ABSTRACT
RENEE: If it’s a situation that she can speak about with confi dence that she’s not going to be hurt by the reactions of others, and it could be a persuasive story, those are some good reasons to disclose. And it would be very effective if she’s saying, “This is where I was and this is where I am now! The act of witnessing, as a performative act, unsettles established boundaries between writer and reader, (or speaker and audience), between fi ction and history, between experience and ideology, even between past and future of memory and desire. The positions of speaker and audience are crucial here, and in fact testimony establishes a contract with its audience different from a literary one. The testimony demands belief (though it may not always get it), though not in the historical accuracy of its story. The testimony is not a recital of history, but it is the creation of a history through an intersubjective process in which both speaker and hearer gain their witnessing subjectivity through the new knowledge of a shared situation. Both subjectivity and knowledge are created in the testimony. Witnessing and testifying are always, in literature as much as in the legal system, performative acts, relying on complex notions of being here and being there. (Davidson, 2003, p. 165)
For a bordered helper, telling a story that is presented as “telling the truth about ourselves” is a performance. And it is more than voice. It is a willing unveiling of both vulnerability and power, a demonstration of the
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costs of location and positionality, and an appeal for connection. Giving an “account of ourselves” is acting out a model of moral responsibility and ethical engagement with others. It is an offering, by example, of one solution to the domination, alienation, and oppression that is such a painful part of the social world. It provides a dramatization of a hard-won epistemology: a knowledge, rare and precious, not only of how to live but also how to know-how to recognize the world and one another, in all our power and difference, and how to live, knowing. It is an appeal for, and a demonstration of, what Polkinghorne calls phronetic deliberation,1 which “produces knowledge about practical choices by integrating background understandings, the felt meaning of a situation, imaginative scenarios, prior experiences, and perceptive awareness” (Polkinghorne, 2004, p. 116).
