kinds of “I”s that provoke a larger analysis of the intricate locales of production and routes of circulation in contemporary markets, and the asymmetries of power, privilege, and access to reading publics that literary and “non-literary” (ethnographic, formulaic) testimonies travel.[16]

How, then, can we as readers adjust our orientations and assumptions to become responsible and ethical, as well as empathetic, in engaging with first-person witness narrative? As we have seen, specific witness narratives are instructive precisely because witnesses and their advocates must anticipate self-interested and suspicious readings when they enlist readers in what become transnational transactions of recognition. The example of Burned Alive suggests that the asserted authenticity of victim experience can be managed and processed by practices of editing and circulation on behalf of multiple parties interested in co-composing a lucrative composite “I.” This narration of witness solicits sympathetic readers who are coaxed into suspending critical judgment, and invited instead to respond with uncritical empathy through cross-cultural identification with the subject positioned as victim. While the witness in Burned Alive emerges as an individualized center of storytelling dependent upon rescue by and collaboration with professionals, by contrast, the Sangtin collective creates a coalitional “I” in an ensemble production of multilayered storytelling. No one woman’s story is situated as representative of a particular rights violation. Far from being just the victims of patriarchal social relations, the women coproduce an analysis of their gendered condition and relations in a narrative resistant to the analytical framing of advocacy professionals. The “I” that is produced in Playing with Fire troubles the notion that those positioned as victims in need of rescue can only be silenced bearers of authentic suffering without agency.

While in these first two examples, the witnesses to conditions of oppression and violence are women engaged with agencies or businesses working on behalf of women’s human rights, Beah’s A Long Way Gone and Eggers’s What Is the What are testimonial narratives more consciously focused on constructing a literary “I” for international readerships. In both of these cases, testimonial discourse to validate claims to a rights identity is employed in the service of storytelling aimed at credibly engaging transnational audiences. Although the translated “I” of A Long Way Gone seems seamlessly sutured, interrogating its amalgamation of languages, locations, political affiliations, subject positions, and ethical identifications reveals slippages as it attempts to weld these positions to both invoke and rescue the “innocent child.” The negotiable “I” of What Is the What productively disrupts reading habits by requiring us to rethink the formation and location of a narrating “I,” as well as who is speaking for whom at various axes of indeterminacy. The Eggers-Deng negotiable “I” thus finds a structure of authorship less vulnerable to charges of fabrication than first-person testimony because it turns on a paradox of fictive truth that unsettles the metrics of authenticity. All of these examples complicate the assumption that a singular “I” either does or does not speak authentically in ways that prompt readers to trouble the notion of authenticity itself.

Why is it important to rethink the position of the witness in relation to authenticity claims, suspicious reading, transnational cultures of rescue, and the ethic of verification? Like Bhaskar Sarker and Janet Walker, we observe the emergence of a new paradigm for framing testimony in life narrative. In this new formation, the subject’s position as victim is abated by emphasis on survivors’ potential for agency, a focus on geopolitical contexts and constraints, and possibilities for productive narrative intervention. This new paradigm foregrounds more nuanced distinctions among different kinds of collective “I” witnesses, and aims to resolve some of the binds of verification and avowals of authenticity in first-person testimony that have entrapped it in both documentary film and life writing.

As Sarker and Walker suggest about the indeterminacy of testimony as a form, “its power derives more from a pledge of truthfulness and a performance of good faith than from a strict, conclusive evidentiary reliability” (21). New reading frameworks might foreground survivor witnessing and questions of agency in ways that an earlier trauma paradigm relying on the singularity of the “I” and its claim to authentic experience could not account for. They can also enable a reading practice that seeks recognition beyond identification with the individualized story of a “victim,” thereby resisting the demand for unquestioning belief that has been complicit in the culture of rescue as a neo-imperial formation supporting Global Northern hegemony. Finally, a new paradigm for reading texts of first-person witness may invite us as readers to acknowledge that we confront a tension, if not an impasse, between our desire for cross-cultural communication to remedy harms and the limitations of our interpretive standpoints, not just locationally but ideologically. Our suggestion is to treat such frameworks and practices as a situated ethic of reading that resists the either-or pull of detection only in the service of verifying the status of “facts.”

As this new model of accountability generated by both the achievements and the limits of testimony emerges, we anticipate that the norms and expectations of rhetorical reliability will also shift from the demand for, and the production of, authenticity in acts of witnessing to a focus on formations of first-person testimony that productively exploit its constraints. Similarly, new modes of mobilizing activist campaigns are emerging that may well qualify or even displace the reliance of advocates primarily on first-person witnessing to advance social justice (Muller). Alternative modes and sites of address such as social networking technologies, online and PDA video, and graffiti art now solicit groups of individuals and communities for transnational networks and meshworks around ideas and hopes for change—both taking up and transforming the terms of the work that personal testimony has historically done. As narrators of first-person witness increasingly engage with multiple online forums and media in presenting stories of suffering and violence to international publics, they will surely encounter other obstacles, but also new possibilities for communicating urgent testimony to engaged, judiciously empathic, informed, and proactive reading publics.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Gillian Whitlock and Leigh Gilmore for sustained conversations over three years about the impasses and the new possibilities of “hoax” narratives. This essay could not have been generated without both their generous critiques and their perceptive insights.

An early, quite different version of this discussion was published as: “Say It Isn’t So: Autobiographical Hoaxes and the Ethics of Life Narrative,” in Life Writing: Autobiography, Biography, and Travel Writing in Contemporary Literature. The essay’s perspectives and positions are extensively informed by Sidonie Smith’s coauthored work with Kay Schaffer: Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (2004); and “Human Rights, Narrated Lives and the Position of the Beneficiary” (2006).

We are also indebted to the responsive audiences at conferences where versions of this paper were presented. Venues included the American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting, Brown University, 2012; Franklin College, Lugano, Switzerland, 2011; Department of English, University of Buffalo, 2011; Conference on Life Writing and Human Rights: Genres of Testimony, University of Kingston, United Kingdom, 2011; Symposium on Feminist and Queer Narrative Theories, The Ohio State University, 2011; British Sociological Association Study Group on Auto/Biography, University of Leicester, 2010; International Autobiography and Biography Association conference, Honolulu, 2008; Department of English, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2008; “Writing Life: Truth or Fiction?” conference, University of Lisbon, 2006; Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Biographie, Vienna, 2006; Institute for Ethnology and Folklore, University of Zagreb, Croatia, 2006; “The Theory and Practice of Life Writing: Autobiography, Memoir and Travel Writing in Post/modern Literature” Conference, Halic University, Istanbul, Turkey, 2006; and “Contemporary Narrative Theory: The State of the Field,” The Ohio State University, 2003.

We are indebted to the generosity of our home institutions, for Sidonie the University of Michigan and for Julia The Ohio State University, in funding our attendance for some of these presentations. We thank Emily Lind for her support in preparing this essay for publication. And finally, we thank the three reviewers who gave the essay so thorough a reading and who made incisive suggestions that can be seen throughout this final version.

Notes

1. The exposé led to two lawsuits accusing Mortensen of “being involved in a racketeering scheme to turn him into a false hero, defraud millions of people out of the prices of the books, and raise millions in donations to the charity.” Other defendants included in the class action suit are his co-author, publisher, and Montana-based charity (Volz).

2. Hoax narratives are by no means peculiar to the present moment of memoir-writing. Indeed, as Susanna Egan discusses, the history of hoaxes stretches as far back as early Christianity. In contemporary, as in older, forms of personal narrative, she observes, “the very concept of imposture depends on readers’ concerns with authenticity, sincerity, and intent” (38). For us, autobiographical fabrications and embellishments characterize moments of shift within post-modernity that are marked by mobility, migration, encounter, and changes in the composition of nation-states.

3. Stoll’s charge that Rigoberta Menchú fabricated parts of her testimonio about the systematic oppression of the Quiché Indians in Guatemala stirred controversy that continues to engage advocates and detractors to this day.

4. Thérèse Taylor provocatively suggests that Fondation SURGIR has links to a right-wing Israeli organization (para 4).

5. Others include Marieé de force, by the anonymous “Léila” (2004); Vivre libre by Loubna Meliane (2003); J’ai commencé avec par un joint (2006) by “Hélène”; Mutilée (2005) by Khady; and Déshonorée (2006) by Mukhtar Mai, all co-authored by Cuny.

6. Oh! Editions also has an English-language website. One of its recent best-sellers is Blasphemy! (2011), a witness narrative by Asia Bibi, a Christian Pakistani woman who was condemned to death for blaspheming Islam by drinking from the Muslim women’s cup at the village well.

7. This tropic figuring of “victim” and “perpetrator” can be mobilized as a “soft weapon” in ideological and geopolitical confrontations that pit “rescuing” cultures and nations against rights-violating cultures and nations (Whitlock, Soft). And indeed, Burned Alive can be seen as a kind of “soft weapon” mobilized in an ideological war in the West against what it regards as “radical” Islam.

8. This discussion of Playing with Fire is adapted and expanded from Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography (159–60, 284) and from Smith, “Cultures of Rescue and the Global Transit in Human Rights Narratives” (631–33).

9. Sociologist Nagar revised the collaborative texts, appended an explanatory introduction and conclusion that situates the stories within global conversations about gender, and oversaw the American publication.

10. See, for example, China Keitetsi’s Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life. Keitetsi’s witness narrative has retained its status as credible for several reasons: it contributed to her celebrity as a survivor of radical suffering, and it launched her career as an international spokesperson for the rights of the child—a podium from which she could both counter her critics and establish her own authority as an informant, buttressed by the approval of human rights giants such as Nelson Mandela. The book found reading audiences throughout Europe. It raised awareness and mobilized other activists on behalf of children forced into military service at a moment of critical need. It reconfirmed faith in human rights advocacy and “fit” the model for popular consumption in the West.

11. The US Internal Revenue Service asserts that taxes on the income netted by the Ishmael Beah Foundation have not been paid for several years.

12. Julia Emberley also discusses the “complicities of innocence” that narratives in film, theatre, and literature exploit to circumscribe and overdetermine the subject position opened up by this discursive construction of childhood (380–81).

13. These include Dave Eggers’s What Is the What; YouTube videos such as “Kony 2012" (Halliday); films such as Blood Diamond that represent child soldiers as drugged puppets brutalized by warlords and mercenaries; and African novels, including Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation (which won the 2006 John Llewellyn Rhys prize) and Chris Abani’s Song for Night. Other events and activist projects include the Invisible Children campaign to end violence in Uganda. This project is a collaborative effort of youth from around the world: “We are story tellers. We make documentaries about war-affected children in east Africa and tour them around the world” (“Invisible Children”).

14. According to the foundation website, the Marial Bai Secondary School opened in Deng’s hometown in 2009, although the Sudan-South Sudan conflict may make its future uncertain.

15. Consider that Frey’s A Million Little Pieces saw increased sales and reader enthusiasm after it was exposed as invented, Wilkomirski’s narrative was reissued as a novel, and decades ago, Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, also alleged to be embellished, was one of the most widely read early narratives of suffering in the death camps. Readers of such texts repeatedly attest to the powerful affect of such stories, and profess that they changed their behaviors.

16. We recognize that there is an essay to be written on the differences in the conditions of production of witness narratives; the degree of intervention in the telling of the story by multiple players such as editors and publishers and activists; and the erasure or foregrounding of that metanarrative process.

Works Cited